Tempting fate — it never fails to disappoint. Yesterday’s regular trading day, after I proclaimed nothing could get in the way of this latest leg of a bullish trading wave, things did. Market participants who’d been riding an enormous wave of technology looked at their year-to-date gains in companies like nVIDIA (NVDA – Free Report) , which had topped up 113%, and sold them off 10% yesterday. As for Bitcoin, I said nothing could stop it. Then one of its exchanges lost power, and the value of one Bitcoin fell more than $2000.
Well, Bitcoin has since recovered a bit and nVIDIA is trading up in today’s pre-market. In fact, the Dow, Nasdaq and S&P 500 are all up ahead of today’s opening bell. This is because profit-taking and machine malfunctions aside, the overall bullish narrative is intact: equities continue strengthening on solid economic metrics like the labor market, consumer confidence, etc. Oil prices are well above $50 per barrel today (with a newly minted OPEC deal just hitting the newswires this morning), and geopolitical strife — rhetoric between President Trump and Kim Jong-Un notwithstanding — is at a minimum.
Ahead of today’s open, new Initial Jobless Claims came down even further: 238K claims last week is down 2000 from the upwardly revised previous week. This is solidly in the very healthy range of 225-250K we’ve enjoyed the past few years, temporary hurricane-related issues aside. Continuing claims, however, are creeping up even further: from beneath 1.9 million just weeks ago, this latest read of 1.957 million is the closest we’ve been to 2 million continuing claims we’ve seen in quite some time.
Personal Income and Spending numbers also came in this morning, with the October headline of +0.4% one-tenth ahead of expectations. Spending reached +0.3%, in-line with analysts’ consensus. These figures show that growing consumer confidence in other metrics is indeed strengthening, which is paramount to a strong holiday shopping season. So we remain hopeful a strong Q4 in both earnings and GDP will be in the offing as of early next year.
