November 22, 2020 | Daily JAM |
Thursday action by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to terminate the Federal Reserve’s access to $195 billion in backup funding on December 31 will just increase the volatility in a bond market that was already experiencing a tug of war between expectations for faster growth in 2021 (and hence higher interest rates and lower bond prices) and worries about an economic slowdown in the coronavirus economy and Congressional inaction on any virus stimulus package (and hence lower interest rates and higher bond prices.) The tug of war will play out in the short holiday week which packs big funding activities by the Treasury into the first two days of the week. Monday and Tuesday will see the auction of nearly $200 billion in 2-year, 5-year, and 7-year Treasuries.
November 14, 2020 | Daily JAM, Friday Trick or Trend |
Our regular (or occasional or perhaps occasionally regular) Friday series (actually running on Saturday this week) Trick or Trend looks at what might (or might not) be emerging investible trends. Exclusively on JAM. This post won't run anywhere else. Ever. Stocks, by...
October 20, 2020 | Daily JAM, Short Term |
Even if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin reach a deal on a new coronavirus rescue and stimulus package sometime in the next week or two, it will die in the Senate if Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has anything to say about it. Today at...
August 25, 2020 | Daily JAM |
Part 3A: Strategies and Picks for the less risky end of a retirement portfolio Part 3 of my Special Report : "Meeting Your Retirement Challenge," which will focus on 5 concrete steps that you can take in your retirement portfolio. In this, Part 3A, I'm going to begin...
May 11, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Short Term |
Due to a quirk in the Federal Reserve calendar, the central bank doesn't meet in May. (Next meeting June 10; last meeting April 29.) That means the Fed has lots of time to jawbone the financial markets and Congress in an effort to get Washington to provide more fiscal...
May 4, 2020 | Daily JAM |
Okay, the Treasury actually will need to borrow only $2.99 trillion, but close enough, no? It will still be a record. The previous record for borrowing in a single quarter was $530 billion in the July to September 2008 quarter in the fallout from the global financial...
April 24, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
No big moves. No major disruptions. No threats of meltdowns. Today has been a welcome breather, a bit of stability, for market that's had more than its share of excitement this week. So far. It's only 1:30 p.m. in New York. And we could see selling or buying before...
April 15, 2020 | Daily JAM, PANW |
Yesterday in my post "What do you do when the market is insane and you're not?" I argued that one of the dangers in a very volatile market with strong--and temporarily profitable--short-term trends is that we'll give in to the pressure to do something--and do...
April 6, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
A rally in European stocks that took the STOXX 600 index up 3% in morning trading has extended to New York. At noon New York Time today, the Standard & Poor's 500 was up 5.65% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was ahead 5.66%. The NASDAQ Composite had gained...
April 1, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
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"...
March 20, 2020 | Daily JAM, Short Term |
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...
March 17, 2020 | Daily JAM, Special Reports |
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...
