from the Richmond Fed — this post authored by Sabrina R. Pellerin The first U.S. credit union – St. Mary’s Cooperative Credit Association in Manchester, N.H. – opened its doors in 1908 with the mission of meeting the personal financial needs of a targeted community: French-American mill workers. Those who helped organize St. Mary’s believed that access to credit for poor working families would improve their well-being. Today, this same credit union is a full-service financial institution, renamed St. Mary’s Bank, and is open to anyone willing to purchase one share of “capital stock” for $5. The ...
So yeah. Good luck trading this. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a setup that’s more conducive to algo madness. That’s from our week ahead preview and it should serve as a warning to anyone feeling brave about trading the euro around Thursday’s ECB meeting. There’s both upside and downside risk for the single currency this week, and parsing things is made immeasurably more complicated by the fact that not only will FX markets need to try and divine something about the timing of the ECB’s exit strategy, but will also need to listen for any indication that the central bank is prepared to try and put a lid on FX strength. As Deutsche...
POITOU, FRANCE – Today is Labor Day. Most of the world pays homage to its sweating, busing, trucking classes, its poor huddled masses… yearning for a cushier seat and a better deal… on May 1. President Grover Cleveland chose the first Monday in September. Of great interest to people in America, as indicated by the newspaper headlines, is how much other people earn. No one – or almost no one – writing in the editorial pages works at McDonald’s or earns the minimum wage. But practically every one of them has an opinion about how much people on low wages should earn. A “living wage” is what they say they want. Thirty thousand dol...
With negotiations around NAFTA continuing on into this week, many Americans are rightfully wondering how major changes to the deal could impact their lives. Discussions are still early, and it’s tough to predict the exact policies that will be affected until negotiations reach their peak. However, until that point, there is one simple barometer that can give you an idea of how you may be affected: how much business does your state do with Canada, and how much is with Mexico? STATES TIED TO CANADA Today’s visualization from HowMuch.net focuses specifically on how close each state economy is tied to Canada. Using a flow diagram, it breaks...
Doug Goldstein, CFP®, director of Profile Investment Services Ltd., and Shannah Game, CFP® and millennial investment specialist, discuss if millennial investors short attention span is unique to their generation, or if other investors also suffer from limited financial focus. Shannah shares with Doug how she encourages millennials to take their retirement and financial future seriously. She offers tools that make tracking expenses and investments easier and insists that people should “know their numbers.” What are the differences in the 3 types of mutual funds? Are you familiar with all 3 types of mutual funds? Doug explains the differe...
Cryptocurrencies are crashing. In the last 48 hours most of the largest cryptocurrencies lost approximately 30%. Is this time to panic and sell everything (as implicitly suggested by this Forbes author)? Or is this a buy opportunity? Before looking into the details we would like to stress the fact that this type of volatility makes an investor intuitively think that he/she has to act. However, that is a big trip. Do not forget that not trading is also a form of trading. Let’s see what the charts have to say about our key question. The crypto top 10 index which is an equally weighted index of the 10 largest cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Eth...
RBOB Gasoline futures tumbled to their lowest level in almost a week overnnight as several US Gulf Coast refineries reported their plans to restart operations after the devastation of Hurricane Harvey forced them to shutdown. While about one-fifth of U.S. refining capacity is halted, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, some plants including those operated by Citgo Petroleum Corp. and Marathon Petroleum Corp. are preparing to restart. The Oct ’17 contract was down as much as 4% earlier before a modest bounce. Moreover, compared to the squeeze in the September contract, RBOB prices have really tumbled… Of course, this r...
Citi analyst Joel Beatty found comments online from U.S. Congressman Collin Peterson that voice support for approval of PTC Therapeutics’ (PTCT) Duchenne muscular dystrophy treatment ataluren, which is also known as Translarna. The document appears to have been posted last Thursday in response to the FDA’s request for comments regarding its advisory panel meeting scheduled for September 28, and is written in the form of a speech to be given at the meeting, Beatty told investors Friday night in a research note. The analyst confirmed from the Congressman’s office that a legislative assistant plans to read the letter on behalf ...
Ask a child what he or she wants to be when they grow up, and you’ll probably get a standard answer: firefighter, doctor, teacher – all occupations we learn to recognize at an early age. Rarely do you hear a young one say, “I want to be a writer.” I don’t recall ever saying it. Yet here I am, with writing as one of my several occupations. It may have been my very early love of reading and feeling the rhythm of the words on the page that put me on this road. One my real influences was the legendary sportswriter Blackie Sherrod. For decades he wrote a column for the Dallas Times Herald and later the Dallas Morning News. Reading hi...
As you know, there are a whole lot of people out there who are concerned that the rally in U.S. stocks rests on a shaky foundation characterized by an overreliance on tech. These concerns have found expression in cautious notes from Goldman and lengthy missives penned by the likes of Howard Marks, who in July implicitly compared the current environment to the “perpetual motion machine” that was at work just prior to the dot-com bust. Well speaking of the dot-com bust, have a look at the following chart, which shows that the S&P Information Technology index recently hit the widest ratio to the S&P 500 since 2001: Meanwhile, Na...