There is an old belief that when bank stocks are doing well, the economy must be doing well also. With this in mind, we decided to take a look how the banking sectors have performed in seven different countries: USA, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Japan, China, Brazil.
Read More
With all the churning underneath the surface of the stock market lately, it is a bit difficult to separate the signal from the noise when analyzing leadership trends and asset allocation.
Read MoreHaving fallen from the recent highs earlier this year, various metrics of volatility in Europe have risen abruptly in the last few days– especially when viewed in the context of a rather subdued VIX (a measure of expected market volatility conveyed by S&P 500 options prices; represented by the light blue line below): Compared to
Read MoreAs we enter the heart of the S&P 500 1Q earnings season, and the CNBCs of the world focus on the number of companies that (surprise) beat earnings expectations once again, remember this fact: earnings expectations have been beaten down over the past six months.
Read More
From a momentum standpoint, global manufacturing peaked in September 2013 and has been steadily slowing, at least in terms of breadth, since then. In order to understand the global manufacturing sector we have created a variety of diffusion indices using the Markit Manufacturing PMI Data.
Read MoreOn an equal-weighted, USD basis, Russia is up 46% year-to-date, by far the best performing country in the MSCI All-Country World Index. Coming in second, is China which is up 29%. India is the 14th best performing country (8.2%).
Read MoreAs baseball season commences we thought it only appropriate to draw an analogy between America’s favorite pass-time and investing. As every good baseball fan knows, batters in baseball acquire a batting average that is aggregation of a players cumulative hits divided by the total at-bats throughout a season.
Read MoreAre commodities becoming less sensitive to changes in the USD? The surge in the dollar has negatively affected commodities somewhat but not nearly as much as one might have expected given that the real trade-weighted dollar is 19% higher than it was in July. Commodities are about 19% lower during this time.
Read MoreUS industrial production in March declined the most month-over-month since 2009. Weather again played a role as colder weather in February led to a spike in utilities output last month and this month we saw the effects of the unwinding of that spike.
Read MoreHistorically, there has been a fairly strong relationship in the trends of German construction output and the results of Markit’s PMI Construction survey.
Read MoreRegional leadership trends have changed recently in the global equity market. So far this year, in USD terms, Developed Asia-Pacific is the best performing region in the developed world, with Europe second and North America last. In the following tables we show regional performance by sector.
Read MoreOil tends to get all the headline but commodities in general continue to take a beating. The Reuters CRB Continuous Commodity Index is down nearly 24% over the past year. Our commodities diffusion index is at its lowest level since February 2009.
Read More
The action in the US government bond market over the last several weeks has reminded us of a quote from one of our favorite books on investing, ”Reminiscences of a Stock Operator”. Those familiar with Reminiscences will recall several scenes in which young traders are gathered at a brokerage house exchanging ideas and contemplating every tick
Read MoreWith the continued outperformance of Asian (namely Japanese) stocks, we are surprised to still only be hearing about the merits of the long Europe trade.
Read More
Commercial hedgers (i.e smart money) aren’t buying that the precipitous decline in the euro against the dollar has come to an end.
Read More