Special Reports: Everything You Need to Know About a Bear Market–Part 2: The Strange Case of Asset Correlations in an Extreme Bear Market
Bear Markets are extreme events. Which means they do weird things to asset correlations. And if you think that's too much inside baseball (you remember baseball, right) for you, think about how in a bear market you're counting on finding safety from a general market...
Sellers batten down the hatches today ahead of tomorrow’s report on new claims for unemployment
Not much mystery to today's selling. Investors and traders were trimming positions--or more--ahead of tomorrow's report on initial claims for unemployment. Last week brought a record 3.28 million new claims for unemployment as the coronavirus and "shelter in place"...
Another reason to buy gold–mines are going on shutdown in South Africa
The South African government has ordered a three-week lockdown in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus that will shut down the country's gold, platinum, and paladium mines. Sibanye Stillwater (SBSW) the world's largest primary producer of platinum, and Anglo...
S&P 500 drops 15% for the week
Let me emphasize that "for the week." The storm of bad news continued today with the European Union saying that the 2020 recession in that bloc may be as bad as 2009. Goldman Sachs warned that the U.S. economy may shrink 24% year over year in the second quarter. Oil...
Special Report: Everything you need to know about a bear market–Part 1 What kind of bear is this? Part 2 The Strange Case of Asset Allocations in an Extreme Bear Market
The definition of a bear market is rather simple: It's a drop of 20% or more from the market high. By this standard we've recently moved into a bear market on all the major U.S. stock indexes--and indeed on all the major overseas indexes with the exception, for the...
Fed’s Sunday surprise sends stocks plunging; losses halved when trading resumes
The Federal Reserve's Sunday night "shock and awe" campaign--interest rates cut to 0% and $700 billion in bond buying--shocked stocks into a panic at the open Monday morning. With stocks down 11%, trading restrictions went into effect. When trading resumed, U.S....
Stocks fall again as WHO declares coronavirus pandemic, White House fails to deliver stimulus plan–no place to hide outside of Treasuries and the yen
As of 1:45 p.m. in New York the Standard & Poor's 500 is down 4.62% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is off 5.13%. The NASDAQ Composite is lower by 4.40% and the Russell 2000 small cap index, with its heavy load of smaller U.S. oil producers, has lost 5.23%....
Gold rallies today with stocks; is this the answer to the gold drop mystery?
Usually gold, a safe haven, time-of-fear asset, rises when stocks stumble and worries climb. Not during last week's big sell off in stocks. Then gold and gold stocks moved down along with stocks. Today, however, as the Standard & Poor's 500 rallied to end the day...
Today’s attempt at a bounce doesn’t hold–S&P 500 closes down in New York
This morning it looked like U.S. stocks would bounce from the drop of Monday and Tuesday--about 6% on the Standard & Poor's 500. As of 10:51 a.m. New York time the index was up 1.64% to 3182.08. But that has turned out to be the high of the day. By 12:18 p.m. the...
Market wakes up to coronavirus threat–it’s not just China anymore
What's different this week? Why is the market plunging today on coronavirus fears when last week it shook off the news? Because the last few days have brought news that the coronavirus isn't limited to China anymore. From Italy comes a report that the Armani fashion...
Saturday Night Quarterback says (on a Sunday), For the week ahead expect…
... the worsening news on the spread of the coronavirus to push yields on U.S. Treasuries even lower as investors and traders look for safe havens. On Friday the yield on the 30-year Treasury set a new all-time low below 1.90% before closing the day at 1.91%. The...Jim’s Stock Alerts
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