Federal Reserve lowered borrowing costs by 25bps in July 30 and September 18 and the stock market dropped days later. I wonder what happens should they lower rates for the third times today. Does the market prefer cheap money better then growth?
https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_investor_sentiment_bullish US Investor Sentiment, % Bullish is at 35.60% July 30 was at 38.44%, Sep 18 at 35.34%
Year-to-date gold is going up, so are treasuries (rates going down) and the stock markets. There is one too many.
Earnings have not been as soft as projected and the economy may not be slowing as much as feared so the sentiment was high. The Federal Reserve then made a third cut and even the disruptive forces of Brexit appear to be on hold for now. Sentiment got even higher with markets peaking to new highs. But Thursday began with a report that Chinese trade officials will not budge on the key issues and hinted that even the "mini-deal" may not be sealed unless there is tariff relife. Investors are back to worrying about the trade war, all the high sentiment evaporated and markets tanked. Fri job numbers might further erode sentiment. My strategy fo the 1st day of Nov is to waite and see.
Meaming? Zero surprise=flat markets? I could not see a correlation between the S&P and this index, do you have any info?
"the extent to which U.S. economic indicators exceed or fall short of consensus estimates. An economic report with better-than-expected news is assigned a value of 1; a report with worse-than-expected news is assigned a value of -1; a report meeting expectations gets a 0 value. Add up the values of the reports for the week, and you have the Surprise Index’s reading for that week."
This is very silly. Try trading first. THEN assign values to that shit, later. Because whatever that is that was just spewed, reeks of the whole Nigerian prince thing. Seriously. Sad.
Stocks hit record highs on Friday but there were also some big losers (Grubhub, Wayfair, Etsy and Pinterest) which were all down between 20% and 40%. The big 4 (Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) also saw some readjustments. To me, this indicates that despite the positive sentiment, players are somewhat coming down to earth, looking at fundamentals and cleansing the "hope-and-hype businesses". Bottom lines are again being looked at to indicate value, companies trying to grow market share at the expense of profitability are getting shunted, while companies showing profits are rewarded. David Sacks, the former PayPal COO, said: "When you're losing money on every transaction, you can't make it up in volume". He might have been aiming the comments towards his former colleague Musk, but it seems investors are taking note of that and embracing what would seem a "return to basics" concept where fundamentals matter. I do not see the global synchronized upswing that was present in 2017 and markets are at those highs despite lower earnings, my view is therefore that a period of rotation & consolidation rather than new highs is the probability for this quarter. A black swan also cannot be ruled-out... there are plenty of hot spots, not least China, impeachment and the ECB coming under new management by a lawyer & banker with no background in economics (another "Powell like" person heading an influential cental bank with an economy larger than the USA)
Monday saw new intraday highs in the US as well as in the French CAC. The news points to a trade deal as the reason, I'm not convinced.. the trade deal is not much of a deal, China is regurgitating what they had promised a year ago while the US needs to take some tariffs off the table, a win for China, a loss for the USA. Also, EU markets outperformed the US by quite a margin. I think it was the EU driving US markets higher rather than trade.