S&P 500 Matches February Closing Low With Monday Decline

Big Selloff On Monday There was a sharp decline on Monday in which the S&P 500 fell 2.23% and the Nasdaq fell 2.74%. The VIX was up 18.28% to 23.62. The S&P 500 fell to 2,554 in the afternoon before rallying a bit near the end of the trading session. It closed about 1 point above the February…

Tesla & Amazon Face Headline Risks

TSLA Has A Terrible Weekend There are many acronyms to describe the large momentum tech names. One of those is TFAANG. That one includes AMZN and TSLA. While there weren’t any earnings reports during the holiday weekend, there were prominent tweets from Elon Musk and President Trump which affected stocks. Tesla’s CEO jokingly tweeted that…

2.4% GDP Growth Predicted For Q1 2018

ECRI Index Declines Slightly As you can see from the chart below, the weekly ECRI index’s growth rate fell slightly from 5.4% to 5.2%. The longer it stays in the mid single digits, the better. This implies the 2nd half of 2018 will see strong economic growth as there will be a re-acceleration after a modest…

The Sector Rotation Out Of Tech Continues

Another Bad Day For Tech Tech stocks had a terrible day as the Nasdaq was down 0.85% and the S&P 500 tech sector was down 0.87%. The defensive real estate, consumer staples, and telecom sectors were all up more than 1%. This is a sign the sector rotation continued in a somewhat flat day as…

Momentum Tech Stocks (Tesla, Facebook, Nvidia, Alphabet) Hammered

Tuesday Tech Crash Stocks looked like they were going to continue their uptrend on Tuesday after the sharp rally on Monday. The market was up in the morning, but then crashed in the afternoon. The S&P 500 was down 1.73% and the VIX was up 6.99% to 22.50. The biggest weakness was in tech as the Nasdaq was…

Synchronized Global Growth No Longer Exists

Recent Tariff-Related Industry Performance The 3 charts below show three industries which are supposed to be the most affected by the tariffs. The steel industry is supposed to be helped, but it has been down over 10% in the recent weeks. Investors aren’t hopeful that the tariffs will stick without a retaliation. While the overall…

Tariff Impact Negligible: Bear Market Unlikely  

Sentiment Indicators Surprisingly, the CNN Fear and Greed index was still stuck on extreme fear after the rally on Monday as it was at an 8 out of 100. The table below reviews some of the sentiment indicators and shows if each one is a bullish or bearish signal. The put to call ratios for 3 days…

Stocks Rally Off The 200 Day Moving Average

Stocks Have A Huge Reversal The stock market reversed sharply on Monday. The S&P 500 was up 2.72% as it bounced off the bottom of the recent range. As you can see from the chart below, it also bounced off the 200 day moving average which was hit on Friday. As I said last week, the…

2nd Half Of 2018 Should See An Economic Rebound

GDP Growth Is Probably Weak In Q1 It appears by most accounts Q1 2018 won’t be a great quarter for GDP growth. Keep in mind, the expectations have been high because of the tax cut and subsequent fiscal spending increase. The latest $1.3 trillion budget, which was passed on Friday, has an $80 billion increase in…

Stocks Falter Because Of Rate Hikes & Tariffs

Stocks Falter Early in Fridays’ trading session it looked like the market was going to rebound or at least stabilize from the terrible selloff on Thursday. After 2PM, the selloff intensified as the S&P 500 closed down 2.10%. It looks like the only thing that stopped the S&P 500 from falling below the correction bottom was…