* Last night, following tradition, President Trump delivered his first State of the Union Address * Although people are saying that it's not technically a true State of the Union Address * We'll have to wait another year for that; that he has been President for too short a period * So it's just an address before the Joint Session of Congress * But whatever you call it, apparently the president's address was well received * Even some of the President's critics are giving him credit, although not ...
Mar 01, 2017•38 min
* Yesterday it looked like the Dow's winning streak may have come to an end * We were up 10 days in a row, which was the biggest winning streak since 1987 * The Dow was down 50-60 points for the entire day * It opened down and it stayed down until the very last hour, it started to rally * In the last 15 minutes it managed to eke out a positive close * To extend the winning streak to 11 consecutive day * And of course, another record high for the DJIA * For those bitcoin fans out there, I know a ...
Feb 25, 2017•37 min
* The Dow finished with yet another gain today * We closed at 20,775.60 * I've been told that this is the longest consecutive winning streak for the Dow Jones since 1987 * Of course, we all remember how that streak came to a crashing end in October with the 1987 stock market crash * We'll see if the market has better luck this time around * We got the FOMC minutes released earlier today * I think they were interpreted as being hawkish; remember, this is all on a relative scale, they're all doves...
Feb 23, 2017•35 min
* We had a very significant day in the currency and gold markets yesterday * We had some good follow through today that really buttresses the point that I want to make * We got some economic news that was released yesterday that would have been considered bullish for the dollar and bearish for gold * By most people, other than me, who trade currencies and who trade gold * But the fact that gold did not sell off or the dollar did not rally was very significant * The news was the CPI and Retail Sa...
Feb 17, 2017•30 min
* Today Janet Yellen was up on Capitol Hill, it was the first of her 2-day testimony * She was before the U.S. Senate today; tomorrow she will be testifying before the House of Representatives * She talks about monetary policy; we have a bunch of Senators and Congressmen who engage in political grandstanding * To me, a lot of the people asking Janet Yellen questions are really just trying to speak for sound bites for the media, trying to score brownie points for their constituents * One senator ...
Feb 15, 2017•33 min
* I will be in Orlando tomorrow for the Money Show * I will be there Wednesday and Thursday returning Friday * I have several speaking events, a couple of workshops * If you're in the Orlando area, come by, it's free to register online * You can pick up your badge on site * We'll have a booth in the exhibit all, you can come by and meet some EuroPac employees * We look forward to seeing clients and listeners * Last week I spoke about President Trump and his weak dollar policy * He thinks the dol...
Feb 08, 2017•32 min
* Yesterday we got the first jobs report of the year and the way Wall Street and the media seem to be spinning it: * "It was a good report!" * It was good news because the headline number beat expectations: * We created 227,000 jobs in January vs the 175,000 that had been expected * Of course it was an improvement on the 157,000 jobs which was a disappointing report in December * But once again, if you look beneath the headline number, you'll find that there are a lot more problems to this repor...
Feb 04, 2017•35 min
* The month of January came to an end, and it didn't play out the way most people believed it would * Remember when the year began, everybody was optimistic on the U.S. dollar * Remember I said that it was the most crowded trade * It was just like gold the year before * Everybody was convinced that now that Trump was President we were going to have all this fiscal stimulus * The Fed was going to be tightening rates more aggressively * The dollar had no place else to go but up; * Everybody starte...
Feb 02, 2017•29 min
* Earlier this morning we got the first look at Q4 GDP * As I suggested on the last podcast, in fact as I have been saying all along * We did see a sharp decline from the Q3 3.5% GDP * The consensus was for a 2.2% estimate for growth in Q4 * And we came in at 1.9% * Quite a way below estimates and psychologically below the 2% number * Part of the reason was a big drop in exports * I talked about this last quarter * One of the reasons we got that 3.5% jump in Q3 GDP * Was the big surge in soybean...
Jan 28, 2017•36 min
* Short and not-so-sweet. Maybe that's how you would describe President Trump's inaugural speech * Which, I think was the briefest since Jimmy Carter * But now, Donald J. Trump is the 45th President of these United States * I did in general like his speech; I agree with much of what Donald Trump had to say * Talking about how bad things are in the U.S. economy * Yes, there were some people who benefited * People in Washington certainly benefited, certainly Washington has been booming, right? * B...
Jan 21, 2017•31 min
* As I said on a prior podcast, this could be the first Presidential Honeymoon to end before the marriage officially begins * Donald Trump will not be sworn in until Friday * Yet the Honeymoon already appears to be over for the Trump Trade * The dollar continues to decline again today; gold continues to rise * Confounding the experts who, at the beginning of the year, predicted the opposite * Gold up again today about $14 it was up $4-5 yesterday, on the Martin Luther King holiday * We're now at...
Jan 18, 2017•29 min
* It's Friday the 13th and it is a Friday before a 3-day holiday weekend * Monday, of course is Martin Luther King Day * The stock market will be closed in observance of the holiday * Once again, I guess Friday the 13th was bad luck for those hoping for Dow 20,000 * In fact, the Dow finished the day Down, it was a slight decline for the Dow * But not so for gold; gold was up again * The Dollar was actually down again * In fact, this year is already shaping up to be a mirror image of what everybo...
Jan 14, 2017•36 min
* The NFIB Index of Small Business Optimism in the month of December, so this is post the election of Donald Trump * Shot up from 98.4 in November to 105.8 * This is the highest level in 12 years - since before Obama was President * And it's the biggest monthly jump in 37 years * You have to go all the way back to 1980, the election of Ronald Regan to find a moment in time where you saw this big an increase in optimism, in confidence among small business owners * Remember, it was Michelle Obama ...
Jan 11, 2017•37 min
* Yesterday we got the final jobs report of the Obama era, * We got the December Non-Farm Payroll. * Now technically, when we get the January number, the first Friday of February, * Half of that would have been during the Obama presidency, * But because we won't get the official news until the Trump presidency, * I'm sure that Donald Trump is going to take the credit, or maybe have to deal with the blame, * Depending on how that number ends up being received, whether it beats the consensus or mi...
Jan 07, 2017•38 min
* This is another big week for economic data; it is a holiday-shortened week * On Friday we get the big Non-Farm Payroll report * If it's a good number, somehow Donald Trump will try to take credit for it, as he has for the rise in the stock market * But I think that the job numbers, while maybe not bad just yet, but I think we will have a lot of problems with the non-farm payroll numbers in 2017 as the air starts coming 0ut of the part-time job bubble while Trump is in office * But we did get s...
Jan 05, 2017•25 min
* The Dow 20,000 party is going to have to wait until 2017 * Although I wouldn't necessarily buy a ticket for January * The selloff that started this week may resume in the first week of the new year * The dow rang out the old year with a 57-point loss to cap a losing week * Probably the first down week since the Trump victory * The Dow now at 19,762 - the close on the Dow for the year * Most people think it's just a matter of time; we can easily rally early on in the new year * But again, there...
Dec 31, 2016•41 min
* The Dow 20,000 party is going to have to wait - at least for another day * The Dow was down a little bit today - 23 to 19,918 * The broader market was a bit weaker than the Dow * The markets continue to shrug off very weak economic news that came out throughout the day * We got bombarded with all sorts of negative pieces of news that ordinarily, maybe before the election of Donald Trump, would have weighed down the market * Certainly it would have weighed on the currency markets * The dollar w...
Dec 23, 2016•31 min
* On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve did exactly what they did last year * They waited until the last possible meeting to nudge the Federal Funds rate by 1/4 of 1% * So now, after 2 years of tightening, the lower bound of the Fed's range has gone from zero to 1/2 of 1% * Now Janet Yellen said the Fed made this decision to lift rates because of its confidence in the U.S economy * That is complete nonsense * If the Fed were confident in the U.S economy, rates would be much higher than a half of a p...
Dec 16, 2016•37 min
* It's been a while since my last podcast and I've gotten quite a few emails from people wondering what happened to me * I was out of the country for about a week, and I did manage to get one podcast off from my hotel room * But when I got back, I was backed up with work, and by the time I caught up, I came down with a case of laryngitis, which has still not completely gone away * I want to start off by talking about the stock market * The Dow hit a new record high today; inter-day we got to 19,...
Dec 13, 2016•34 min
* The Trump fantasy rally continued today, of course the big irony here is that all of the stock traders who were so worried about a Donald Trump presidency * Now, he's Ronald Regan re-incarnated * They're partying like it's 1983 - when Regan first stepped in the market had a very difficult couple of years * We went through a recession before we got that Regan Rally - we're going to skip all that * It's amazing that people believe you can have reckless monetary policy for 8 years * You can have ...
Dec 01, 2016•31 min
* The Dow Jones is in record territory, closing above 19,000; they're already starting to talk Dow 20,000 now * The markets are euphoric * All the traders who were so convinced that President Trump would be a disaster for the stock market, now think it's a boom for the stock market * It shows you how fickle investors are, but also how quickly the narrative can flip * Personally, I don't think it has anything to do with the fundamentals * I think traders are trying to push the markets in a partic...
Nov 24, 2016•41 min
* The stock market continues to ride the Trump wave to new highs, in fact the Russell 2000 hit an all-time record high today * The enthusiasm for stocks not being dampened by the carnage in the bond market * We now have the yield on the 10-year treasury up at around almost 2.3 * And the yield on the 30-year now, just below 3% - 2.99 * Yields are still low, but nowhere near as low as they were * And of course, nowhere near as low as they're headed * It's not just the fact that bond yields are ris...
Nov 18, 2016•23 min
* What a difference a day makes * Between Tuesday evening, when the markets first began to realize that Donald Trump was going to win the election and the predictions of collapsing stocks and soaring gold prices appear to be taking hold * Because at one point the Dow was down about 800 points and gold was up about $60 * All of a sudden, the sentiment started to shift and by the time the U.S. markets had opened for trading * Gold had lost its rally, the stock market had recovered its losses * And...
Nov 12, 2016•45 min
* It is Wednesday, November 9, 2016, one day following one of the biggest political upsets in U.S. political history * As Donald Trump shocked everybody by defeating Hillary Clinton * Hillary Clinton was supposedly the most qualified person ever to seek the U.S. Presidency, and Donald Trump had no experience whatsoever * And the establishment had already sworn in Hillary Clinton; it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that she was going to win * I think she was almost a 10:1 favorite even on t...
Nov 10, 2016•29 min
* It's not going to be a new record as far as the consecutive days of declines for the U.S stock market * The 9-day losing streak ended today in a huge pre-relief Clinton victory rally * The markets had been factoring in a higher probability of a Donald Trump victory ever since the FBI announced that they were re-opening the email investigation * Thanks to a treasure trove of 650,000 emails on Anthony Wiener's (a.k.a. Carlos Danger) laptop computer * Apparently they have now gone through all 650...
Nov 08, 2016•30 min
* Today U.S. stocks extended their losing streak to 9 consecutive days * We haven't had a losing streak this long since 1980 - that was 36 years ago * 8 consecutive down days last took place in the financial crisis year of 2008, so we had tied that yesterday * Now we one-bettered it and we're back to the longest streak since 1980 * The record for consecutive down days is 12 * The last time that happened was in 1966 * And if you don't know what the significance was of 1966 - that was the peak of ...
Nov 04, 2016•27 min
* Today the possibility of a Fed rate hike in December rose about 10 points * We're now at about an 80% probability, at least the way the markets assess the odds * That the Fed will raise rates in December after failing to raise rates today * If you remember, after they didn't raise rates last time there was some probability of a November rate hike * But by this morning, the probability of November had pretty much been reduced to about zero * With everybody believing that the Fed would raise rat...
Nov 03, 2016•30 min
* Yesterday we finally got the release of the initial estimate for Q4 GDP * The Atlanta Fed had originally come out with an estimate of about 3.8 and had steadily reduced their estimate * They got down as low as 1.9 before ratcheting it up a couple of times and their estimate was at 2.1 when we got the official release * And the number came out at 2.9; not only much higher than Atlanta Fed's estimate, but much higher than the consensus forecast at 2.5 * I am very suspicious of this number * This...
Oct 29, 2016•36 min
* The odds of a December rate hike continue to ratchet up above 70% * We had a parade of Fed officials, most recently again today coming out and talking about why a December rate hike is a good idea, probable, possible, appropriate * You name the adjective, some Federal Reserve president, governor is discussing it * The markets are ratcheting up their expecations * The dollar index continues to move higher, we hit about a 9-month high today * We got above 99; but we didn't close there, in fact t...
Oct 25, 2016•47 min
* The official probability of a December rate hike continues to diminish over the last several days * The markets had the rate hike at about a 70% probability; now we're down to about 60% * Personally, I think the odds are closer to zero, and over time, as we get closer and closer to that December meeting, the odds will steadily move down * Just like the Atlanta Fed keeps moving down its estimates for Q3 GDP; most recently down to 1.9% * I expect the Atlanta Fed to move lower again this week on ...
Oct 19, 2016•47 min
