The market catches round number-itis

Mid-week market update: On the weekend (see The market's hidden message for the economy, rates and stock prices), I wrote that the short-term outlook was more difficult to call than usual. On one hand, we were seeing broad based strength, which argued for an intermediate term bullish call. On the other hand, Urban Carmel pointed...

A second chance on Europe

About three weeks ago, I wrote about opportunities in European equities (see Worried about US equities? Here's an alternative!). I pointed out that stock prices in Europe were far cheaper than US, the fears about European integrity and financial system were overblown, and the market seemed to be ignoring signs of a growth recovery. Since...

The market’s hidden message for the economy, rates and stock prices

Preface: Explaining our market timing models We maintain several market timing models, each with differing time horizons. The "Ultimate Market Timing Model" is a long-term market timing model based on the research outlined in our post, Building the ultimate market timing model. This model tends to generate only a handful of signals each decade. The...

Waiting for the consolidation to end

Mid-week market update: The intermediate term outlook that I've been writing about for the past few weeks hasn't really changed (see Get ready for the melt-up and Party like it's 1999, or 1995?). The stock market continues to enjoy a tailwind based on the combination of overly defensive investors and a growth turnaround which is leading...

Jackson Hole preview: Fun with statistics

As we await the Fed`s annual Jackson Hole symposium on August 25-27, Bloomberg highlighted a research paper by Fed economist Jeremy Nalewaik. Nalewaik found that inflation and inflationary expectations had tracked each other well but started to diverge in the mid 1990's.     This paper is important to the future of Fed policy, as it pushes the Fed towards...