Stocks Rally After Powell’s Dovish Presser
Stocks Increase Slightly After the Fed didn’t change rates at its December meeting and Powell stated he wouldn’t hike rates in 2020 unless inflation spiked, stocks increased modestly on Wednesday. After Powell’s first few meetings led to declines in the S&P 500, the past 3 have all led to rallies. That’s because the Fed hiked […]
Fed Doesn’t Change Rates & Might Not In 2020 Either
Review Of The “Unimportant” Fed Meeting This wasn’t a hotly anticipated Fed meeting because the Fed wasn’t expected to hike or cut rates, the decision was widely priced in, and the Fed shouldn’t act at the next meeting either. There was very little uncertainty about the January meeting as well (few expect a change then). […]
Best Labor Market Since At Least 1958
Another Slight Decline For Stocks Investors have one thing on their mind and it’s not the Fed meeting on Wednesday where there will be no change in rates. Every day that goes by without hard evidence that there will be a trade deal means we are one step closer to tariffs being raised on the […]
Upper Income Households Have The 3rd Most Confidence In 20 Years
December Redbook Shows Continued Strength We’ve already had a strong Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but that’s not the entire holiday shopping season. The rest of December is also important. Last year, we saw a huge dip in retail sales growth in December. There was an extra week for shopping. But consumers didn’t utilize that […]
S&P 500 To Rally4.3% in 2020
Slight Pullback On Monday The stock market fell modestly on Monday after its big rally on Friday which was caused by the great jobs report. And, the market was pushed lower by Apple’s 1.4% decline. S&P 500 fell 0.32%. Apple is one of the trade sensitive stocks. Obviously, there are other news events that can […]
Great Real WageGrowth In Full Labor Market
Education And Healthcare Drive Job Creation November jobs report showed 266,000 jobs created which was the most since January. 41,000 of the manufacturing jobs created were related to the ending of the GM strike. That means there really were 13,000 manufacturing jobs created which isn’t terrible. ISM manufacturing employment index fell 1.1 to 46.6 and […]
Stocks Explode On Strong Jobs Report
Big Rally In Stocks After Strong Jobs Report Many investors thought the November jobs report would show less jobs created than it did. And many also thought a very strong jobs report with high wage growth could be problematic for the stock market. I will review the headline numbers from this labor report later in […]
ISM Services PMI Falls & Markit PMI Rises
Services PMI Déjà vu (ISM Falls) November ISM services PMI fell and the Markit PMI rose. This is just like the manufacturing sector. One difference is the ISM manufacturing PMI was below the Markit reading. This time the ISM reading was higher (the gap just narrowed). It’s more normal as the Markit PMI is usually […]
Details On Trade Negotiations Are Released
2 Day Winning Streak Just like last month, the stock market is following a losing streak with a winning streak as it is up for 2 straight days. The calendar effect might be helping stocks as December is usually a great month. Interestingly, following years with gains of 20% or more, the average annual return […]
ADP Private Sector Job Creation Misses All Estimates
Recession Odds Decline According to the Aruoba-Diebold-Scotti business conditions index, odds of a recession have declined recently. However, the most recent data in this report is always the least reliable. It gets updated after the fact when new data comes out. For example, the November industrial production report hasn’t come out yet. When it does, […]