Small Business Sentiment Falls For 5th Straight Month
Small Business Sentiment - Major Decline In Small Business Optimism The January small business optimism report wasn’t great. Going from great to good is terrible in rate of change terms. As you can see from the chart below, the index fell from 104.4 to 101.2. That missed estimates for 103 and the low end of the…
Stocks Rally As Trump Softens Stance on Trade War
Stocks Rally - New 2019 High For The S&P 500 Stocks Rally - The stock market’s performance this year has been unreal. It appears investors realized there won’t be a recession this year, so they are buying stocks with reckless abandon. Valuations have gotten expensive because earnings estimates have cratered. I wouldn’t have a problem…
Global Central Banks Cut Rates: Fed In A Mid-Cycle Pause
Global Central Banks - Could The Economy Be Mid-Cycle? Some investors believe the economy couldn’t possibly be mid-cycle because the expansion is already almost the longest since the 1800s. Ignore how long you think expansions should be. Technically, the mid-cycle slowdown in 2011-2012 wasn’t close to the middle of the cycle. This expansion has already had…
Consumers - 69% Expect To Be Better Off Financially Next Year
Consumers - Small Caps Rally S&P 500 only increased 7 basis points on Monday. But the Russell 2000 was up 0.84%. Russell 2000 is up 12.03% year to date, while the S&P 500 is only up 8.1%. Either the Russell 2000 is outperforming because it has a higher beta than the S&P 500. Also the…
Retail Investors Have Come Back To The Stock Market
Retail Investors Are Back Previously in a recent cycle, retail investors were still bearish on stocks. That has changed. The timing of these surveys is critical because retail investor optimism has exploded in the past couple weeks. Retail investors missed the rally in the first few weeks of 2019, but have since piled into stocks.…
Twitter Stock Falls, But The Company Is Making Smart Changes
Twitter Earnings Specifics Twitter’s earnings report caused its stock to fall from $34.16 to $29.95 in 2 days which is a combined loss of 12.3%. It’s an interesting reaction because the firm beat earnings and revenue estimates. EPS was 31 cents which beat estimates for 25 cents. GAAP operating income was $207 million which was…
Stocks Drop - About To Have A 2nd Leg Lower?
Stocks Drop Substantially, Finally Stocks were extremely overbought earlier this week. With the 0.94% decline in the S&P 500 on Thursday, they came closer to normal levels. The CNN fear and greed index fell from 65 to 62. We aren’t out of the woods of this correction yet. But now I’m a little less bearish…
Jobless Claims Worry Some Investors
Jobless Claims - 2 Motor Vehicle Sales Reports Before getting into jobless claims, let's review some vehicle sales reports. Because of the government shutdown, the motor vehicle sales reports from December and January were both released on Monday. This December report was solid, which helps Q4 GDP and the January report wasn’t. Meaning it hurt…
S&P 500 Stocks - 88% Are Above Their 50 Day Moving Average
S&P 500 Stocks - Snaps Its 5 Day Winning Streak Finally, the S&P 500 fell slightly on Wednesday as its 5 day winning streak ended. CNN fear and greed index stayed at 64. S&P 500 was down 0.22%, Nasdaq was down 0.36%, and Russell 2000 fell 0.15%. Best 2 sectors on Wednesday were technology and…
Recession - 23.6% Chance Within Next Year
Recession - Report Updates Initially after the government shutdown ended, the BEA came out with release dates for a few unimportant economic reports from Q3. On Wednesday, the release dates of the reports we care about were announced. The “initial” Q4 GDP report will come out on February 28th. It will take the place of the…
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