The stock market was down slightly on Tuesday. Snap (SNAP) stock was down 11% to a 21 handle. While Snap doesn’t have a large market cap, it’s significant because it represents the latest excess of Wall Street. The company has a lock on the attention of teenagers and 20-somethings, but is burning cash quickly. It will fall below the IPO price at some point because cash flows matter, even though they didn’t matter in the first day of trading. It’s tough for me to assign reasons for the stock market’s fall because it’s down less than 1.5% from the peak on Wednesday. However, when I describe bearish factors, I can simply say the ma...
Urban Outfitters, Inc. (Nasdaq:URBN) late Tuesday [Mar 7, 2017 | 4:09pm ] posted in-line fourth-quarter earnings results, as comparable sales were flat from the year-ago period, as predicted. Written by StockNews.com The Philadelphia-based specialty apparel retailer reported Q4 earnings per share (EPS) of $0.55, which was in-line with the Wall Street consensus estimate of $0.55. Revenues rose 1.7% from last year to $1.03 billion, narrowly missing analysts’ view for $1.04 billion. Overall, comparable Retail segment sales (“comps”) were flat in the latest period. Comps rose 2.0% at Urban Outfitters and 1.2% at Free People, but fell 2.9% a...
The Nikkei continued its two-day slide ending today with just small -0.2% decline. The JPY had one of its tightest trading ranges in awhile even with geopolitics playing out on its doorstep. The talk around Asia remains focused on the FED and implications upon their (Asia’s) markets as they will be closed upon the NFP report release. Positions are being established now to end Q1 with many discussing the likelihood of three or four moves in 2017. The Shanghai and Hang Seng markets both returned positive (+0.3%) moves with energy and mining leading the pack. Gold started its decline again from yesterday’s set-back and although weaker did...
What was once considered doubtful (by no less than myself) has become at least a coin flip and may actually be more likely than not. I’m talking about the potential SEC approval of the Winklevoss Bitcoin ETF (COIN). I was skeptical of how the SEC might react to volatility in the price of bitcoin, the number of hacks of bitcoin exchanges and the lack of current SEC oversight as possible roadblocks to approval. But the presence of a number of independent analysts may be swinging the scales in favor of approval. Given the State Street is being brought in to operate the ETF may give the SEC the degree of comfort it needs to go ahead wi...
Last week, in the wake of the President’s address to Congress, stocks rallied hard but ran into a brick wall at Dow 21,000, Nasdaq 5,900, and S&P 500 2,400. For the moment, optimism is high due to solid economic and corporate earnings reports along with the expectation that economic skids will soon be greased by business-friendly fiscal policies. But the proof is in the pudding, as the saying goes, and the constant distractions from a laser focus on the Trump agenda are becoming worrisome – not to mention the many uncertainties in Europe, North Korea’s missile launches, and China’s lowered growth projection as it tries to address ...
The credit-card fueled spending spree came to a screeching halt in January, when according to the latest just released consumer credit data from the Fed, revolving credit tumbled by $3.8 billion. This was the first decline since February of 2016, and the biggest drop since December 2012. On the other hand, the far more generous non-revolving, student and auto loans, rose once again, posting a $12.6 billion increase in January, bringing the total consumer credit increase to just $8.8 billion, one half of the $17 billion expected, and down materially from the revised December print of $14.8 billion. The sharp contraction in revolving, i.e. cred...
It’s become a bit passé by now to highlight the big hawkish shift in the traders’ expectations for next week’s FOMC meeting; unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know the market-implied likelihood of a 25bps rate hike has shifted from relatively unlikely (85%) in the last couple of weeks, driven by a run of solid economic data and more importantly, essentially-unanimous hawkish “Fedspeak” in favor of such a move. Perhaps a more important development has been the simultaneous increase in the amount of tightening priced in, not just the timing of the year’s first interest rate rise. As of ...
For those of you who wondered why there was such concentrated selling in the mining stocks a few weeks ago, perhaps this latest bear raid on the precious metals provides an adequate explanation. See the second chart below. As a reminder, Non-Farm Payrolls this week, and the FOMC the next. ...