March 19, 2024

$50 is the new $5….

The Market: As expected, volatility continues and $50 point swings are becoming as common as $5 point swings use to be.  We expect volatility to remain high but would not be surprised to see the magnitude of the swing start to temper. Today was important because after two straight days of gap ups that sold off into the close, today managed to hold and extend on the gap after an intraday pullback.  As we noted in Monday’s write-up,  the market is very short-term oversold and we would expect a bounce so today’s action is not surprising but we will be…

Tech and HealthCare EPS lead

Index & Sector performance 7/23/14 The Market: Today the stand out index was the NASDAQ (QQQ) which finished 0.64% higher with a lot of help from Apple (AAPL) which finished the day up 2.61% after reporting EPS yesterday after the close.  The S&P 500 (SPY) and Russell 2000 (IWM) were relatively flat, while the Dow (DIA) was the clear laggard and the only index to finish down on the session.  Weighing on the Dow was Boeing (BA) and Caterpillar (CAT) which finished down 2.34% and 1.53% respectively. In individual sectors it was HealthCare (XLV) which shined helped immensely by Intuitive…

GDP disappoints but market ignores

Index & Sector performance 4/30/14 The Market: As you can see in the table below, the U.S. Q1 GDP number came in well below expectations.  While Q1 was not expected to be a high growth quarter, clearly analysts did not expect a near negative number.  Certainly the colder than expected weather could have and likely did play a role but on our opinion you cannot completely blame a miss like this on the weather. So why might traders and investors be willing to look past this data besides the weather?  Possibly because a number like this allows the Fed to…