What to watch for in a pivotal earnings season

The Q2 earnings reporting season could be a pivotal one. Earnings reports and subsequent corporate guidance are likely to give investors greater clarity on whether the economy is softening into a slowdown or undergoing a soft landing and recovery. The preliminary picture is a fragile recovery. Forward guidance for Q2 has improved from Q1. Negative...

Tech leadership stumbles, what will pick up the pace?

 Mid-week market update: It finally happened. The NASDAQ 100 is being re-weighted in order to address “concentration risk” (full details here). It was a belated decision in response to narrow market leadership, but the problem seems to have moderated on its own. Large-cap technology stocks, which had been on a tear, stalled against the S&P...

The mystery in the NFP report

 I’ve been thinking about the nonfarm payroll report that was reported on Friday. Employment has been gradually slipping from a 5 and 8 handle to about 200K today. The June headline payroll report came in at 209K, which was under consensus expectations. The big surprise was the decline in the unemployment rate.      ...

Bond rout = Stock rout?

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 Trend...

Why our Ultimate Market Timing Model is cautious

 I recently had a discussion with a reader about my Ultimate Market Timing Model (UMTM). The UMTM is an extremely low turnover model that flashes signals once every few years and is designed to limit the extremes of the downside tail-risk of owning equities. When extreme downside risk is minimized, investors can afford to take...