Mid Term
February 6, 2024 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Morning Briefing |
I think we’re seeing stocks put in a top. Not immediate–I think we’ve got the impending Federal Reserve interest rate cuts to help stretch out this rally into a sideways move. But the signs are there. And the most important signs aren’t the “overvaluation” of the Magnificent 7 stocks or the narrow leadership in this market. (More on why this top isn’t likely to lead to a Bear Market in tomorrow’s post “Why this isn’t 1999.) Nope. To me the most important sign if the big announcement from Meta Platforms (META) of a $50 billion stock buy back and the initiation of 50 cents a share dividend, the company’s first.
February 5, 2024 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Morning Briefing |
Maybe you can’t remember when the yield on the benchark 10-year Treasury fell through 4% and looked headed to 3.5%. It might be hard to remember because it was so long ago. Like two weeks. Today the yield on the 10-year Treasury completed a round trip, rising 14 basis points this morning to 4.16%.
February 3, 2024 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Volatility |
Nothing like a bank surprise to get Wall Street in a lather. On Wednesday, January 31, New York Community Bancorp (NYCB) announced that it would cut its dividend and add to reserves against losses in its commercial lending portfolio. The stock fell 38% on Wednesday to hit a 23-year low on Thursday. The bad news wasn’t limited to U.S. banks either.Tokyo-based Aozora plunged more than 20% after warning of US commercial-property losses Frankfurt’s Deutsche Bank more than quadrupled its provisions against U.S real estate losses. I don’t see any reason to think that this is a one-day phenomenon. Or that the damage is just a minor problem in a few portfolios. Billionaire investor Barry Sternlicht warned this week that the office market is headed for more than $1 trillion in losses. “This is a huge issue that the market has to reckon with,” Harold Bordwin, a principal at Keen-Summit Capital Partners in New York, which specializes in renegotiating distressed properties, told Bloomberg. “Banks’ balance sheets aren’t accounting for the fact that there’s lots of real estate on there that’s not going to pay off at maturity.” On Monday then, I’m adding Put Options on the SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF (KRE).
January 31, 2024 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Morning Briefing |
The Federal Reserve maintained its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday in a range of 5.25%-5.50%–as the financial markets expected. But the central bank pushed back more strongly than financial markets hoped on a March 20 schedule for the first cut in rates. “The Committee does not expect it will be appropriate to reduce the target range until it has gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2%,” the Fed said in its policy statement.Fed chair Jerome Powell pushed back even moe strongly in his Wednesday press conference pushed back: A march cut is “probably not the most likely case or what we’d call the base case,” he said. “I don’t think it’s likely the Committee will reach a level of confidence by the time of the March meeting to identify March as the time to [cut rates].”
January 29, 2024 | Daily JAM, F, GM, Mid Term, TSLA, Videos |
Today’s Trend of the Week video is Bad News from Tesla is even worse news for other electric vehicle companies. On January 24, after the close, Tesla announced a slight miss on their earnings report. Guidance was rather sparse but grim. Sales grew at about 38% in 2023, well below the 50% target that Tesla regularly touts. The 2024 guidance is even below that, (Wall Street estimates 24%). While this isn’t great for Tesla, it’s much worse for companies like Ford, GM and Volkswagen who are trying to figure out how much to spend and when to build market share for electric vehicles. The companies have been using estimates based on Tesla likely prices and profit margins in order to build their own projectors for their own profitability in electric vehicles. Those estimates, thanks to recent guidance from Tesla, appear to badly outdated, especially if Tesla is considering cutting prices again. Now companies like GM and Ford will have to decide how much pain, and for how long, they’re willing to take in order to get into this market.
January 27, 2024 | AAPL, Daily JAM, Mid Term, Morning Briefing |
It’s a Federal Reserve meeting week, but I expect Apple’s (AAPL) earnings report for its December quarter to be the big event of the week. With the potential to move the tech sector and the market.
January 25, 2024 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Videos |
Today’s video is Too Far, Too Fast. Yesterday, on January 24, the market hit Wall Street’s consensus 2024 target for the end of 2024. Yep, a bit early. The consensus target for the end of the year 2024 close is an average of 4867 and yesterday the S&P closed at 4868. The median target is 4950, and the high end forecast is around 5200–only 350 points from where we are. We’re still awaiting confirmation that the Fed will cut rates and when that happens (likely in June or July–not March), more money will come into the market. This mid-year injection of money is good, but how much of a reward is there in a market that may have already reached its target for 11 months from now? At this point, investors are chasing momentum in an attempt to make up for missing the mark in 2023. That leaves the market risky at the moment. There’s not a whole lot of reward in a market that moves sideways with very few big moves on the up side. We may very well finish the year flat from these levels.
January 23, 2024 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
China will launch a new stabilization package including about 2 trillion yuan ($278 billion) to buy mainland shares via offshore trading links in the coming days, government sources say. This would come after a market rout that has erased more than $6 trillion in market value from mainland China and Hong Kong stocks since a peak reached in 2021. And certainly China’s stocks rallied on the news. The NASDAQ Golden Dragon Index of Chinese stocks traded in the United States closed up 4.84% today, Tuesday, January 23. But considering the extent of the losses and its duration, I’d count a less than 5% gain–especially since the index was up by more than 6% earlier in the day.
January 20, 2024 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
In a week where the U.S. Standard & Poor’s 500 and NASDAQ Composite and NASDAQ 100 set new record highs, China’s stock market turned in another big move to the downside. The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index has already lost 11% in 2024. That comes after a record four-year losing streak and the slump this year has just reinforced the opinion among money managers that “China is uninvestable now.” The Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index slipped was down by as much as 2.2% at the start of US trading Friday, extending losses to a fifth consecutive day. The grim milestones keep accumulating.
January 16, 2024 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
Chinese officials have indicated that the government is considering issuing 1 trillion yuan ($139 billion) of new debt under a special sovereign bond plan. The plan would sell ultra-long sovereign bonds to fund projects related to food, energy, supply chains, and urbanization. The sale of this type of ultra-long bonds is rare: In the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998, for example, the government issued special debt to replenish capital for major state-owned banks. The most recent sale was in 2020, when authorities issued 1 trillion yuan worth of those bonds to pay for pandemic response measures. The new round of stimulus is good news for a global economy that has been struggling with lagging growth as China’s economy has slowed. But the plan is bad news for anyone worried about the deep structural problems facing China’s economy.
January 15, 2024 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
Hertz (HTZ) plans to sell a third of its U.S. electric vehicle fleet and reinvest in gas-powered cars. The company says the shift is due to weak demand and high repair costs for its electric vehicle fleet. Which is dominated by Telsa’s electric vehicles. Electric vehicles make up about 11% of the Hertz fleet and 80% of those electric vehicles are Tesla. The news certainly isn’t a plus for electric cars and electric car makers. But I think it’s also important not to forget that Hertz is struggling to show improvements to its bottom line. Tesla’s price cuts–and their effect the resale value of the Hertz fleet–may have more to do with this abrupt about face than weak demand and higher repair costs.
January 11, 2024 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Morning Briefing |
CPI inflation isn’t falling as quickly as economists had predicted and as investors and traders had hoped. At the least, the numbers call into question the belief that the Federal Reserve will begin to cut interest rates as early as its March 20 meeting.
