The drop in the price of crude oil over the last quarter of 2014 was and continues to be bad news for companies that drill and own oil wells. In the jargon of the energy sector, these companies operate in the upstream portion of the spectrum from oil in the ground to gas in your…
It’s that time of year when people start thinking about New Year’s resolutions and investment planning for the future. It’s also the time of year when analysts feel more or less compelled to offer up forecasts. My friend Doug Kass turns the forecasting process on its head by offering 15 potential surprises for 2015 (plus…
Private payrolls in the US increased by 241,000 in December, according to this morning’s ADP Employment Report. The gain, which beat expectations by a sizable margin, marks a moderate improvement over November’s revised 227,000 advance. More importantly, the year-over-year pace of growth accelerated to roughly 2.2% through last month—the fastest annual growth rate since August 2012. Today’s…
The Euro elected the Yearly Bearish Reversal at the 12150 area and it has penetrated the 2010 low so far of 11880 intraday reaching so far 11801. The key support lies at a set of DOUBLE WEEKLY BEARISH REVERSALS found at 11778. If we elect that this year, the Euro will fall most likely BELOW par…
2015: Another Good Year Unless “Something Happens” Life Science stocks had another big year in 2014 up 48% tracking gains for the overall healthcare sector up 35%. Over 10 years the return is 300%! The move up was not a straight line as there were two major corrections in April 2014 after the Q1 “bio-bubble”…
A quick recap to the trade data released today again shows the unadjusted value of import rolling averages decelerated insignificantly month-over-month whilst exports decelerated significantly (and below the November 2013 levels). Many care about the trade balance (which declined again), but trade balance simply has little correlation to economic activity. Import goods growth has…
The crash in oil prices has an obvious winner – consumers. All over the world, people are celebrating the New Year and cheaper energy prices. The price of gasoline is approaching a bargain basement $1.50 per gallon in parts of Oklahoma. Nationwide, prices should fall to around $2 in the early part of…
This is a pointless follow up post to this post which got some attention. As suggested by New Keynesian models, the old post considered G — government consumption plus investment. Here I am going to look at total expenditures (including transfers) and total revenues. Also I will consider only the Federal Government (due to FRED incompetence). There…
Source: Wikipedia Dear Diary, The Dow fell hard on the first real day of trading in 2015 – down 331 points, or 1.9%. And US crude oil fell below $50 a barrel, as pumpers kept on pumping to try to keep up with their debt service costs. We don’t know if this heralds bad…
An Air of Inevitability One thing recent years have shown is certainly that currency markets have a tendency to overshoot and trend very consistently in the same direction. Sentiment and positioning analysis has in some cases failed to work with unwavering regularity. In fact, it didn’t even help much if fundamentals were not necessarily in…
