Jobless Claims Rise Slightly Headlines at the stock market’s open said stocks were falling on a bad jobless claims report. After the stock market rallied, they needed to change their headlines. Given the recent decline in stocks, it's doubtful that this weak reading was enough to cause a decline. Th
Correction Nearly Hit (Tesla Crashes) With the S P 500 falling 2.37%, it nearly hit correction territory as it is down 9.6% since its peak. In the near term, the market is oversold, but there are still bubbles in the tech sector. There was significant weakness in tech on Wednesday as Apple fell 4.2%
Slight Decline In Markit PMI Flash Markit PMI fell slightly in September, but this was still a pretty good report. Diffusion indexes measure how business is doing versus the last period. With the economy recovering, the comparisons get tougher. This explains why many diffusion indexes were very high
Tech Leads The Market Higher On Tuesday Tech has recovered strongly from its Monday bottom. Fact that it is in a bubble has not impacted its returns yet. If this was a normal bull market, a greater than 10% correction would be enough for me to turn bullish. However, tech was in a bubble. If
Slight Improvement In Chase Card Spending We got 2 new good data points on spending which suggest the consumer isn’t in disaster mode. Redbook same store sales growth increased from -1.2% to 1.5% in the week of September 19th. That’s a nice improvement, but on an absolute basis, it’s still very low
Small Cap Value Tanks The stock market fell again on Monday. It started as a broad based decline, but then morphed into a huge decline for small cap value and a very large reversal for large cap value. For much of this correction in September, small cap value has outperformed. It gave up all that
Consumer Running On Empty? Morgan Stanley came out with a new note that makes the point that the consumer is running out of savings to keep up its current spending. The consumer is about to be running on empty according to the chart below. As you can see, the personal savings rate has been dropping
Another Selloff The stock market declined again on Friday as it fell through the technically important 50 day moving average. As you can see from the chart below, the streak of trading days above the 50 day moving average ended at 103. This was one of the highest streaks in the past 13 years. Obviou
Consumer Spending Rolling Over? Some think the consumer is doing fine. Only the data points that don’t adjust for the Labor Day holiday show recent weakness. Seasonal adjustments need to be made or you will be caught missing the obvious. We’re just trying to note the trends, not focus on small moves
Modest Thursday Selloff On Thursday morning, the futures market looked grim as the S P 500 was down over 2%. Investors didn’t understand what catalyzed that decline, and didn’t think the Fed was hawkish at all like some said. Sure enough, the S P 500 bounced back in the futures session and closed do
