While today’s better than expected rise in the flash PMI indicator (black line) for the euro zone is a welcome surprise, it would seem that it will take quite a bit more improvement before we can reasonably expect substantial progress in the recovery of important metrics such as GDP or industrial production: By country, France
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It would be one thing if the recent fall in the price of oil was an isolated event completely explainable by supply side and/or geopolitical factors such as overproduction or the desire of the Western powers to punish Russia for its Ukrainian crusade. That, however, does not seem to be the case.
Read MoreAs of the close yesterday, the US two-year treasury yield was sitting at 61 basis points. For a little perspective, the two-year started the year at 39 basis points and hit a low in September 2011 of 17 basis points.
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Faithful followers will already know that we do not rely on meetings with management or analyst reports in our methodology for finding the world’s best knowledge leaders.
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The spread between 30-year treasury yields and 10-year treasury yields fell to 65 basis points yesterday which is the lowest spread since January 21st, 2009. Since April 2013, the spread has narrowed by 59 basis points. As the long end has flattened, the spread between high yield and AAA bonds has narrowed considerably.
Read MoreTwo weeks ago we mentioned that over the past several years the last six weeks of each year has tended to either strongly favor cyclical stocks or counter-cyclical stocks. Today, we wanted to update that chart.
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After today’s close, using our equal weighting methodology, the MSCI World Energy sector is in a technical bear market (down 20%). In the table below, we can see that as of Friday’s close, the MSCI World energy sector was down 19.07%.
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Nonfarm payrolls came in well above expectations at 321K vs expectations of 230K for November. In addition, the previous two months were both upwardly revised by a total 44K jobs. Private nonfarm payrolls were up a very impressive 314K.
Read MoreGaveKal Capital’s Bryce Coward looks at the exploding growth of ETFs and offers an idea on how to combine ETFs with mutual funds in an optimal way to improve the risk and return characteristics of portfolios.
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The US ISM non-manufacturing survey for November was released today and showed an increase of 2.2 points to a robust level of 59.3.
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Below is a quick and dirty of the state of global stock market internals. We try to hit on a few of the major categories to give a good cross section of what the internals look like.
Read MoreFor the last six years of quantitative easing, commercial bank non-borrowed reserves have been a good proxy for liquidity. These reserves have grown from under $50 billion in 2008 to $2.8 trillion at the peak a few months ago.
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All eyes seem to be on crude oil prices right now. Taking an average price of WTI and Brent as a proxy for global oil prices, oil is down over 33% year-to-date. In November alone, oil was down about 12%.
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In honor of Black Friday, we thought we would look at how the North American retailers look from a technical perspective using our relative point and figure charts. Once again, our box size is 2.5% relative performance and all charts have four years worth of history.
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US new home sales underwhelmed again in October. The latest data point came in at 458K SAAR versus consensus of 470K. What really caught are eye was the volatile increase in average and median prices. The average sales price spiked by nearly 28% month-over-month, easily to an all-time high for this series.
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