USD recovered some significant ground versus most currencies and commodities helped by solid job data. Initial jobless claims dropped to 255k versus expectation of 275k. In the UK, Retail Sales were terrible. -0.2% versus expectation of 0.3% resulting in a 170 pip move lower to 1.5500 from 1.5670. The biggest mover today in Asia was…
The GBP/USD pair initially tried on Thursday, as the 1.57 level offered far too much in the way of resistance. The market fell significantly at that point in time, and crashed into the 1.55 level. This area should be important, but I see a more important line below, as shown by the uptrend line on…
Hormel Foods (HRL) has quietly assembled a large portfolio of well-known food brands… The image below shows many of the company’s well-known brands. The company’s more successful brands include: Skippy peanut butter, Spam, Dinty Moore, Jennie-O Turkey, Muscle Milk, and the recently acquired Applegate Farms. The Applegate Organics Acquisition Hormel recently acquired Applegate Farms for $775 million. Applegate…
There’s precious little hard data at this point for profiling the US economy in July, but the preliminary numbers so far suggest that growth will prevail and the manufacturing sector’s recent weakness will give way to a modestly stronger trend. We’ll know more when we see today’s flash July data for the US manufacturing purchasing…
Under the original Coinage Act of 1792, drafted by Alexander Hamilton, the penalty for debasing a coin was death. Under that law, President Lyndon B. Johnson was guilty of a capital offense. Fifty years ago today, Johnson signed the Coinage Act of 1965, setting into motion five decades of currency debasement that continues today. Under…
One of my first paid jobs was washing dishes in the restaurant of a Holiday Inn. I was 13, and lied on the application that I was 16, the minimum age they would accept. It wasn’t a glamorous position, but it did provide a paycheck. And it came with all of the vagaries you’d expect…
As Bridgewater talks back its now widely discussed bearish position on fallout from China’s equity market collapse, Chinese stocks rose at the open (before fading after ugly manufacturing data). However, liquidations continue across the commodity complex in copper, gold, and silver. Though not on the scale to Sunday night’s collapse,the China open brought another ‘flash-crash’ in precious…
Photo Credit: winnifredxoxo From a friend who is a client: Here are a couple of things I have been pondering. Market capitalization is pretty fictitious. It assumes that all the shares of a company are worth the price at which the last block sold. However, if you tried to sell all of the shares of…
There seems to be no end to how low crude oil can go. The precious metal fell another 1.5 percent on Thursday, settling at $48.48, the lowest level since March 31. Many analysts are expecting it to drop even more in the months ahead. “This market is headed to $40 before we go to $60…
To start this week, I pointed out that the U.S. dollar index (UUP) and the British pound (FXB) had tagged important milestones for this year. The U.S. dollar index finally rallied back to the downtrend line established from its multi-year high set in March. The British pound finally cracked the 0.70 support level against the euro (FXE)….
