One of the biggest stories next week could be a NAFTA deal. In the past week, both President Trump and Prime Minister Trudeau have said that significant progress has been made and its widely believed that a preliminary agreement will be announced at the summit in Peru beginning on Friday April 13. With the Mexican…
On the latest edition of Market Week in Review, Chief Investment Strategist Erik Ristuben and Rob Cittadini, director, Americas institutional, discussed the U.S. employment report for March and the market impact of potential tariffs on U.S. and Chinese goods. U.S. March employment report misses consensus expectations The U.S. economy added just 103,000 jobs in March,…
At the end of the first quarter, Crude Oil was up 7.5% while Energy stocks were down 6.1%. How unusual is such a divergence? Let’s take a look. Note: References to Energy/Energy Stocks/Energy Sector throughout this post are referring to the S&P 500 Energy Sector ETF (XLE), total return data from Stockcharts.com. Since the inception of…
Momentum-based strategies have led the factor-investing horse race for US equities in recent history, but the latest surge in market volatility may be its undoing. For the trailing 30-day period, the momentum factor’s modest loss leaves it in last place, based on a set of ETFs tracking key US-based factor strategies. By contrast, the best-performing…
We began months ago, noting the 3 Amigos destined for their goals. Here’s a post from November 2017 explaining the macro fundamentals involved: Updating the 3 Amigos of the Macro Amigo #1 (SPX vs. Gold): Either reach major theoretical resistance (it’s a ratio, after all) or abort mission by establishing a downtrend. Amigo #2 (10yr yield to 2.9% and…
Reserve Bank of India cut its inflation forecast for the first half of FY2018/19 to 4.7-5.1%. Former South Korean President Park was sentenced to 24 years in prison. Malaysia Prime Minister Razak has called for early elections. Bahrain discovered its biggest oil field since it started producing crude in 1932. Local press reports Turkey’s Deputy…
Canada sees a healthy rise in jobs: 32.3K in March, above 20K expected. The unemployment rate remains at 5.8% as predicted with no change in the participation rate, at 65.%. There is some good news in the composition of the positions: 35.9K part-time jobs were lost while no less than 68.3K were gained. Such big moves…
Never get hung up on one payroll report, good or bad. The Establishment Survey series, seasonally-adjusted and statistically smoothed as much as humanly possible, is still incredibly noisy. It didn’t used to be this way, which is an important clue that “something” has changed. The lack of consistency in the monthly measurement is as the…
Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as they get to identifying their method. There is, however, a general belief that there are four big indicators that the committee weighs…
