This week’s calendar includes a pretty normal schedule, but not the most important economic reports. There will be an abundance of FedSpeak, with questions about last Friday’s employment data. Despite this, the real story will be the start of earnings season. Expectations are pretty low. Statements about the outlook are always important, but that is especially true right now. The financial media will be asking: Can the profit outlook sustain the rally in stocks? Last Week The economic news was pretty good, and the market reaction was even stronger. The continuing market rebound has caught many off base. This week’s review emphasizes Fr...
It’s been almost 10 years in the making, but the fate of one of Europe’s most important financial institutions appears to be sealed. After a hard-hitting sequence of scandals, poor decisions, and unfortunate events,Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes that Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank (DB) shares are now down -48% on the year to $12.60, which is a record-setting low. Even more stunning is the long-term view of the German institution’s downward spiral. With a modest $15.8 billion in market capitalization, shares of the 147-year-old company now trade for a paltry 8% of its peak price in May 2007. Courtesy of: Visual Ca...
Charles High Smith writes, “In the conventional investment perspective, risk-on assets (i.e. investments with higher risks and higher potential returns) such as stocks are on a see-saw with risk-off assets (investments with lower returns and lower risk, such as Treasury bonds). When risk appetites are high, institutional managers and speculators move money into stocks and high-yield junk bonds, and move money out of safe-haven assets such as gold and U.S. Treasuries. But recently, markets are no longer following this convention. Safe haven assets such as precious metals and Treasuries are soaring at the same time that stock markets bou...
1. Market Update The Brexit vote was a surprise but my alternative scenario for this unlikely event was a bull’s-eye. Gold immediately spiked sharply higher and met some profit taking around $1,350. Now two weeks later it’s even higher and in a strong uptrend. Gold knows that all these new uncertainties as well as the extremely unstable situation in the financial markets worldwide plus negative real interest rates will force central bankers to print even more money in the coming years. I continue to believe that precious metals are in a new epic bull market and will protect you against the coming loss of confidence in our fiat mon...
“We don’t have a government, we don’t have an opposition,” said satire magazine editor Ian Hislop on BBC’s Question Time, Thursday. The Prime Minister appeared on the morning after the EU Referendum vote to announce his resignation, effective a long time hence. Since then, the ship of State has been not so much rudderless as uncaptained. Mr Cameron’s irresponsibility is lamentable: just before impact, he has left the bridge for others to steer the country off the rocks. The Referendum was always going to be divisive. But with US Presidential elections, the often very bitter and unscrupulous fight beforehand is followed by a period...
When sellside strategists, such as Deutsche Bank’s David Bianco, throw in the towel and the best they can come up with is a 100 word admission that nothing makes sense anymore, and that the S&P has never been “more disjointed from other assets”, it’s either a time to sell everything… or buy anything. From DB: For many years we’ve watched a set of market based indicators across seven major asset classes to help gauge cyclical conditions and S&P reward/risk. We can’t think of a time the S&P was more disjointed from these other asset class price moves than in recent days. While we believ...
In an article I wrote about a week ago, I reviewed the current P/E (price earnings ratio) of the sectors that comprise the S&P 500 Index. The article included the below chart which compared the current sector P/Es to the respective sector’s average P/E and minimum P/E over the past ten years. the article noted some of the income or yield producing sectors were trading at elevated valuations. Simply because the P/E for a sector is high, and the same applies to individual stocks, this does not necessarily mean the sector or stock is overvalued. Importantly, the P/E should be compared to the earnings growth rate for each sector or com...
Everyone knows that the market has been an incredibly volatile place to be as of late. With global economic concerns weighing, we’ve seen incredible movement in the market. However, late last week, we started to see incredibly strong movement in US stocks after the non-farm payroll report. Today, we’ll talk about what we saw from the report, why it caused US stocks to head upward, whether or not we can expect a strong week next week, and how binary options traders can take advantage of the trends. US Jobs Report Excites Investors As mentioned above, the non-farm payrolls report for the month of June was released late last week. Th...
Here are seven ETFs of interest and a few thoughts on each. First up is the agricultural commodity ETF, which has a decent basing pattern. This isn’t very heavily traded, and it isn’t a big percentage mover, but it also isn’t prone to shocking moves, either. The triple-bearish energy instrument, shown below, looks like it’s starting to gain a bit of strength after having withered away most of the year. The Euro is following its channels quite nicely, and it seems more prone to weakness than strength at present levels. The standout for 2016 ,of course, is precious metals miners. I’ve drawn a channel with a midline for the junior mine...
Source: riskdynamics.eu The United States has learned from its bad experiences during the Global Financial Crisis when almost its entire financial system was going down in flames. Stress tests to find out how banks would be able to deal with economic adverse scenarios became mandatory, and the European Union followed suit with its stress tests in 2011, followed by a series of check-ups later on. Source: Daily Mail Almost a decade has passed since the global financial crisis, and half a decade since the European stress tests, but the volatility and unrest in the financial world has never been this high. You would think that five years of ECB-s...