The S&P opened above this week’s previous daily opens and briefly oscillated around a narrow point until it steadied and closed the day with a small gain of 0.19%. The index is up 0.93% since last Friday and up 9.34% YTD. The U.S. Treasury puts the closing yield on the 10-year note at 2.35%. Here is a daily chart of the S&P 500. Today’s selling puts the volume 12% below its 50-day moving average. A Perspective on Drawdowns Here’s a snapshot of record highs and selloffs since the 2009 trough. Here is a more conventional log-scale chart with drawdowns highlighted. Here is a linear scale version of the same chart with t...
Janet Yellen’s testimony before the House committee was what drove markets on Wednesday. The key takeaway from the testimony was that she was moderately more dovish than she was previously. This dovishness led to a rally in stocks and bonds. The S&P 500 rallied 0.73%, the Russell 2000 increased 0.80%, and the VIX fell 5.42% to 10.30. The 10-year bond rallied as the yield fell 4.28 basis points to 2.3177%. The 2-year bond rallied as the yield fell 3.62 basis points to 1.3389%. This dovishness caused the chances of a 25-basis point hike by December to fall to 53.3% from 58.9% yesterday. The key term of the day was the neutral rate. This ...
The Chart of the Day belongs to SeaSpine Holdings (SPNE). I found the medical technology stock by using Barchart to sort today’s Top Stocks to Own list first by the most frequent number of new highs in the last month, then again by technical buy signals of 80% or more. Since the Trend Spotter signaled a buy in 5/9 the stock gained 45.89%. SeaSpine Holdings Corporation is a medical technology company which focused on the design, development and commercialization of surgical solutions for the treatment of spinal disorders. The company also offers orthobiologics and spinal fusion hardware solutions. SeaSpine Holdings Corporation ...
U.S. stocks were on track for a new record on Thursday as Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s testimony made bulls feel even bolder than they have for most of this year. The strong gains are even more timely, given one economist’s warning that developed countries may be in or nearing frothy market territory. He highlighted the symptoms of froth he sees at this time and offered some suggestions for avoiding bubble territory as the world’s central banks look to taper off their monetary accommodation policies. Yellen reverts to her typical dovishness During her time as chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen has been known for her dovish t...
The stars — in the form of smart and dumb money futures contract positions — have once again lined up favorably for precious metals. Here are those positions for gold and silver as of Tuesday the 4th. Notice that speculators (the dumb money) got a lot less optimistic — that is, less long and more short — while the commercials (the smart money) got much less pessimistic. The closer each group gets to neutral, where their longs and shorts are about equal, the greater the likelihood that metals prices will rise in the subsequent six or so months. And here’s the same data for silver presented in graphical form. The top bars are specu...
Yellen’s speaking again… give it all you’ve got!! Stocks stalled early on (around 1010ET) thanks to inflation comments from Yellen, but that dip was bid back to the highs… then they took a little spill when Fed’s Brainard admitted “asset valuations do look a bit stretched” around 1400ET. Once again the rally-monkeys came out – even as it became clear that GOP will not have the votes for the revised healthcare bill… Nasdaq up 5 days in a row – the longest streak since May… Early Small Caps weakness was ramped all the way back into green… Futures show that in general mar...
To the naked eye, it represents progress. China has still an enormous rural population doing subsistence level farming. As the nation grows economically, such a way of life is an inherent drag, an anchor on aggregate efficiency Chinese officials would rather not put up with. Moving a quarter of a billion people into cities in an historically condensed time period calls for radical thinking, and radical doing. In one official party plan, it was or has to happen before 2026. The idea has been to build 20 new cities for this urbanization, and then maybe 20 more. It led to places like Yujiapu in Tianjin. China’s answer to Manhattan was to inclu...
The pharma/biotech sector has picked up this year after being battered by the drug pricing controversy in 2016. The first half has been pretty strong for companies in the space. The NYSE ARCA Pharmaceutical Index has risen almost 9.8% year to date (YTD) after declining almost 10% last year. NASDAQ Biotechnology Index is up 17.7% YTD after sliding 19.1% in 2016. The sector does have its share of challenges in the form of rising competition, high profile pipeline setbacks, slowdown in growth of mature products and the loss of exclusivity for certain key drugs. Though the drug pricing issue still prevails, investors, lately, are hoping that stee...
“I think it all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for it.” – Edmund Hillary Some better action today in the bio, pharma and tech sector but action should remain subdued until earnings kick off in a couple weeks. Patience pays. That said, I do have a few positions on and more setups are starting to appear and I do foresee taking some more trades in the near future. Whoop, whoop!! SPY is at the top of its range so let’s see if we can breakout or see more rest as we wait for earnings season to kick off....
Wheat supplies were slightly higher, but Weather now rules Market Analysis This month’s US supply/demand revisions generally followed the indications from June 30th quarterly stocks changes. Old-crop corn and wheat ending stocks were increased while old-crop soybean ending stocks were lowered. However, the USDA didn’t cut its spring wheat crop size as small as the trade ideas, which lead to a higher 2017/18 ending stock projection than forecast. Despite these curves from the USDA, the big change that impacted prices late in the session came from the US 8- 14 day weather model (GFS). It’s mid-day forecast deescalated its hot temper...