Some Comforting And Some Not-So-Comforting Data

Schwab's Jeffrey Kleintop shared some stats this morning on past market reactions to U.S. airstrikes. He prefaced them with:

This Week's Message: What Interest Rates Say -- And -- Why I Sleep Well At Night

Just listened to an interview with Jim Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, I've been a fan of Jim's my entire career. He's quite the historian, and an utterly brilliant thinker.

Risk On For Sure, Right?

Only because it's the first day of the new year am I pointing herein to the oddness of a particular single-day's trading action.

What a way to start the new year! With the Dow (30 stocks) up 330 points (1.1%), the S&P 500 up 0.8% and the Nasdaq Composite ahead by 1.3%!

Quote of the Day: The Investor's Greatest Enemy

Currently reading Howard Marks's insightful book, Mastering the Market Cycle. While I could literally pull dozens of quotes that jibe with yesterday's post on market sentiment, I'll share just this one for now:

Repo Crisis Averted, Maybe...

We've scratched the surface a bit herein the past few weeks on what can only be termed as a serious liquidity issue in the overnight funding (repo) market. While some suggest that it's not serious, that it's purely technical, and so on, well, when a technical glitch requires half a trillion in fresh bucks to simply keep liquidity flowing (as opposed to actually fixing the problem) I think we can get away with calling it serious.

Quote of the Day: China's Wasting No Time!

As I suggested in a recent (client-only) post, stimulus from China in 2020 could bode well for a couple of our core positions.

Well, they're wasting no time:

Investors Expecting A Most Happy New Year!

We recently developed our own sentiment indicator -- we call it the PWA Fear And Greed Barometer -- as a way to keep constant track of how the passengers are distributed among the investment cruise ship, so to speak.