Back in December we wrote a piece entitled, ”Decomposing the S&P 500 PE Ratio: How Can the Market PE be ”Low” and Stocks be Expensive at the Same Time?” in which we showed how the market capitalization of the S&P 500, and many other indexes...
Ending a 66-day streak of consecutive days without a 1% down finish, the S&P500 finally succumbed to statistics as it lost about 1.2% today. Bonds and gold, on the other hand, rallied as the US 10-year treasury yield lost 7bps, the 30-year lost 6bps, and...
The CBOE has an interesting daily index that tries to measure the risk of a ”black swan” or a two-standard deviation from the mean type of event in the next 30 days....
We usually prefer in our blog posts to give the reader a nice linear explanation of what we are laying out in front of them. Sometimes, however, when we are perusing our chart library we find a variety of charts that are interesting but are...
Yesterday we wrote about the how the current price level of the S&P 500 was about one standard deviation higher than its four year moving average price level (last chart below). We noted the rarity of this event, but stated that this precludes neither further...
Stock prices as measured by the S&P 500 have risen some 190% from the low in March of 2009. The spectacular thrust this bull market has seen has put stocks above their moving average price levels by a wide margin....
Many of our readers are probably familiar with the concept of a ”random walk” in which stocks are just as likely to go up as down on any given day (i.e. the outcome is a coin flip)....
Lumber prices are now down nearly 21% from the December peak of $375/bft and are now trading at $297.6/btf. We’ve noted several times how lumber prices (a measure of the health of the US economy) have completely disconnected from stock prices, and today’s action confirms...
Stocks are once again departing from most other asset classes today as the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 rip higher while treasury yields and most hard commodities are down on the day, though higher than in early morning futures trading....
One way to measure price volatility is to look at the intraday range an asset trades within (the intraday high minus the intraday low) and then compare that range to the asset’s price level. In this way we normalize the daily range for the prevailing...
We’ve touched on this point here and here, so we’ll keep it brief. Lumber is making a new low today and continues to diverge from stocks. Lumber made a large divergence from stocks in 2011 and 2013....
We’ve noted several times in the last few weeks the ongoing weakness in lumber prices here, here and here. We watch lumber prices because lumber, being a largely domestically produced and consumed resource, can give a good early indication of changes in domestic economic activity....
We’ve been commenting over the last few days here and here about the increasing number of weak stock market closes and how the number of weak closes seems to be closely correlated with Fed tapering of asset purchases. It seems fair enough, then, to comment...
The long end of the yield curve has continued to flatten over the last several days. At 77 basis points, the spread between 30 year and 10 year treasury bonds is the narrowest it’s been since 2009 (1st chart below)....
Today is a day that will test the persistence of this market rally. A few events came together that to us suggest a level of distribution. They are: The 1840 level on the S&P 500 that had provided pretty reliable support failed decisively....
