As of 11:30 a.m. New York time this morning, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock index was down 1.15%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 1.02%. And the technology heavy NASDAQ was lower by 1.84%. Much of the talk this morning has centered on news from Facebook (FB) and Apple (AAPL) this weekend as the reason for the drop. I think that explanation is misleading
So much news. And so much that has the potential to move the financial markets. Let’s start on the economic side, ok? Monday we get reports on personal income and inflation. And on the earnings side? Lots and lots of reports that could change the tone of this market. The biggest are Microsoft, (MSFT), PayPal (PYPL) and Facebook (FB) on Wednesday January 31 and then Alphabet (GOOG), Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) on Thursday, February 1.
In my daily trawling through the market I come upon lots of tidbits of knowledge that I think are important to investors but that don’t justify a full post. I’ve decided to start compiling these notes here each day in a kind of running mini blog that I’m calling Notes You Need. Posts resemble this from today: “11:40 a.m.: It’s almost earnings season so it’s time for Wall Street analysts to raise target price forecasts on high visibility stocks so they won’t be left behind on any post-earnings spike. Today Credit Suisse raised its target on Amazon (AMZN) to $1410 from $1385 and Robert W. Baird raised its target to $1310 from $1100. The stock traded at $1245 at 11:40 today. Amazon will announce fourth quarter earnings on February 1. And on the Facebook front Credit Suisse raised its forecast to $232 from $230. the stock traded at $188 today.”
Last week’s drop has again led to the question “So where’s the volatility?” After all it’s not like there aren’t dangers in this world that might lead a trader to bid up the price of protecting against those dangers. It’s certainly not in the VIX, which looks for volatility in the S&P 500 future. But there’s actually plenty out there. It’s just all in the Treasury futures market where traders are hedging their bets on 10-year and 30-year Treasuries big time. The implied volatility in those futures markets has soared in the last couple of weeks.
A very heavy week for earnings will reach a crescendo on Thursday, November 2 with reports from Alibaba and Apple. The excitement isn’t surprising after the huge earnings that Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), and Intel (INTC) delivered this past Thursday, October 26. This week Facebook (FB) is the Wednesday, November 1, Â warmup act.
For 2017 though the end of September, the FANG stocks–Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google (Alphabet)–and friends such as Apple and Microsoft have contributed 29% of gains in developed economy stock markets. Pretty hefty concentration, you say. But, if your looking for a market really dominated by elephants shift your gaze to emerging markets.
The conventional wisdom at the end of last week was that we were witnessing a rotation out of tech shares and into financials and small cap stocks. In other words, nothing to get  too concerned about. Apple (AAPL) was a special case as surveys of retail channels showed weak sales for the iPhone 8. Today, though, the concern is a bit more serious.
