Mortgage Purchase Applications Growth Continues Composite index for mortgage applications was up 1.1% in the week of February 7th after rising 5% in the prior week. With rates being near their record low, it’s no surprise the refinancing index is spiking. Refinance index was up 5% after increasing 1
New Record For Stocks Despite Coronavirus With the S P 500’s 0.17% increase on Tuesday, it hit yet another record high. It’s up 3.93% year to date which is just 7 basis points below my original full year price target. U.S. stock market is being boosted by the expectation that the U.S. consumer will
Redbook Sales Growth Falls: Consumers Are Financially Confident In the week of February 8th, Redbook same store sales growth fell from 5.7% to 4.8%. That’s not a disaster, but it’s less growth than you’d expect to see if the consumer was on fire like the confidence surveys suggest. Recent Gallup pol
Coronavirus Continues To Cause Trouble Predictions that energy would do well this year were blown out by the coronavirus which lowered Chinese demand for commodities. Furthermore, even though Apple has a big presence in China, its stock hasn’t reacted negatively to the news. That’s the worst case sc
Very Long Expansion We’ve recently seen a decrease in personal income growth, which has led to an increase in credit card usage in December. Specifically, personal income growth has fallen from 6.1% in July 2018 to 3.9% in December 2019. It's okay that the consumer taking on some debt this cycle bec
Stocks End 4 Day Winning Streak The stock market fell modestly on Friday in spite of the solid jobs report. Before you question the market’s sanity, remember that there just was a big rally back to new highs. In 4 days, the S P 500 increased a combined 3.73%. It was a quick recovery from the
Benchmark Revision Let's first review the benchmark revision to historical job growth. Job creation from April 2018 to March 2019 was revised lower by 514,000. This was the biggest downgrade in payrolls growth since 2009. Keep in mind, that the BLS pegged the revision at -501,000 a few months ago. T
Disney Earnings Beat Estimates (Top Bottom Line) Earnings reports come fast and furious during earnings season. Let's review a few of them. Disney reported results on Tuesday. It had EPS of $1.53 with beat estimates by 9 cents. Revenues of $20.79 billion beat estimates by $70 million. Disney stock f
Solid MBA Applications MBA applications composite index was up 5% weekly which was on top of 7.2% growth. This report was in the week of January 31st. Purchase index was down 10% after rising 5%. However, on a yearly basis, growth was 11%. The past 3 weeks have averaged 12% yearly growth. This has b
A New Record High For Equities The stock market is done with worrying about the coronavirus. With that in the rear-view mirror, suddenly the sky looks clear for a rally because the economy is turning around, inflation is low, there is no risk of a hawkish Fed (it’s only uncertain how many times it w
