While 30-year fixed mortgage rates have dropped by about 30 bps to 4.55% after peaking at 4.86% in September of last year, it is somewhat troubling to see that mortgage applications are practically unchanged during this period. Meanwhile the number of real estate credit employes...
While many business surveys are rebound back to pre-2007 levels, one that is still mired in pessimism is the NFIB Small Business Survey. Small Business continue to feel much more depressed than in almost any time prior to 2007 as the index has not been...
Since the start of the bull market in March 2009, the S&P Small Cap 600 stocks have outperformed the S&P 500 by 32%. However, over the past two weeks small cap stocks have underperformed by about 3%....
The ISM Non-Manufacturing Survey came in at 54 for January, just above consensus of 53.9 and slightly higher than in December (53). On Monday, the ISM Manufacturing survey disappointed as it came in at 51.3 vs expectations of 56. We like to look at a...
We have seen research that suggests that for each $800 billion in Fed asset purchases it equates to approximately a 100 bps reduction in the fed funds rate....
Pending Home Sales Index fell by 8.7% month-over-month compared to expectations of only a -0.5% decline. Pending home sales have now dropped every month since making a four year high in May. Unfortunately, weakness was across the entire country. The West leads the way down...
The Case-Shiller Home Price Index reported home price statistics for November this morning. The report indicates that housing prices have lost some momentum two thirds of the way through the final quarter of 2013. For the first time since March, there were several cities that...
Herbalife is down 12% after Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey asked the SEC and FTC for an investigation into Herbalife’s business practices. HLF is up over 240% over the past four years and 54% over the past year....
The unemployment rate in the US has fallen from 9.1% to 6.7% in three years. In fact, the number of workers who have been out of work for less than five weeks (as a % of the labor force) is at all-time lows (1.46%). This...
Given the other positive data releases that we mentioned here and here earlier in the week, today’s headline payroll number is a bit of a stunner (74K vs estimates of 200k)....
On the heels of a solid ADP report yesterday, we had two more above average releases this morning. Initial jobless claims fell by 15,000 and the often watched four-week moving average dropped by almost 10,000. Challenger layoffs reported the lowest level of layoffs since June...
ADP showed a monthly increase of 238,000 jobs in December. This was the largest gain since November 2012. Perhaps most importantly for the labor market the gain was led by small firms (1-49 employees) which hired about 108,000 people in December. This was the largest...
While the headline ISM non-manufacturing number came just slightly below consensus (53 vs 54.8), the major news out of this report was new orders contracting for the first time since July 2009. In a mere four months, new orders have fallen from 60.5 to 49.4....
The news out today is auto sales for the Big 3 US car manufactures increased 8% in 2013 which helped push sales to the highest level since 2007....
NYSE released margin debt for November last week and it posted another new all-time high. However, the one-quarter moving average of margin debt as a percentage of total capitalization is still below the level it was at in April....
