CCRV News and Press, ISHARES US ETF TR From 09/01/22

Summary Since Powell shocked the world with an unexpectedly hawkish speech last week, the market has been struggling to guess just how much worse a tighter Fed is going to be for the economy. As a first pass, the market has decided that it looks a bit scary: most risk assets are d...

Summary Today's market X-ray shows the returns for each index, asset class, sector, and so on, since the recent low point on June 16th. Of the global indices, US small caps are in the lead, followed by the NASDAQ. High beta stocks are the most preferred factors since June 16. ...

Summary Among the most salient of economic developments in the last two years have been big movements in the prices of oil, minerals, and agricultural commodities. The price of oil decreased by about 30 percent between early June and mid-August. The politically sensitive American ...

Equity markets have clearly taken notice of rising inflation - and not in a good way. Conventional wisdom has traditionally said different things about how equities and bonds should behave in an inflationary environment - some hold to the notion that stocks should be protected from hi...

We can’t actually see the present because there is a lag between the information being captured by our eyes and processed by our brains. The rising dollar, rising rate environment are well known and entrenched at this point. There are still some problems we have to get past...

The energy sector led during the month of July, providing almost all of the positive performance due to a strong rally in natural gas prices. The heat wave from late June into early July in the lower Midwest U.S. killed cattle, quickly reducing supply. However, both cattle and hogs ra...

China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that retail sales grew by 2.7% in July - nearly half as much as the consensus forecast of 5%. Industrial production also missed the 4.6% estimate with an increase of 3.8% as the Chinese economy joined the US in shrinking during the...

It appears the U.S. economy may be falling into recession - the business cycle has not been eliminated. Valuations outside the U.S. continue to look relatively attractive versus the U.S., especially in Japan. Credit spreads rallied over the past month or so and are once again in l...

Elevated inflation, slowing global economic growth expectations, and reduced central bank liquidity remain the key economic considerations. The policy interest rate divergence between the U.S. and Europe is likely to increase amid heightened recession risk in Europe. We expect mar...

Inventories have risen recently and there has been a lot of commentary about how this will negatively impact the economy. My brief overview of markets is that large growth stocks are still overvalued even as they led the recent rally. The sentiment about the economy is still quite...