The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which last week warned of a wave of mortgage foreclosures this fall, has proposed a rule that would prohibit mortgage service companies from starting foreclosures until after December 31, 2021.
You could buy VWAGY, trading today, April 5, at $37.00, up 4.27% or you could buy VWAPY at $29.27, up 2.92%. (A search for VW ticker will discover another 21 symbols on various European exchanges but for U.S investors these two ADRs are the major choices. Both are ADRs (American Depositary Receipts) on Volkswagen’s German shares. But there’s a considerable difference between these two ADRs. For example, on April 5 VWaGY showed an average daily trading volume of 1.34 million shares. VWAPY, on the other hand, showed an average volume of just 232,327 shares. So what’s the difference?
Stocks are up strongly this morning (April 5) on delayed buying after Friday’s huge jobs gains for March (the stock market was closed for Good Friday) and on very good news from the service sector of the U.S. economy in the March survey from the Institute for Supply Management.
The ISM’s non-manufacturing activity index rebounded to 63.7 in March. That’s the higher level in the survey’s history and comes after a reading of 55.3 in February.
This week will bring positioning for what’s looking like a record quarter for earnings growth for the first quarter of 2021 that’s likely to keep the stock market trend pointing upward. The first earnings report for the quarter are due from the big banks on April 14 and 15.
On April 1 FactSet reported that the bottom-up analyst earnings projection for the stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500 for the first quarter had climbed 6% as the quarter itself progressed. That’s the biggest increase in analyst projections since FactSet began tracking quarterly bottom-up earnings estimates in the second quarter of 2002. Normally, analyst estimates slip downwards as the quarter progresses with the average decrease of the last five years at 4.2%
What we’re looking at the the possibility of an almost unbelievable surge in earnings in the first quarter of 2021, the second quarter, and for the whole year–caused by year-to-year comparisons with the pandemic recession in these quarters of 2020.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is warning of a deluge of foreclosures that could hit the housing market in September. As of January more than 2 million borrowers had either postpone their mortgage payments or failed to make them for at least three months, according to the bureau. Government-authorized forbearance plans begin to end in September. That means hundreds of thousands of home owners will need help getting back on track or face foreclosure on their homes.
In March the U.S. economy added the most jobs since August, the Labor Department reported this morning. Payrolls increased by 916,000 jobs in the month. (And the Feburary numbers were revised upwards to show a gain of 468,000 jobs.) The combination was enough to send the official unemployment rate to 6.0% from 6.2% in February.
With the financial markets closed tomorrow for Good Friday, traders and investors jumped in to buy today ahead of what is expected to be a jobs report tomorrow morning showing unemployment dropping to 6.0% (by the official measure) from 6.2% in February. The Standard & Poor’s 500 closed up 1.18%. The Dow Jones Industrial average ended 0.52% higher. The NASDAQ Composite finished higher by 1.76%. And the small cap Russell 2000 gained 1.50% on the day.
I’m starting up my videos on JubakAM.com again–this time using YouTube as a platform. The seventeenth YouTube video “3 picks for earnings” went up today.
The number of workers filing new claims for unemployment unexpectedly jumped for the week ended March 27. The rise to 719,000 initial claims for unemployment was a surprise after last week when the total dropped to a revised 658,000. That was the lost weekly total since the pandemic shutdowns started in March 2020.
