Last Week There were only bulls, no bears, lambs, or lions to be found on Wall Street in March, as the stock market came out as it came in, charging forward. The S&P 500 closed the holiday-shortened week at another record high, and the rally continued to broaden...
A Dedication to Mickey Lefton “As my memory restsBut never forgets what I lostWake me up when September ends.” Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong penned those lyrics inspired by the grief he felt over the death of his father when he was a young boy....
Sugar Rush The stock market got a pre-Halloween sugar rush, with the S&P 500 3.9% higher, the Nasdaq showing a 2.2% gain, and the Russell 2000 jumping 6.0%. The rally from the previous Friday continued through Tuesday, but disappointing results from Alphabet and...
Outbreaks and New Rates In our previous commentary, “War-Torn Week”, we adapted the blues song “Stormy Monday” to describe the tone of the market. We expressed our belief that in the upcoming week that the war would be the primary determinant of the direction of...
Carnage Continues The market definitely sang the blues as the Dow Jones Industrial Average notched its fifth consecutive week of losses, down 2%, while the S&P dropped 2.9%, the Nasdaq slid 3.5%, and the Russell 2000 declined 1.06%. It was a worn-torn Monday And...
Rams Brought It Home If the trading week had ended at lunch on Thursday, then we could have cheerfully turned our attention to the Rams, Bengals, and Snoop Dogg. St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, perhaps still upset that the Rams had moved to Los Angeles, threw...
Riding the Wave Looking at the graph of S&P 500 last week jogged the memory of a sine wave from middle school math class. A sine wave or sinusoid is any of certain mathematical curves that describe a smooth periodic oscillation. A sine wave is a continuous wave....
New Year New Highs The S&P 500 advanced 1.12%, reaching record highs on Monday and Wednesday. For 2021, the Index set 70 all-time highs, the most in a single year since 1954. Small caps finished the year quietly, edging up 0.34%, while the Nasdaq gained 0.56%. The...
Grizzly Declines Shortly after we posted last week’s “Where Are the Bears?” commentary, our ursine friends awoke from their slumber Monday morning, mauling investors who had celebrated another record close on the S&P 500 the previous Friday. The twin terrors of...
Transitioning from Transitory to Tactical In our commentary from the week of June 21, 2021, we offered the following thoughts concerning Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s description of inflation as being “transitory”: Poor Jerome Powell probably listens to the opening of...
On the Up and Up Inflation looks like it is running, as the lyrics from AC/DC go, “hot” and demanding we “pay the price” for this “problem child.” The stock market finished lower for the week with those escalating inflation fears and related slumping consumer...
Powell's Policy Persists On Friday, at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, Chairman Powell delivered the message that whereas tapering is coming, the Delta variant makes the timing uncertain. He also made it clear that the plan to taper does not suggest that any...
Last Week: We hope that everyone enjoyed their holiday weekend. One highlight at North Star was watching Joey Chestnut break his own world record at the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4th after devouring his 76th hot dog and bun in front of a packed...
Last Week: What a difference a weekend makes. The selling pressure from the previous Friday vanished into thin air, and a bounce-back rally kicked in on Monday morning that continued throughout the week. The S&P 500 closed Friday at another record high, posting...
Last Week: Chairman of the Federal Reserve is near the top of my list of extraordinary stressful jobs that I would hate to have. Currently, it would fall somewhere between a war-zone surgeon and an undercover narcotics officer on the Chicago Police Department. Poor...
Last Week: Equity markets ground higher, fueled by (1) good earnings from economy re-opening companies and from several residential real estate-related companies; (2) a benign bond market that seems comfortable with the Fed’s ‘inflation is transitory’ party line; (3)...
Last Week: Mr. Market, like Disneyland’s Mr. Toad, had a wild ride. Toad, borrowed from “The Wind in the Willows”, regularly becomes obsessed with current fads, only to abandon them abruptly. That sounds like a reasonably good description of most of the trading...
Last Week: The U.S. economic data and corporate earnings reports clearly indicated a strengthening recovery, along with new signs of mounting inflationary pressures. Retail sales surged 9.8% in March compared to the prior month, its steepest increase since May last...
Last Week: Investors continued getting what they want, as well as what they need, despite some storm clouds forming on the horizon. Stocks rallied to close once again at record levels Friday, with the S&P 500 topping 4,100, as investors ignored concerns about...
Last Week: The economic outlook continued to brighten, with the pandemic subsiding and the potent combination of monetary and fiscal policies priming the growth pump. The Big Bad Bond market growled as the 10-year Treasury yield jumped 8 basis points to 1.64%, hitting...
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