Monthly Market Monitor – July 2020
Most Long-Term Trends Have Not Changed A lot has changed over the last 4 months since the COVID virus started to impact the global economy. Asia was infected first with China at ground zero. Their economy succumbed first with a large part of the country shut down to a degree that can only be accomplished in an authoritarian regime. The [...]
Monthly Macro Monitor – June 2020
The stock market has recovered most of its losses from the March COVID-19 induced sell-off and the enthusiasm with which stocks are being bought – and sold but mostly bought – could lead one to believe that the crisis is over, that the economy has completely or nearly completely recovered. Unfortunately, other markets do not support that notion nor does [...]
We Have Reached The Silly Phase of the Bull Market
Have we entered a new bull market? Was the 35% pullback in the S&P 500 in March the fastest bear market in history? Or is this just a continuation of the bull market that started in 2009, interrupted by a rather large correction? Bull markets and bear markets are about behavior, about the human emotions of fear and greed. While [...]
Beware of Accepted Wisdom
Most everyone has heard of the Chinese proverb – or curse – that wishes one to live in “interesting times”. You’ve probably also heard that in Chinese the word “crisis” is composed of two symbols, one that denotes “danger” and another that means “opportunity”. Well we certainly live in interesting times and there is indeed a crisis. We won’t know [...]
Market vs Economy: A Time Mismatch
“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” Stephen Hawking The economic news over the last month has been as awful as anyone alive has ever seen. Unemployment has risen from 3.5% to 14.7% since February with nearly 15 million Americans filing for jobless benefits in the last month alone. The CFNAI hit its third-worst reading ever and that [...]
OPEC + Reality
Two weeks ago, OPEC+ and the US came to a deal to cut crude oil production. President Trump hailed the deal, saying it would save “hundreds of thousands” of oil patch jobs. The Texas Railroad Commission meets today to “consider” a cut in oil production in the Lone Star state. Meanwhile, the market has made all this high-level negotiating irrelevant, [...]
The Long-Term Implications of COVID-19
With volatility in the stock market ebbing somewhat or at least going in a more comfortable direction – 1000 point up-days feel a lot better than 1000 point down-days – it seems a good time to start pondering the long-term implications of the virus and shutdown. All of us have been so focused on the short term – is this [...]
The Dichotomy of Market Sentiment
It doesn’t take much effort to find bearish sentiment about stocks or the economy right now. CNN’s Fear & Greed Index, an amalgam of seven discrete market sentiment indicators, is still in the “Extreme Fear” zone. Generally, market bottoms are associated with extreme fear while tops are associated with extreme greed. And it generally works; the gauge was pegged in [...]
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