Managing Equity and Markets

  The Fed has become more hawkish in its public stances. I said in an earlier newsletter that “soft landing” is for 2022 as “transitory” was for 2021. All made up for our entertainment. The expectation for July used to be a 50bp hike. After the latest inflation report and hearing from the Fed mem...

Happy Belated Father's Day! As I expected, the Fed took the opportunity that the inflation numbers presented and raised rates by 75bps. During Fed Chairman Powell’s speech, he mentioned how he wanted to “moderate demand” because it was too high. This is something I have been talking a lot about: ...

In The News The story that is controlling the media right now is inflation. Friday’s numbers showed inflation came in higher than expected and at a new 40-year high. The markets reacted accordingly: a stock market sell-off and mortgage rate increases. The problem now is that this opens the door f...

In The News The world will be watching CPI numbers released Friday. During last month’s report, we saw a dip in year over year inflation but the month over month still grew, albeit slowly. If this next report shows a decrease in rate month over month, the markets will bet that inflation has peake...

Atlanta Fed President Bostic said on Monday that he wouldn’t be surprised if the Fed paused its rate hikes in September. Originally, the Fed planned for 10 rate hikes in 2022 for a total of 300bps. They have done 75 so far, but with Fed members already talking about pauses, the ambitious rate hik...

Last week Fed Chairman Powell announced how the Fed will do whatever is necessary to battle inflation. He also keeps referring to his admiration of Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who famously increased interest rates to near 20% levels in order to battle inflation. This ultimately helped battle infla...

Last week started off with a rough Monday but then markets rejoiced when CPI numbers came out Tuesday. Even though CPI inflation numbers came in at 8.5%, slightly higher than expectations, the markets dug into the month-over-month increase of a little over 6% and saw the month-to-month inflationa...

Chart Check (see above) Don't blame the messenger We continue to live in our downtrend channel. We may push the boundaries of resistance/support a little bit, but I expect the downtrend to continue for now (especially as the Fed “plans” to unload the balance sheet). I haven’t spoken about the 50 ...

 "Our biggest challenge today is completing homes, not selling them, as demand continues to be robust." – Jeff Kaminski, CFO KB Homes Let's GO! We have the potential for a volatile 2 week period ahead of us. This week, we hear from a lot of Fed members ahead of next week’s (4/11 & 4/12) inflation...

“There is an obvious need to move expeditiously to return the stance of monetary policy to a more neutral level” – Fed Chairman Jerome Powell Hi All!  As I expected, the Fed continued with a quarter-point hike in rates. The markets expected that. Last week I said his outlook would weigh more than...