As good news for the labor market goes these days, today’s numbers from Washington for November payrolls rank as one of the better reports in recent memory. Private-sector employment increased by a strong 314,000 last month, way above the +225,000 consensus forecast. “Job gains were widespread, led by growth in professional and business services, retail trade, health…
Wal-Mart (WMT) is the largest discount retailer in the world. Wal-Mart is the 8th largest publicly traded US corporation. Wal-Mart is 4.3 times the size of Costco (COST) and 5.8 times the size of Target (TGT) based on market cap. Wal-Mart has generated 5.67 times the amount of revenue Amazon (AMZN) has over the past 12 months. Wal-Mart is the dominant force in discount…
Click on picture to enlarge 2007 was a unique year in Japan as their stock market peaked and Yen was about to embark on a strong rally…for a while. The above chart reflects that the Nikkei and Yen have had a wild ride the past 7 years. The Nikkei peaked in 2007, fell hard for…
As surmised in the subscriber update posted just after the ‘Jobs’ report, jitters about interest rate hikes are bubbling to the surface in the T bond market. This may also be a Straw Man to get people thinking risk ‘OFF’ when it remains ‘ON’, at least by the structure of the yield curve. All maturities…
The BLS jobs report headlines from the establishment survey were strong and above expectations. The unadjusted data shows good job growth but slightly less than last year. The household survey shows almost NO job growth. Will the real job situation please stand up? Putting this month’s headline numbers into perspective – the monthly private sector growth is…
Networking solutions provider, Juniper Networks (JNPR – Analyst Report) and VMware, Inc. (VMW – Snapshot Report) recently collaborated to provide private cloud-based solutions across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. VMware is an industry-leading virtualization software company. Through this collaboration, Juniper will combine its MetaFabric architecture with VMware’s NSX network virtualization platform that provides private cloud-based services. This would make the cloud-computing…
After an initial “good news is bad news” kneejerk lower in stocks, USD strength (and thus JPY weakness) is providing the ammo to ‘prove’ this is good news, but problematically the bounce is fading (of course, there’s a long way and a lot more VIX to sell to manage this narrative green). Oil is up modestly (growth?). Treasury…
It’s interesting to note that the Russians have several new nuclear plants under construction, including a fast breeder, despite their enormous fossil fuel resources. What do they know that we don’t know? – Jack Ellis Probably nothing at all Jack, although admittedly it is useful to consider the difference between knowing…
The strength of the US employment report is seeing the dollar jump across the board. The divergent theme has been brought out in relief. The 321k rise in non-farm payrolls is the strongest print of the year and is the second monthly increase above 300k since early 2012 (the other one being this past April). On…
While the world has been watching Draghi and are surprised at the dissent, at the same time the street tends to try to create hard fast rules to follow the Fed rather than the markets and economy. The thinking process seems to try to fashion fixed rules to approach the Taylor Rule. This is kind…
