Quite a bit of US data was released this morning. The major releases were GDP 3rd revision, Corporate Profits, Initial Jobless Claims, & Pending Home Sales. Let’s take a quick look at each.
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This morning durable goods orders were released, and while the headline index exhibited a good bounce from January, the rest of the report was more mixed. We identified durable goods orders as an economic indicators we are watching closely for 2007 parallels.
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While the Ifo business climate appears to be hanging in there, the expectations component (light blue line)– for trade and industry as well as services– fell back quite a bit in March (not unlike the results of the ZEW Survey published last week): By sector, none of those surveyed indicated a positive change in the
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Year to date, Japan is the worst performing developed equity market, down 8.64% on average. Performance Only two industry groups are up for the year, while industries like insurance and diversified financials are down 15-20%.
Read MoreWe had three US housing related economic releases today: FHFA House Price Index, S&P Case-Shiller, and new home sales. The two price series both slightly beat consensus while new home sales came in exactly at consensus. FHFA house price increased by 7.4% year-over-year in January and all regions are showing positive year-over-year growth.
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Among industry groups in North America, semiconductors are the second best performers this year. A couple of the best looking semiconductor charts, that are breaking out of multi-year trading ranges, are Linear Technology and Xilinx.
Read MoreMarch has been relatively rough month for equities so far. Of the 24 industries that we track, 23 are negative! The only industry that is currently positive MTD is the Semiconductor & Semiconductor Equipment industry. This group had a strong week last week (+3.23%) while the average stock was barely up 1 basis point.
Read MoreThe CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis publishes a monthly report called ”World Trade Monitor”. This report tries to quantify the seemingly unquantifiable; world industrial production and world trade volume and prices. Either later today or early next week the CPB should come out with the first statistics for 2014.
Read MoreStocks are making new highs, yet internal momentum is somewhat sluggish. The following is a tour of some momentum stats measuring the sectors within the MSCI World index. We focus on the 20 day timeframe for our analysis.
Read MoreFor the week ending March 14th, foreign investors in Japanese stocks were net sellers by the largest single-week amount since weekly records began in 2001. This is concerning not only because of what it implies for the Nikkei (2nd chart), but also because of what it implies for the yen (i.e.
Read MoreExisting home sales fell to 4.6 million homes in February which is the lowest level since July 2012. Existing home sales are now down over 7% year-over-year. The weakness this month was centered in the Midwest and Northeast. The South and West regions both saw month-over-month increases in February.
Read MoreWe’ve enough items to start to make a list of the economic indicators catching our attention because they seem to be stalling out or peaking similar to what we saw in 2007. The first group of charts touches on production, employment, consumption, employment, confidence and inflation.
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Quick name the two best performing sectors YTD in the MSCI World… Is it surprising that the top of leader boards reads in bright green Utilities (5.24%) and Health Care (5.07%)? Third place goes to Materials which is trailing by a significant margin (1.49%).
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There are 609 companies in the MSCI North America. Of which, 104 (17.1%) are in the consumer discretionary sector. Only the financial sector (109 stocks or 17.9%) account for a larger share in the MSCI North America.
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Copper is probably the best commodity indicator to track in order understand global economic strength or weakness because of its widespread use in infrastructure, houses, cars, electrical equipment, etc. In turn, lumber is probably the best commodity indicator to track in order to understand domestic conditions in the US.
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