Economy Recovering From Hurricanes
Graham-Cassidy Vote Coming Mid To Late Next Week The deadline to pass the Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill in the Senate is September 30th which is in 8 days. If it does pass the Senate, the House will have enough time to vote on it. The issue is never going to be time. Deadlines are the catalyst for Congress…
Warsh Has A 28% Chance Of Being The Next Fed Chair
Fed Pick Pivotal A previous article reviewed the Fed’s guidance for interest rates over the next few years, but I think the chart below does a unique job at contextualizing the situation we are in. As you can see, the trend of interest rates having lower peaks is continuing. The difference between this cycle peak…
AAPL - iPhone 8 & 8 Plus Have Tepid Pre-order Sales
AAPL Will Rely On iPhone X & China The Nasdaq was the only index that was negative on Wednesday. It was down because Apple pulled it lower. AAPL was down 1.68% on Wednesday; it is down 4.86% from its all-time closing high on September 1st. There were a few catalysts that pushed it lower. The…
FOMC Day: Fed Unwind To Reach Peak Rate In October 2018
The Fed’s decision day is finally here. We’ll review the new information we received on Wednesday from the Fed in this article. The headline wasn’t a surprise as the Fed didn’t raise rates and it said the $10 billion per month unwind will start in October. The new information we got on the unwind is…
2017 Has The Third Lowest Annualized Volatility Ever
Low Volatility As we’ve discussed many times, the volatility in the stock market is barely existent as nothing seems to phase it. This has been caused by a Goldilocks scenario where growth is just right. If it was too hot, there would be inflation and the Fed would raise rates more than they have. If…
ECB May Extend QE Because Inflation Estimates Are Falling
Macroeconomic investors will be focused on Draghi’s decision on the CSPP which is the corporate sector purchase program where the ECB buys 60 billion euros per month in corporate bonds. The plan ends in December which means Draghi will need to decide whether to extend it; if he extends it, he needs to decide for…
Record Russell 2000 Earnings Expected
Stocks Barely Move Monday was another record setting day for stocks. The Dow had its 5th record close and the S&P 500 stayed above 2,500 closing up 0.15%. The new trend is that the Russell 2000 is outperforming the large cap indexes. The Russell 2000 was up 0.65% on Monday and is up 6.2% in the…
Hurricane Harvey Retail Sales Impact Was Short
More information is coming out on how hurricane Harvey effected the economy. The chart below shows how retail sales ex-autos were affected by the storm. As you can see, there was a boost in sales in Texas prior to the storm because people were buying supplies such as necessities as well as storm protection gear.…
Fed Unwind To Be Announced On September 20th
Some Final Unwind Thoughts On Thursday, the Fed’s balance sheet was released like it is every week. As you can see in the chart below, the balance sheet increased $17.7 billion which was the biggest spike since December 2016. That’s weird timing because the Fed is expected to finalize the unwind announcement next week. This…
New Record High As Nothing Can Keep A Lid On Stocks
Today was an unusual day in the stock market because the S&P 500, Dow, and Nasdaq all hit a record high even though there was very bad economic data released. The Dow had its best week since December. Even the Russell 2000 has been getting in on the party. The Russell 2000 is up 5.48%…