Consumer Sentiment Improved Slightly As expected, consumer sentiment improved slightly in the second half of April. That’s because it already fell so much in the first half of the month and because stocks rallied. Bad news is the initial spike in mid-April has worn down. That’s probably because stoc
Hope Fades The stock market started off positively in the morning after rallying on yet another terrible jobless claims report. This situation changed after the WHO reported disappointing results about remdesivir which Gilead countered. And this entire situation is very odd. We never had conclusive
Further Decline In Initial Jobless Claims Thursday has meant doom for the economy as the number of initial claims builds to epic proportions. It’s likely the unemployment rate is in the high teens based on the latest data from initial claims. We have seen stocks rally on these terrible initial claim
Nice Rally On Wednesday The stock market recovered from its recent declines on Wednesday as the S P 500 was up 2.29%. It was led higher by Chipotle which reported great results. Its stock was up 12.15%. Shockingly, Snap turned the entire tech sector higher. It's possible almost no one knew it had th
Same Store Sales Growth Falls Further As predicted, same store sales growth in the Redbook report is coming down. That’s because the hoarding is over. Undoubtedly when the economy recovers we will see higher growth, but we aren’t there yet. We are stabilizing along the bottom. We can expect the econ
Oil Crash Part 2 On Monday, the May WTI contract which was expiring sold off hard. That wasn’t important because it’s not really the price of oil. Real price of oil is the June contract. It cratered on Tuesday just in case you thought the Monday decline wasn’t real. Plus, Brent crashed too. This was
Philly Fed Index Hits A Record Low On the one hand, the Philly Fed non-manufacturing index hitting a record low isn’t a huge deal because it was only started in 2011. On the other hand, it would probably be at a record low even if the data went back several decades. It is becoming clearer
Negative Oil? Sort Of The biggest story on Monday was the decline in the May oil futures contract which expired on Tuesday. Most people understood oil futures prices could go negative in an unlikely scenario because it costs money to receive the physical commodity. Oil is expensive and difficult to
March Activity Plummets We knew the March Chicago National Activity index would be bad. Most of the March economic reports are already out and they were terrible. However, even those low expectations weren’t met. We didn’t have a specific estimate for this report because such a guess is futile. Howe
Is This What Euphoria Feels Like? The stock market is expressing extreme hope that either the economy reopens in May or June without any trouble or that a treatment or vaccine are coming soon. At least there are a few ways for the bulls to win! We are probably not at a moment of extreme
