Tag Archives: Unemployment

Does The Market Have Room To Rise Or Is It Finally Going To Pullback?

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Good morning and thank you for reading this week’s Monday Morning Market Commentary. I hope everyone enjoy Mother’s Day the weekend before last and I want to thank so many of you for the kind emails, wishing Beth Ann a Happy First Mother’s Day! We had a wonderful time and she was very thankful that I spent all weekend with her and Madison. Also, for all those that filled out the client survey, thank you. I really appreciate your feedback and will be making some changes to how we work because of it.

Now onto the markets for the last two weeks. Even with so much bad news coming out about our economy and the global economy, stocks have continued their swift ascent. These past two weeks looked very similar to many of the weeks we have seen this year, with stocks pushing high into the midweek, pulling back a little midweek, and then rising to close high on Friday. The S&P 500 rose over 3% over the last two weeks, closing at 1,667.47 on Friday.

Bond yields followed along with the S&P 500, rising to just over 1.9% throughout the week. Although bond yields have diverged severely from stocks the last few years, we have seen them start to move in unison again the last few months. The 10-yr Treasury went from 1.75% two Fridays ago, to close at 1.95% this past Friday, quite a big jump over 2 weeks. Continue reading →

Stocks Make Lower Highs While Bond Yields Make Lower Lows… That’s Not Good

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Good morning and thank you for reading this week’s Monday Morning Market Commentary. This past week we saw stocks rise all week, even as we received more and more disappointing economic and earning reports. Bonds, however, did seem to notice all the disappointing reports as yields dropped to lows for the year.
Let’s first look at the chart of the S&P 500 from last week. As I said and you can see, stocks rose throughout the week, with Friday being the only down day. Most indices were able to get back half of what they had lost the previous week, but this marks a lower high for stocks, which isn’t usually a good sign. The S&P 500 finished at 1,582.24, or 1.74%.
This week we saw bond yields continue their divergence from stocks and bonds put in a low for yields this year. Bond yields were basically flat all week with the big drop came after we received the disappointing GDP report on Friday morning. The 10-year Treasury yield finished the week quite a bit lower, ending at 1.66%. Continue reading →

Jobs Report Hurts Stocks and Brings Down Bond Yields

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Good morning and thank you for reading or watching this week’s Monday Morning Market Commentary. This past week we started to see a breakdown in the US markets that I have been talking about for quite some time. The week started off down and pretty much stayed down all week because of many pretty bad economic reports. We saw the biggest drop on Friday after an absolutely dismal jobs report came out. I’ll spend some time diving into this report because it sheds quite a bit of light into what is going on in the economy right now.
As usual, let’s first look at the chart of the S&P 500 from last week. After hitting all-time new highs, stocks took a big breather this week and spent most of the week in the negative. Between the US ISM Manufacturing index dropping, Europe’s unemployment hitting another new all-time high, huge rise in initial jobless claims, ADP jobs report also missing big, and the number of jobs added last month being just a quarter of what was expected, stocks really didn’t stand a chance. This all leads to an even bigger question, is the worst still ahead. The S&P 500 finished down to 1,553.28, losing just about 1% for the week.
Although stocks dropped this week, bonds continued to diverge from stocks and we saw the 10-yr Treasury yield drop to four month lows. Unlike the stock market, bonds didn’t rise throughout the day on Friday and closed near their lows for the week. The 10-yr Treasury yield had the biggest weekly drop in yields since June 2012. It ended the week all the way down to 1.694%. Continue reading →

All-Time New Highs For S&P 500… Will The Goods Time Continue?

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Good morning and thank you for reading to this week’s Monday Morning Market Commentary. This past week we finally saw the S&P 500 close at all-time highs. It just so happen to come on the very last day of the week, month, and quarter, which was Friday. We did continue to see bond yields drop, even though stocks rose across the board, at least here in the U.S.
Let’s first look at the chart of the S&P 500 from last week. Stocks did start the week off quite rocky, with a big drop on Monday before it started it’s rise. The S&P 500 ended Friday at 1,569.19, an all-time high close for the index.
Bonds continued to diverge from stocks and we saw the 10-yr Treasury yield drop again. This divergence from stocks has been going on for a few weeks now and as I talked about early in 2012, when this happens it’s usually stocks that “catch down” to bond yields. The 10-yr Treasury ended the week all the way down to 1.852%. Continue reading →

Looks Like Cyprus Bail Out Is Going To Bring Stocks Down Sharply

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Good morning and welcome to another Monday Morning Market Commentary. Thank you for taking the time to read/watch this week’s commentary.  This past week we saw stocks continue their climb higher but this time bond yields didn’t rise as well. We also had a huge announcement over the weekend about a bail out option for Cyprus that would enforce a 10% tax on all bank deposits in the country. This is the first time we’ve seen such a tax talked about, let alone put into place. I’ll talk about this more in just a minute.
When we look at the chart of the S&P 500 from last week we see that stocks traded in a very tight range all week, less than 1% between the high and low. Stocks did close near their highs for the week, with the S&P 500 ending at 1,560.73, up 0.6% for the week.
This past week bond yields didn’t go along for the ride and we saw a sharp divergence, with the 10-year Treasury yield going down. We have seen this before and it normally isn’t good for stocks when bonds start acting like this. Remember last week when I talked about how important it would be for the 10-year Treasury yield to hold above 2%? As you can see on the chart, 2% was just a hair too much, and Treasury yields closed at the lows of the week at 1.996%. Continue reading →