Samsung echoes Apple’s revenue warning; tech sector shrugs
Overnight Samsung Electronics announced that for the quarter that ended in December quarterly profit and revenue missed estimates on sputtering demand for memory chips. Operating income fell to 10.8 trillion ($9.6 billion) won for the South Korean giant. That was well...
Testing, testing: Bounce, rally, or retreat?
U.S. stocks moved toward a key test today with the Standard & Poor’s 500 approaching the 2550 to 2600 level that signals the top of the recent volatility range and likely technical resistance. If the index breaks above this level, the market could run...
How good is Fed chair Jerome Powell at herding cats?
It’s an extraordinarily busy week for the Federal Reserve–verbiage wise. Saturday, January 5, John Williams, head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Raphael Bostic of the Atlanta Fed, and Mary Daly of the San Francisco Red all spoke. Today, January 7,...
Stocks rally on huge job gains; acceleration in wage growth puts Fed betwixt and between
The U.S. economy added 312,000 jobs in December, the Labor Department reported this morning. The government statisticians also revised November’s report to show the addition of 176,000 jobs instead of the prior report of 155,000. Economists surveyed by...
Adding yen exposure to Jubak Picks and Volatility Portfolios
On December 27 I switched to the  Invesco Currency Shares Japanese Yen ETF (FXY) from the Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets ETF (VEA) in my Perfect 5 ETF Portfolio (on my subscription sites JugglingWithKnives.com and JubakAM.com) in an effort to get more yen exposure...
U.S. stocks take a beating as weak manufacturing index follows on Apple sales warning
Last night’s warning from Apple that sales for the December quarter would be well below the company’s earlier guidance bled into a weaker than expected reading this morning  from the Purchasing Managers Index for the Manufacturing sector. The ISM...
Apple cuts revenue forecast, drops 7.6% in after-hours trading
Will Apple’s (AAPL) warning spook stocks tomorrow, Thursday, January 3, to a degree that bad economic news out of China didn’t today? After the close in New York Apple CEO Tim Cook dramatically lowered the company’s estimates for sales in the...
Why no big drop on truly bad China economic news? Look to the bond market
China and other export-oriented Asian economies delivered really grim news on growth last night and yet U.S. stocks have refused to move into the red. As of 2:20 p.m. New York time on Thursday the Standard & Poor’s 500 index was up 0.07% The NASDAQ...
Asian manufacturing data spur stock tumble
It’s not just China anymore. Unfortunately. The Caixin Media and IHS Markit Purchasing Managers Index for China’s manufacturing sector fell to 49.7 in December  from 50.2, its lowest reading since May 2017. That confirms a trend seen in the official...
Why predicting a bottom for this bear is so hard: More lessons from the charts
Once stocks have wound up in the jaws of a bear market, the most pressing question is when/where will it end? Which is tough to predict because we have a relatively small data set to project from–we’ve only had 12 bear markets (using the 20% drop from a...
MGM Resorts International: That’s one ugly chart (and what that means for the market as a whole)
If you’re thinking of doing some bottom fishing in a belief that the bear market might be nearing a bottom or that the recent Santa Claus rally could last into the first half of January, I’d suggest you take a look at some charts, either of individual...
Here’s how on my paid sites I’m using Put Options in AMZN, NFLX, and BA to hedge against the bear
I don’t use options on this site or in any of the Jubak Picks portfolios. But I do in the Volatility Portfolio on my paid JugglingWithKnives.com and JubakAM.com paid sites. This week I’ve bought Put Options–which go up in price when the underlying...
Here’s how I’ve shifted my ETF portfolio allocations on my paid sites
On my paid sites, JugglingWithKnives.com and JubakAM.com I run and track a simple five ETF portfolio called, immodestly the Perfect 5 ETF Portfolio. In the last week, I’ve made the following shifts: Increasing my allocation to 25% in the Goldshares SPDR ETF...
The key to this bear market–it’s global; and any turn about will have to be global too
If you’re trying to figure out this market–and who isn’t?–down 700 points on the Dow on Monday; up 1000 on Wednesday, down 400 points on Thursday before finishing up 250 points, I’d suggest starting with the observation that this bear...
Markets blow a raspberry to Christmas–and Mnuchin
And Merry Christmas! to you too. The stock market delivered a lump of coal on Christmas Eve. (Does this mean the financial markets are part of the dastardly war on Christmas? Say it ain’t so, Goldman Sachs!) The Standard & Poor’s 500 index closed down...
Worst of both worlds from the Federal Reserve stokes continued selling
Yesterday, the Federal Reserve delivered the worst of both world’s, as far as Wall Street is concerned. And the 25 basis point increase in benchmark interest rates doesn’t even count–since that was what the market was expecting. First, the Fed drew...
Did Monday action signal a (temporary) bottom?
Monday’s big drop in U.S. stocks was unusual in this period of frequent market routs–and unusual in an important way. Even as the market has tumbled day after day, investors haven’t seen a big 90% down day of the kind that signals a (perhaps temporary) capitulation...
Xi’s tough talk isn’t good news for investors
Hope you weren’t hoping for good news from President Xi Jinping’s speech Tuesday to an audience of party officials, military honchos, and business leaders on the 40th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up campaign that unleashed China’s economy. First,...
How will the President Trump wild card play out in the stock market this week?
Maybe that should be “wild cards.” First, there’s President Donald Trump’s threat to shut down about 25% of the government on December 22 if Congress doesn’t include $5 billion for his border wall in its bill to fund such government units...
News flow a net negative this morning and stocks retreat
I recently noted that I thought stocks wanted to climb, and would through the end of the year–if news let them. Well, this morning, the news has put a big downward thumb on the scale. First off, November retail sales grew 8.1% year over year, China’s...
Nobody wants to get too far ahead of the news in this stock market
After yesterday’s bounce in riskier bounce-worthy stocks, today the U.S. market is seeing a slight pull back. At 1:30 p.m. New York time the Standard & Poor’s 500 is off 0.34% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is lower by 0.05%. The NASDAQ...
Tomorrow morning’s retail sales report for November: really tough comparisons
Economists surveyed by Briefing.com are expecting the 8:30 a.m. New York time report on November retail sales to show month to month growth of 0.2%. That wouldn’t be quite so likely to disappoint the market except that retail sales climbed 0.8% month to month in...
U.S. stocks want to bounce, but not so sure about a rally
Bounce, yes. Rally, maybe. What the difference? Conviction and duration. The wider market isn’t sure that the bad news on the U.S. China trade war is over and doesn’t want to get blind-sided. That’s why the broad indexes such as the Standard &...
U.S. stocks roar back this afternoon–what’s that all about?
U.S. stocks after being deep in the red this morning, came roaring back this afternoon. Or at least technology shares did. The Standard and Poor’s 500, which had been as low as 2583 today, climbed back to close at 2637. The swing from high of the day to low was...
Markets worry about everything this morning–especially bank and energy stocks
I dare you to find something global financial markets aren’t worried about. And, moreover, many of the worries are re-enforcing each other today. So, for example, we’ve got U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer, saying on Sunday TV the the 90 day...
Was the Fed telling the markets something today?
The Federal Reserve’s interest rate setting body, the Open Market Committee, meets on December 19 to 1) decide on a 25 basis point boost in benchmark interest rate, and 2) to tell financial markets what to expect on interest rate increases for 2019. It’s...
For the Fed, one and done–for a while?
This morning the November jobs report came in softer than expected–and that pretty much removed the last factor pushing the Federal Reserve toward aggressively raising interest rates in 2019. For November the economy added 155,000 jobs. That is still a strong...
OPEC cuts production by more than expected–but markets are increasingly less impressed as the day advances
To the surprise of many, OPEC & Friends–what’s known as OPEC+–agreed to cut production by 1.2 million barrels a day beginning in 2019. This was a bigger cut than the 1 million barrels a day that commodity markets had expected. Oil prices and oil...
Market looks like it’s trying to force another Federal Reserve bounce
On a day like today–when U.S. stocks have resumed their downward plunge–the Standard & Poor’s 500 was off 1.91% as of 1:30 p.m. New York time and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was lower by 2.08%–it’s important to remember that the...Jim’s Daily Email Alerts:
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