The S&P 500 is up 4.8% in the 2nd quarter to date but that is far from the whole story. The bull market over the last year has become ever narrower with the index return pulling away from the average return. This quarter the average return of the stocks in the index is actually negative, down 2.4%. Over the last [...]
The S&P 500 reached a milestone recently. Or at least I think so. The technology sector, as of this week, is now 33.6% of the index. If you count the Communications sector as technology - and you should since 49% of the sector is Meta and Google - the allocation to technology oriented companies is 42.8%. The top 3 companies [...]
When people talk about "the market" they are usually referring the big indexes - the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ. For more casual observers, "the market" is the Dow which is a lousy index for a lot of reasons but has the advantage of history. But are any those really representative of how "the market" is doing? Not really. All [...]
The employment report released last Friday offered contradictory views of the state of the economy. The Current Employment Survey (also called the payroll or establishment survey), which comes from a survey of 119,000 businesses, showed a gain of 272,000 jobs for the month of May, which is right in line with the monthly average since April of 2022. On the [...]
I don't write or talk much about trade but it is, obviously, an important part of the global economy. With all the talk of deglobalization, you'd think that the US trade deficit must be shrinking, right? And with all those tariffs, imports must be falling right? Well, okay but the US doesn't make anything anymore and our trade policies have [...]
"The uncertainty about where neutral is today creates a challenge for policymakers." - Neel Kashkari, Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Last week was a volatile one for markets with big swings in stocks and bonds in a holiday-shortened week. The economic data didn't appear to be sufficiently out of the expected range to justify big moves but we got them anyway. [...]
A recent poll conducted by Harris and the UK news outlet The Guardian, produced some interesting results. Of those polled: 56% believe the US economy is in recession 49% believe the S&P 500 is down for the year 49% believe the unemployment rate is at a 50-year high 72% think inflation is increasing The reporting on this has been mostly [...]
Until a few years ago, non-traded REITs were, along with some other sketchy investments, the red-headed step child of the investment world. Nobody liked them except the people selling them who got paid big commissions to do so. They were often riddled with fraud and insider dealing and have been a consistent source of complaints to FINRA and the SEC. [...]
Bonds and stocks rallied last week on the back of two pretty good inflation reports, right? I suppose but there were other things going on too so let's take a look at how inflation expectations changed last week and see if that's what drove markets. The 5 year inflation breakeven fell by 2 basis points. Yes, 2. 10 year inflation [...]
There were two important inflation reports last week. One of them, the Producer Price Index, focuses on wholesale prices and it showed inflation hotter than expected in April. The year-over-year change bottomed in June of last year at just 0.3% and has been rising steadily since then. It now stands at 2.2%. The market reaction to this report was - [...]
Stay In Touch