Jobless Claims Fall It was a mistake to assume that in the 2 weeks California is pausing its initial claims transactions that their numbers would completely drop out of the total. That wasn’t what happened. They just kept California’s numbers the same, and included whatever initial claims CA had in
Market Hinges On Stimulus Hopes Fears You never truly know why the market moves in certain directions each day, but Wednesday probably had the most certainty as to what the market was trading off of. The stock market crashed briefly in the afternoon as there were some negative reports on the possibi
Stimulus Controls The Market Speculation over the stimulus is controlling the market. For a brief moment, the futures market reacted to the presidential debate on Tuesday night, but then the algorithms switched over to following the stimulus negotiations. It’s fairly uncertain if anything will get d
Moderate Selloff On Tuesday Stocks fell modestly on Tuesday. At times in the trading session it seemed like the stay at home trade was beating the reopening trade. However, by the close everything was down. It was an across the board modest decline. S P 500 fell 48 basis points, the Nasdaq fell 29 b
Fiscal Stimulus On The Docket On the day before the ADP report, we got another update on the consumer. By the way, the current estimate for September job growth in the Friday BLS report is 900,000. Investors moderately concerned this estimate is too high, but there will be over 600,000 jobs added. M
Banks Are Very Hated Bank stocks received a lot of hate over the weekend because of their bad performance last week. Price determines sentiment. There hasn’t been anything more grueling than owning European or Japanese banks in the past 14 years. In the past 2 years, U.S. banks have also done poorly
Update On The Consumer September labor report is this Friday. Consensus calls for 850,000 jobs added. Merrill Lynch is calling for 800,000 jobs added with the unemployment rate falling to 8.1%. We are testing how far the labor market can improve without the leisure and hospitality industry. Sports a
Tech Leads The Market Higher The stock market rallied sharply on Friday as big cap tech led it higher. A bubble in tech isn’t going to go away until interest rates rise and the COVID-19 crisis ends. It would help value stocks and potentially boost yields if a stimulus is passed. Personally, It's unl
Strong Core Capital Goods Orders August durable goods orders report had very tough comparisons, but still had positive monthly growth which is a plus. New orders were up 0.4% which followed 11.7% growth which was revised up by 0.5%. That missed the consensus of 1.5%. Ex-transportation order growth w
Wild Thursday Trading There were major moves on Thursday as the stock market tried to shake off its September correction. Trading action was wild. The stock market started down, rallied into the afternoon, and then fell before the close. From trough to peak, the S P 500 rose 2%. It closed up 30 basi
