Is The Market Ready For A Phase Change?

Economic Outlook Revisited A peak in earnings growth doesn’t mean you should sell stocks. Earnings revisions give an upper hand in deciphering the results of each earnings season. The question for the intermediate term is if there are enough catalysts to bring 2019 earnings growth lower, eventually leading to a net decline and a bear…

Stocks Crater On Latest Trade Actions Against China

Trade Tensions Get More Serious Stocks plummeted and then rebounded somewhat at the end of the trading session on Monday because of the latest trade tensions. The S&P 500 ended the day down 1.37% and the Nasdaq fell 2.09%. The Dow fell 1.33% which pushed it below its 200 day moving average for the first…

100% Of S&P 500 Firms Have Beaten Q2 Earnings Estimates So Far

Earnings Growth Top Not A Worry Earnings growth is expected to peak in Q3 2018 which has already become a big story as investors have looked for bearish arguments since stocks have been flat or down for much of this year. This is a case of reaching for an argument which sounds good, but is…

Stocks Fall On Trade Jitters Again (Dow 8 Day Losing Streak)

Weak Day Across The Board For Stocks The past few days saw the Dow fall while the Russell 2000 rose. It has been an interesting situation leading up to Thursday because if all the major indexes were to rally, then the Russell 2000 would be massively overbought. If they all fell, the Dow would be…

7 Out Of 7 Firms Have Beat Q2 Earnings Estimates

Weak Existing Home Sales The new home permits, starts, and completions were all strong in May, but the existing home sales have been flat at best this year. The seasonally adjusted annual rate of existing homes sales was 5.43 million in May. This was below the consensus for 5.5 million. As you can see from…

Facebook, Netflix, & The Russell 2000 All Hit Record Highs

Walgreens Could Help Struggling Dow The trend of small caps outperforming large caps continued again as investors worry about the rising dollar and the trade skirmishes. I think that if a trade deal ends up being made with China, the Dow can rally at least 500 points as it has been the most hurt by…

Mid-Term Elections Are Now In Focus

Analyzing The Known Risks I’m always interested to find out what investors are worried about. Not all their worries end up causing volatility and sometimes there is a negative catalyst that comes out of left field. However, it’s still valuable to review the known risks to determine if they will send stocks lower and find…

Stocks Decline Modestly On Trump’s $200 Billion Tariff On China

Review Of Tuesday’s Stock Market Tuesday was a continuation of the recent stock market trend which has seen largest caps underperform small caps. The Dow was down 1.15%, pushing it to the red for the year (it’s down 8 basis points). It is down 6 straight days which is its longest losing streak since March…

4.7% Q2 GDP Growth Anticipated

Atlanta Fed Model Shifts Down Slightly I was expecting a big drop of about three tenths in the Atlanta Fed Nowcast after the weak industrial production report. However, as you can see in the chart below, it only fell one tenth to 4.7% because other changes were positive. The industrial production report caused the estimate…

The Small Caps Remain On Fire

Review Of The Stock Market’s Monday Performance The S&P 500 was down 0.76% right after the open on Monday as it looked like the stock market was going to have an awful day. Instead, that was the low for the day; the market was in an uptrend from that point on as the S&P 500…