Silver’s reluctant, sluggish participation in early 2016’s powerful gold rally has been glaringly obvious. Instead of amplifying the yellow metal’s big gains as in the past, silver largely failed to even keep pace. The lack of silver confirmation for gold’s big move has certainly raised concerns. But despite silver’s vexing torpidity in recent months, it is…
Initial Reaction Today’s employment report shows an increase of 215,000 jobs, very close to the Bloomberg consensus estimate of 210,000 jobs. The Household Survey and Payroll Survey (Establishment Survey), were in sync this month. There was not another surge in part-time employment. There were no major revisions. Year-on-year hourly earnings are up a somewhat disappointing…
After a tumultuous start to the year, the U.S. stock market finally turned green. It’s a striking revival for an index that had entered correction territory by mid February, with investors’ sentiments turning bearish. Rise in oil prices from record lows and Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s dovish comments lifted the markets. However, the oil market…
The FOMC may have cut its rate hike forecast from 4 to 2, following by an even more dovish speech by Janet Yellen, but Goldman is convinced the Fed is wrong. As a result, after looking at today’s payrolls report, its chief economist Jan Hatzius said that “we ultimately think the committee will move faster…
Quite a few years ago a blogger wrote an April Fools post about 100X levered ETFs. It was pretty good and fooled quite a few people. I tried to find it but had no luck. I thought about writing a jokey post announcing some sort of outlandish suite of ETFs. We’ve kicked this sort of…
Good riddance! I’m never eating at THAT restaurant again! That’s all I can say about the completion of the first quarter of 2016. Talk about an e.coli of a quarter! It was the worst quarter in hedge fund history. Bodies will be washing up on the beach for months. Back-to-back we saw both the worst…
The BLS job situation headlines looked good. Jobs growth accelerated this month on the back of last month’s downwardly revised data. Economic intuitive sectors were mixed. The rate of growth for employment accelerated this month (red line on graph below). Unadjusted Non-Farm Private Employment – Year-over-Year Change (blue bars – left axis) and Year-over-Year Growth…
From a macro perspective – we’re experiencing an S&P topping formation that may or may not turn ‘south’ rapidly, or persist in a distribution process. After all that’s happened in the past year-and-a-half, it is again dangerously extended. During this time we’ve had some marvelous moves outlined, primarily biased to the downside (solely on spikes…
It may be almost impossible to underestimate the gullibility of professional Fed watchers. At least Lucy van Pelt needed to place an actual football on the ground to fool poor Charlie Brown. But in today’s high stakes game of Federal Reserve mind reading, the Fed doesn’t even have to make a halfway convincing bluff to…
As March marked the beginning of spring, the bulls were stampeded by a “perfect storm” of Central Bank actions. From the ECB dropping rates into negative territory and launching a bigger “quantitative easing” program, to the Federal Reserve backing off its plans to hike interest rates this year, the “accommodative support” gave the bulls the clearance they needed to pile back…
