Category Archives: Market Recap
Market Recap
From Bear to Bull in a Week Another wild week. The sharpest, fastest bear market in history – the S&P 500 was down -35.2% from its closing high on February 19 to the intraday low on Monday – was followed by the sharpest, fastest move back into bull market territory in history, as the index rallied +20% from that point through yesterday’s close. Both Tuesday and the past three days were the best…
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Market Recap
Where to Begin? Most importantly, all of us at Gemmer hope you and your family are healthy and doing as well as can be expected. Everyone here is working hard during this ‘shelter in place’ period and our backup plan to work remotely is functioning better than we could have expected. We were fully operational day 1! Secondly, you may see trade confirms coming through in the coming days. We are not…
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Market Recap
V, U, or L scenario? What a crazy week. What can you say about a week that saw the following daily S&P 500 returns: Monday +4.6%, Tuesday -2.8%, Wednesday +4.2%, Thursday -3.4%, and Friday -1.7%? And after all this the S&P finished up +0.6% for the week. Who’d of thought? Normally we’d get into today’s strong payrolls report and how the economy had built up a decent head of steam in the…
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Markets Grapple With The Coronavirus
Markets Grapple with the Coronavirus There’s an old saying that markets take the escalator up and the elevator down. That sure was the case this week. Selling pressure was intense all week as investors grappled with the implications of the coronavirus spreading beyond China’s boarders. The S&P officially hit correction territory with a decline of more than 10% from the high. As you can see below, this is the eighth correction of more than…
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Market Recap
Gauging the Economic Fallout Up until Thursday the markets remained pretty buoyant in expectation that the Coronavirus infection rate had peaked. This seemed to change on Thursday and Friday as attention turned away from infections towards the economic fallout. The change of tone could be detected after Japan reported a miserable fourth quarter GDP number. Growth in the fourth quarter fell at an annual rate of -6.3% (chart below) after Japanese…
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Market Recap
Infection Rates Seem to be Slowing As you would expect the coronavirus situation was the headline story all week. The situation continues to evolve, but it is pretty clear that simply counting the number of infections is far from simple. Is China fully disclosing the number infected? If infection rates have plateaued, why are roughly 400mm people in China under some form or quarantine? Investors were also thrown off balance on Thursday when…
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Market Recap
Economic Backdrop Before we get to the Coronavirus discussion, a few macro notes. Earnings We are still in 4th quarter earnings season. Key observations: – 38% of S&P 500 companies have reported Q4 earnings – 73% beat EPS estimates, surprising positively by 4% – EPS growth is coming in at +6% y/y. All sectors except Energy and Materials are delivering positive earnings growth – Sales growth is…
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Market Recap
Housing Fundamentals Improve There were a few economic reports this week, but the main one concerned home construction, which hit the highest level in 13 years. New housing starts jumped in December to a seasonally adjusted rate of 1.608m, the highest level since December 2006. That was an increase from November’s upwardly-revised 1.375m and cruised past the median forecast among economists for 1.375m. As you can see above, the hook high…
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Market Recap
Welcome to 2020!! Another decade down and on to the next one. What can you say about 2019 other than ‘that went better than expected.’ It almost doesn’t matter where you invested last year, you saw decent returns. About the only exception in the U.S. were oil and gas stocks. Just look at the oil services ETF (orange line below). It managed to lose -5.6% despite a +34.5% rise in crude prices. That takes…
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Market Recap
Economic Recap – Faint Hints of a Trough The large-cap domestic equity indexes continued to push to new highs this week. It’s always hard to peg why the markets do what they do short-term, but these three reasons have to rank reasonably high on any list: – Optimism that a trade deal of some sort gets done before year-end. – Chairman Powell talked again this week and basically said there are…
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