For buy and hold investors, remaining long the S&P 500, purely based on the price action, has not been too hard of a trade in the last two years, the peak to trough draw-downs have …
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We’ve flagged the importance of yen weakness for global asset prices on multiple occasions in 2013. The Bank of Japan’s QE program (about $70 billion per month) is much larger than the Federal Reserve ($85 …
Continue readingThe heightened focus on the monthly Nonfarm Payrolls report over the last 5 years has been directly due to the Federal Reserve’s emphasis on the employment picture in its policy decision-making. Market participants have been …
Continue readingThe overnight price action very much surprised me when I woke up this morning. If you had asked most traders a couple of months ago how the market would react when Janet Yellen was announced …
Continue readingMorningWord 10/7/13: The headlines this Monday morning don’t sound pretty. But oddly they aren’t too different to those from last Monday when we also woke up to find the S&P 500 futures trading down …
Continue readingMorningWord 10/1/13: Despite the nerve center of the financial markets being situated right here in downtown Manhattan, most market participants in the U.S. have spent the better part of the last 4 months focused on …
Continue readingMorningWord 9/19/13: If you are feeling a tad used and abused by the Federal Reserve’s “communication” over the last few months as it relates to their plans to dial back bond purchases, don’t worry, misery …
Continue readingExactly one month ago I initiated this long call position with the thought that high dividend paying stocks that had gotten hit as rates rose over the last month would possibly come back in vogue …
Continue readingMortgage demand continues to decline. The past 3 months have seen one of the weakest periods for mortgage application volumes during the 2009-2013 bull market. The mortgage application data can be quite volatile week-to-week, but …
Continue readingIn the past month, we have seen major improvements in the macroeconomic data across the globe. Last week’s U.S. data ended on a bit of a weak note with the payrolls report, but the ISM …
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