"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Maybe Mark Twain but could be Josh Billings or someone else entirely The Great Rotation from large cap stocks to small cap and value stocks that started a few weeks ago, continued unabated last week. There's a lot [...]
There's been a pretty remarkable turnaround in markets over the last 10 days. At the end of June, market returns were dominated by large cap growth stocks. The Russell 1000 growth index was up 20.5% while the value index was up a mere 6.5%, a spread rarely seen over such a short period of time. The Russell 2000 index of [...]
Special Note On Hurricane Beryl: As thousands of people in coastal Texas remain without power after Hurricane Beryl devastated the region last week, relief groups on the ground are asking for donations to aid their efforts. Here are a few organizations that can put monetary gifts to use right now. - "Where crisis strikes, hunger follows." The U.N. World Food [...]
The economic data wasn't particularly shocking or weak but it seemed as if last week may have marked a change in the economic outlook. The 10-year Treasury note yield only fell 7 basis points on the week but that only tells part of the story. Rates rose strongly on Monday, up 15 basis points at the high of the day. [...]
The 2nd quarter is officially over and it was one of the strangest I’ve experienced in my 33 year career. To jump straight to the punchline, if you owned large cap growth stocks, you had a great quarter. If you owned almost anything else, you didn’t and you likely lost money. I don’t know when the bear market in doing [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
"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 [...]
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 - [...]
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