Gold prices ended Thursday’s session up $9.34 an ounce, helped by the weakness in the dollar. XAU/USD initially fell yesterday but bounced up nicely from the anticipated support level at $1305, the confluence of a horizontal support and the bottom of the hourly cloud. The market climbed back above the $1317-$1316 area and ultimately reached the $1326 level. Prices are stalling in Asian session today as market players await non-farm payrolls from the United States. The Labor Department’s employment report is closely watched by the Federal Reserve. The bulls have the overall technical advantage, with the market trading above the Ichimoku cl...
Euro-zone CPI stands at 1.4% y/y as expected. Core CPI is at 0.9%, lower than 1% expected. The weak core numbers are a headache for the ECB. PPI beat with 0.6%, but it isn’t that important. This is the first release of inflation data, but the final data usually doesn’t deviate from the initial publication. EUR/USD remains slightly lower on the day, at 1.2050. The US jobs report is next up. The initial read for euro-zone inflation was expected to show that headline CPI rose by 1.4% y/y in December, slower than 1.5% in November. Core CPI was predicted to rise from 0.9% to 1%. Ahead of the release, EUR/USD was stable within the high range,...
As volume begins to build on the CBOE futures contract following the holiday period, it was the buyers who stepped in yesterday to help drive Bitcoin back over the $15,000 level, with the $15,500 level now fast approaching. For much of Wednesday, Bitcoin futures oscillated around the VPOC, and denoted with the yellow dashed line, as market participants reached price agreement in this region, marked with the highest volume on the 60-minute chart. Then as markets moved into early trading yesterday, Bitcoin futures fell over $1000 in a six-hour period, before the buyers stepped in at 9.30 am UK time on the hammer candle at the bottom of the pric...
According to the Federal Reserve, US consumers in October added a large $8.3 billion (SA) to their credit card balances. That was the third largest monthly increase since 2007. For some, that’s an indication of risk-taking and therefore recovery-like behavior on the part of American consumers. Given that it’s been this way for some time, revolving consumer credit balances started in earnest around March 2015, and recovery isn’t the term anyone could reasonably use to describe the past three years, that doesn’t seem very likely. Instead, there has been a pretty good correlation between the rise of revolving credit and the deceleration ...
In 2017 GDP growth picked up solidifying a global expansion phase that had previously been slow and erratic. The number of countries growing at rates consistent with their potential increased to levels not seen since prior to the global financial crisis. As the expansion gathers pace and, in some cases, becomes long by historical standards, it is time to wonder where the next crisis will come from and how we will deal with it. Among the many potential reasons why the world might fall into another recession, there is one that is repeated very often and it is linked to the narrative we created after the 2008 crisis. We find ourselves again at a...
AT40 = 65.7% of stocks are trading above their respective 40-day moving averages (DMAs)AT200 = 63.2% of stocks are trading above their respective 200DMAsVIX = 9.2 (was as low as 8.9)Short-term Trading Call: cautiously bullish Commentary The S&P 500 (SPY) burst higher yet again and spent most of the day at or above its upper-Bollinger Band (BB). Technically, the index is getting stretched. Combine that move with a volatility index, the VIX, which barely closed above its all-time low for the second day in a row, and conditions are ripe for a pause and a pullback for the stock market. A shot straight up so far in 2018 for the S&P 50...
2017 marked something of a turnaround for the fate of dividends paid by publicly-traded companies throughout the year. What had been a multi-year declining trend for the U.S. stock market since mid-2014 appeared to bottom out between March and June 2017, before reversing into an improving trend throughout the rest of the year. Let’s drill down into December 2017’s numbers, before we comment on some unique developments in the last month of the year that was. 4,506 publicly-traded U.S. firms issued some kind of declaration regarding their dividends in December 2017, the most on record for data that extends back to January 2004. Tha...
Since November 8, 2016, the following percentage gained/lost graphs show that, to date, 8 of 9 Major Indices increased from 27.31 to 41.58%, while the 9th posted gains of 4.71% 6 of 9 Major Sectors gained from 26.09 to 44.69%, while the remaining 3 gained from 8.93 to 12.37% It looks like someone was anticipating an improved economic future from the election results and bet heavily on U.S. markets to propel them to these gains…judging by the spike in volumes made on the Dow 30 Index every week, since then, and not seen since the financial crisis of 2008/09 (weekly charts below). For further details on where markets hav...
GBP/USD 4 hour The GBP/USD bullish trend is continuing higher in a bullish channel (blue) after a bearish retracement back to the round level of 1.35. Price could be moving towards the Fibonacci targets of waves 5, which seems to be part of a wave C (green) although the previous top could be a tough resistance point. 1 hour The GBP/USD could extend the bearish correction within wave 4 (blue) if price breaks below the channel. A break above the channel resistance could also indicate an acceleration of the bullish trend. EUR/USD 4 hour The EUR/USD uptrend continuation has reached the larger resistance zone (red lines) for the 2nd time. This is...
The year 2017 has turned out to be pretty impressive for the pharma/biotech stocks. Though the industry was hampered by drug pricing issues in 2016, it bounced back and made a considerable headway in 2017, courtesy of a slew of FDA approvals. The regulatory body approved 46 novel drugs last year, easily surpassing 2016’s total tally of 22. Particularly, large-cap players in the industry raked in stellar returns, up 15.8% in the last 12 months. Nonetheless, the same space also posted a 5.2% decline in 2016. Upbeat quarterly results, rise in demand for new product sales, successful innovation and product line expansion, strong clinical study ...