According to II, we saw more bullishness w/o/w. Bulls rose .5 pt to 53.9, matching the highest level since October 10th while Bears fell .2 pts to 19.2, the least since mid November. The spread of 34.7 is the most since October 10th. While sentiment is not at previous extremes with Bulls around 60 and Bears closer to 15, we're pretty close. Also, after Monday's close …
[Read more...] about Sentiment/Some better data out of Europe
The number of job openings in February totaled almost 7.1mm, a still robust number of needed workers but down from 7.6mm in January, almost 500k less than expected and the least amount of availability since March 2018. Hiring’s dropped by 133k and is down for the 3rd month in the past 4 and brought the hiring rate down by one tenth to 3.8%. The quit rate held at …
As we are on the cusp of a slew of earnings reports in the coming 6 weeks and with the amazing stock market rally over the past 3+ months I'm including a valuation refresher for a metric other than a P/E ratio for the S&P 500 just to provide context. It's instead the P/S (price to sales ratio) to avoid the games people play with earnings per share. Keep in mind …
While the bank earnings on Friday will certainly be the main focus this week, I'd highlight what MSC Industrial and Fastenal have to say on Wednesday and Thursday respectively in their earnings releases. They are great proxy's for the manufacturing/industrial/construction world. Last week I talked about the Citi Economic Surprise Index and separately the Semi stock …
Positives 1) March payrolls grew by 196k, 19k more than expected while the two prior months were revised up by 14k. The private sector component though had less of an upside print as jobs here rose by 182k, 5k more than expected. The household survey saw a loss of 201k jobs after a gain of 255k in the month prior. Because the labor force shrunk by 224k, the …
[Read more...] about Succinct Summation of the Week’s Events – 4/5
March payrolls grew by 196k, 19k more than expected while the two prior months were revised up by 14k. The private sector component though had less of an upside print as jobs here rose by 182k, 5k more than expected. Similar to what ADP said and in contrast to ISM, manufacturing shed 6k jobs instead of hiring a net 10k as forecasted. February was revised to a …
[Read more...] about Payrolls beat, helped by gov’t/Smooth it out
Initial jobless claims remain very low. They totaled 202k for the week ended March 30th, 13k less than expected and down 10k from 212k last week. This brings the 4 week average to 214k from 218k last week. That's the lowest since early October. Continuing claims, delayed by a week, fell to the lowest since early January. Bottom line, even in the recent …
We've talked a lot about the differing messages that bond and stock markets have been sending about the economy and outlook. Maybe it's just as simple as the bond market curve flattening is just reflecting the current slowdown that is clearly upon us while the stock market is just believing it's temporary and a rebound in growth will occur in coming quarters. …
After the February 3 pt jump in the ISM services index to 59.7 as the government reopened and followed two months of declines from 60.4 in November, this index fell to 56.1 for March and that was 2 pts less than expected. That’s the lowest print since August 2017. After jumping by 7.5 pts in February, new orders fell back by 6.2 pts. Backlogs did rise 1 pt though to …
ADP said only a net 129k private sector jobs were created in March, 46k less than expected, only partially offset by a 14k upward revision to February. For the 2nd month, small companies with less than 20 employees shed workers. In contrast to the jump in the employment component in the ISM manufacturing figure on Monday, ADP said 2k manufacturing jobs were lost in …
Peter is the Chief Investment Officer at Bleakley Advisory Group and is a CNBC contributor.
