There is nothing better than finding fresh berries at a fair value at the grocery store or a farmers’ market. One of the downsides to fresh berries is that you know a few at the bottom of the basket will be crushed, spoiled or have a six-legged friend claiming it as its home. But what if you got home and found that 40% of the berries in the basket were in a bad state and possibly inedible? Now what in the world do berries have to do with personal finance?
Less than seven weeks until the end of the year. Take out the two to three holiday weeks and you are down to about twenty days of real work left in 2023 for the markets. The M&A strategic and opportunistic deal train will begin to slow significantly as will the corporate information from companies to the investing world.
With the Treasury Bond markets significantly oversold going into the end of October, it was make or break time for the markets. The 5% level on yields was beginning to look like a ceiling and investors were increasingly lining up at their terminals to get in on the high rate, risk-free action.
So, it is FOMC week. What will Jerome say? Expect lots of bark with no bite. The Fed is done raising rates. Just look at what 5% Treasury rates are doing to the economy.
As interest rates rise and macro pressures continue to build, I am not sure if interest in the equity markets even registers right now. Fives on the 10-year yield. Eights on the 30-year mortgage rate.
A giant tortoise has about a 35% chance of seeing a total solar eclipse during their lifetime. Of course, this assumes that they live in a sunny climate for the one day roughly every 375 years that an eclipse happens overhead.
The horrific violence in Israel this weekend has added another element of risk to the financial markets for investors to consider.
The fourth quarter begins with a continued air of uncertainty for investors. While the markets dodged a big bullet over the weekend in avoiding a government shutdown, other concerns remain.
Stock investors have gone on strike and shutdown. Fed up with the line of dominoes being laid out, the CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index popped from an ultra-low handle of 12 to 16-18 in just 8 days. You know the dominoes: government shutdown, UAW strike, rising Treasury yields, climbing oil prices, resumption of student loan payments, September seasonality and the N.Y. Yankees missing the playoffs.
While nature's hues shift as September moves toward October, I wonder if some new headwinds in the economy will begin to influence the price change colors on my stock market screens.
With the summer now ended, September begins the wind up through the year end for the financial markets. So, while companies are executing on their M&A and capital structure plans, portfolio managers and advisors are thinking about their calendar year performance numbers
No fireworks this year at Jackson Hole as Jerome Powell and the Fed stuck to their data driven playbook.
Not only will the temperatures be half from what many economists and Fed members are used to during the month of August, but today's current set of stats is wildly different from that of a year ago.
Investors have $5 trillion of their money market funds earning away at a 4-5% rate. As inflation slows and the economy remains solid, what is an investor to do with all this cash?
It was a big week for those dark red colored recessionary forecasts. The ongoing strength in the manufacturing and consumer economy was helped by continued solid job gains which led several top firms to erase the negative growth rates on their GDP forecasts.