Is Apparel The Canary In The Coal Mine?
Last week, one of the curious parts of the CPI report was the large jump (1.6% month/month, or nearly 20% annualized) in Apparel. At the time, I dismissed this rise with a hand-wave, pointing out that it Apparel is only 4% of core and so I don’t worry as much about Apparel as I do, […]
Market Talk March 21, 2016
With Japan on national holidays it was left to Shanghai and Hang Seng to show the rest of the world the way forward. With the help of the PBOC, adding ample liquidity and fixing the Yuan rate at 6.4824 (compared to 6.4628 on Friday) stocks saw a healthy 2%+ gain for the day. HSI closed marginally firmer. In […]
Kaleidoscope Eyes
Dennis Lockhart, Atlanta Fed president, made a speech today trumping up the possibility rate hikes as soon as April. In his speech, Lockhart cited “sufficient momentum evidenced by the economic data to justify a further step at one of the coming meetings, possibly as early as the meeting scheduled for end of April.” Let’s dive […]
Connecticut Credit Risk Spikes To Record High
Amid cuts in aid and surging taxes, it appears the market remains less than impressed at Connecticut’s debt sustainability. Following last week’s disappointing bond auction, CT bond risk has spiked to 65bps over the benchmark – a record spread demanded by investors to take CT repayment risk. CT becomes the 4th riskiest US state after NJ, IL, and PA. […]
Higher U.S. EV Sales To Drive Tesla Stock
123RF Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) shares have rallied more than 10% over the past five days after a bullish report about the state of the EV industry in 2016 emerged. According to InsideEVs.com, plug-in sales in the U.S. during the first two months of the year were up 8.9% to 14,172 units compared to the same period a year […]
S&P 500 Snapshot: A Fractional Gain In A Catatonic Session
Our benchmark S&P 500 opened a hair lower than Friday’s close and sold off to its -0.31% intraday low about 90 minutes later. It then slowly recovered in zigzag fashion to its 0.21% afternoon high before drifting downward to its fractional closing gain of 0.10%. Today’s session was the narrowest intraday trading range of the […]
Gold Daily And Silver Weekly Charts – Silver Shows More Staying Power Than Gold
Silver showed a little more staying power than gold, which is not all that surprising because gold has been leading all the way up this year, and the gold/silver ratio is at some historic highs. The US dollar gained back a little of what it had lost after the Fed meeting last week. There was […]
5 Low-Debt Stocks That Promise Steady Returns
With an uncertain market scenario and speculations rife over a rate hike by the Fed, companies with a low debt level are undoubtedly the safest bets. Upbeat domestic economic data coupled with 242,000 job additions in Feb 2016, easily surpassing the consensus estimate of 194,000, have lifted the U.S. GDP growth estimate by 1%. Meanwhile, […]
Valspar, Sherwin-Williams Merger Could Lift Entire Paints Sector, Analysts Say
Sherwin-Williams (SHW) announced on Sunday an agreement to acquire its smaller paints and coatings rival Valspar (VAL) for $113 per share in cash. Weighing in on the news, several Wall Street analysts argued today that, beyond generating as much as $4.00 in additional earnings per share for the new company, the merger could lift the […]
The Housing Story Is Really Inventory
Existing home sales as reported by the National Association of Realtors fell 7.1% in February 2016 from the month before. It was a very large decline but followed a two-month surge beginning December 2015; which itself came after an unusually large decline in November. In other words, housing and home sales seems to be that […]
