Just as trade tensions seemed to escalating beyond any hope of near-term recovery, the Trump administration as well as Chinese officials both have seemed to shift the conversation. It certainly doesn’t mean that newly introduced tariffs from China, and an increase in existing and planned duties from the U.S. won’t happen, but it does seem […]
Read MoreWhile a lot of sectors in the market are showing a heightened level of volatility and sensitivity lately, many of them remain up quite nicely year to date, or over the past year. Trade concerns have become more and more heightened lately, spreading volatility throughout the market and pushing the curve between short-term and longer-term […]
Read MoreTrade, trade, trade – analysts and investors have been focusing on this single question now for more than a year. I don’t believe social media is helping the matter – President Trump tweets about increasing tariffs and calls China a trade “enemy,” and then a few days later seems to reverse course with another tweet […]
Read MoreIf you’re like me, it can get a bit tiresome to hear about nothing but the trade war, tariffs, and listen to market media and analysts speculate about the impact of the latest Trump tweet. It’s been more than a year that tariffs between the U.S. and its trading partners – and most particularly, China […]
Read MoreOne of the interesting things to observe in the economy during the late upward stages of an economic cycle is consumer lending. A struggling economy usually prompts the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates in an effort to encourage more business activity. Lower interest rates mean cheaper borrowing for businesses and individuals. For the purposes […]
Read MoreWhen investors start to get more nervous about the sustainability of economic growth, and therefore of the market in general, volatility tends to increase. That means that stock prices tend to see wider-than-normal swings from extreme high to extreme low. Most of the market’s current uncertainty seems to be focused on the prospect that economic […]
Read MoreAs it relates to trade, most analysts agree that the sectors that are the most sensitive to pressures from tariffs, currency devaluations, and geopolitical tensions include Industrial stocks. As trade concerns have mounted in the last month, the Industrial sector has dropped by almost -5, and is mostly flat over the last twelve months; however, […]
Read MoreAs has been a pretty consistent theme for most of the past year, uncertainty around trade continues to put the market on edge. Beginning last month, investors started feeling trade anxiety all over again as trade progress seemed to stall yet again. At the beginning of this week, hope shifted back yet again after the […]
Read MoreUncertainty since mid-July in the broad market has put a lot of pressure on stocks in a lot of industries – and if the analysts are to be believed, sectors that are the most exposed to trade pressures and sensitive to the cyclical nature of economic ebb and flow, like Technology and Industrials are at […]
Read MoreWhile the entire market has seen a pretty solid overall performance year to date, the energy sector has underperformed, with mostly flat performance year to date. Over the past year, the sector has been even more disappointing, having declined by about -23.5% year to date as measured by the S&P 500 Energy Sector SPDR ETF […]
Read MoreTrade tensions, which have persisted for well over a year, have worked to amp up market tension at different periods throughout the year. The prospect for trade compromise helped the market rally strongly from the beginning of this year until mid-July, when the Fed’s more modest-than-expected interest rate cut, along with the cold reality that […]
Read MoreOne of the hallmarks of the market’s upward trend this year (even factoring in the market volatility and pull back since late July from the latest all-time high) has been the strength of the U.S. economy. Even as trade uncertainty continues to keep investors and analysts on edge, concerns about interest rate policy persist, and […]
Read MoreThere are a lot of ways to look at a company and evaluate them for fundamental strength. Traditional metrics, including many of the ones that I rely on for the stocks that I analyze, measure everything from sales and earnings growth to how much productivity the company realizes per employee. You can break down the […]
Read MoreAs trade concerns have introduced volatility back into the market, industrial and technology stocks in particular have been battered the worst. It is true that many of the companies in these sectors have been referring to tariffs and trade among headwinds to their latest earnings results. That is among the reasons that the Industrial sector, […]
Read MoreThe energy sector is one of the most cyclical sectors of the economy, primarily because of its reliance on oil. Oil prices are often highly volatile depending any number of factors, ranging from geopolitics to weather phenomenon to simply supply and demand. A good example of that volatility was seen in the latter part of […]
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