A prevalent tone of ‘proceed with caution’ was evident in today’s session. The weakness was widespread as every sector closed deep in the red with no shortage of culprits. The main focus was on the yen strengthening versus the dollar (as much as 3%), an eye watering move that sent the Nikkei plunging 12.4% overnight. The weakness bled into the US session early as major indices opened on their lows and crowded trades unraveled mercilessly. Further, the move lower in equities sparked a flight to…

Freaky Friday and investors are clearly spooked. NFPs this morning didn’t just miss, they missed by a mile and a revision lower for the prior month isn’t helping matters. The labor market has been top of mind recently amid continued signs of cooling, or what Powell chose to refer to as ‘normalization’ on Wednesday, and this morning’s weak employment data really seems to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Drilling down to the numbers, headline NFP came in at 114k versus 175k expected whic…

If yesterday’s month-end could be categorized as “mean reversion of the mean reversion,” today’s performance displayed an overextension of that very same mean reversion. In other words, stocks crumpled. Two economic numbers— weekly jobless claims and manufacturing ISM— stirred up anxiety that the goldilocks/soft landing scenario has quickly gone south. The manufacturing ISM dropped to 46.8 (2 full points below Street consensus). And all the critical demand/growth indicators slumped, includi…

“Mess with the bull, you get the horns.”

At the end of the day, don’t we all want to be on the winning team? It’s simple human nature to want to win, and boy-oh-boy is this market making that a hard thing to do… A real mixed bag on performance in US equities today as the nerves were apparent ahead of key earnings to begin after the closing bell tonight with Microsoft (more on that later, but.. don’t get excited) and into the July Fed meeting tomorrow. A rather painful rotation continued to play out as Tech bellwethers were punished…

US Equities finished mixed to slightly up with arguably the busiest week of summer upon us with major central bank decisions, key economic data and earnings all on deck. Olympic swimmers aren’t the only one’s diving in, shall we?….Looking ahead on the global macro, tomorrow we receive US Jolts, China’s PMIs, and BoJ rate decision (narrowly expect 15bp hike). Wednesday, we have our US FOMC meeting (unched expectation, paying attention to language around 25bps cut due in September), and the Eur…

A bit of a recovery today for the major indices, as investors continued to contemplate the on/off rotation out of tech/semis, as well as a ton more earnings reports, most of which were fairly robust this morning. In terms of macro news, PCE data was generally as expected and consumer spending remained healthy enough, though US consumer sentiment eased to an 8-month low. All the data underscored the soft-landing scenario playing out and reinforced the belief that next week The Fed will lay the g…

So, you want a recap huh? Some insight as to what happened today? Well, it sort of feels like a bit of everything happened today. The ongoing earnings avalanche along with seismic shifts in rotation from crowded trades to ones that are less so; or in the words of one client “…there is no shortage of good stocks getting sold & c**p stocks getting bought this week…” Markets were pummeled yesterday, at least it LOOKED as such but under the covers, 1/3 of the S&P 500 was actually green on the big…

All good things ultimately must come to an end. The S&P 500 had not fallen 2% in 356 days, until today, as a confluence of events led to an acceleration of the risk off/ rotation that have been in the markets since July 17th. By the end of today, the S&P 500 closed -2.31%, Nasdaq -3.64%, Semis -5.41%, Mag 7 -5.33%… you get the point. Perhaps more worryingly is that the major indexes (except the Russell 2000) also closed below their 50-day moving averages, as the calendar heads into month end…

Watch and wait were the directives for today. US Equities mostly tread water at/above the breakeven throughout the session before drifting to the lows into negative territory in the final 20minutes as we awaited Alphabet and Tesla earnings after the bell to give us Big Tech’s first look at an updated bill of health (spoiler alert: you might not want to hold your breath…). With depressed summer volumes taking hold, a rather “interesting” US political backdrop afoot into elections, the Fed in t…