Tax Bill Debate Is Heated Like it or not, the tax plan is still dominating the headlines. It’s arguably more important to figure out what will be in the bill than determining whether it will pass. There is heated rhetoric coming from the House. For example, conservative Representative Kevin Brady sa
Retailers Helped By Tax Bill The stock market indexes reflect the tax bill’s impact on earnings as the Dow rallied, while Nasdaq fell. The Dow was up 0.24%, the S P 500 was down 0.12%, and the Nasdaq was down 1.05%. Many of the retail names did well because they have high tax rates. Gap stock
Tax Bill Timeline Monday’s market trading was affected by the changes in tax policy, once again, with the Dow underperforming the Nasdaq. Let’s first look at the timeline of the legislative process. The bill has gotten through the critical steps of passing the House and the Senate, but since both bo
Italian Election Sees Surge In Right Wing Populism With the Italian election coming in March, we’ve discussed how a win by an unstable political party could be particularly harmful to Italian bonds because the ECB will be cutting its bond buying in half. Since the last time we’ve check on Italian po
Politics Pushes Stocks Around There was a sharp but temporary correction on Friday as it was reported that Michael Flynn will cooperate with Mueller’s special council. As with most political risks, the market shook it off after a few hours as the Dow only closed down 41 points and the S P 500 was do
OPEC Comes To An Agreement After the big meeting OPEC had, WTI oil closed up 10 cents at $57.40, making this out to seem like an unimportant event. However, that’s not the case because this decision was already priced in. It was so important that the market calculated exactly how it would affect pri
Neel Kashkari: Minneapolis Fed President Is Fine With 2.7% Inflation On the day of the release of the Beige Report which showed price pressures are strengthening as economic growth is steady, let’s review a comment Neel Kashkari made about inflation. Neel did a Q A on Twitter. One of the questions a
FANG Stocks Fall On Tax Cut Talks Wednesday’s stock market action was driven by the changes that will go into effect when the tax cuts are passed. The Russell 2000 was up 0.38% and the Dow was up 0.44% while the S P 500 was down 0.04% and the Nasdaq was down 1.27%. As you can
End Of The Yield Curve Flattening Period Treats Stocks Well In continuation with our discussion about what the flattening yield curve means for stocks, the chart below shows the historical movements in the S P 500 when the yield curve falls below 60 basis points. Firstly, you can see that the time i
Tax Reform Pushes Stocks Higher The stock market had a huge day on Tuesday as the Dow had its 61st record high of 2017. The Dow was up 1.09% and the Russell 2000 was up 1.53%. The S P 500 was up 0.98%. It has been above its 200-day moving average for 358 days which is the
