SMLE News and Press, Xtrackers S&P SmallCap 600 ESG ETF From 10/12/22

Summary The NFIB’s latest small business survey showed sentiment rebounded in September, although labor market indicators decelerated further. While those reporting "cost of labor" as the biggest problem went unchanged, the percentage of respondents reporting quality of lab...

Summary Our markets for short-term debt are dysfunctional, and regularly in need of rescue by monetary authorities. One source of this post-Financial Crisis market failure is excessive risk-taking encouraged by the Fed’s decade-long hyper-easy monetary policies. A secon...

Summary Last month's unexpected surge in the number of teens with jobs has largely dissipated. The factor that accounts for why the seasonal adjustment works that way is the annual start of the school year in September, which sees teens return to classrooms across the U.S. The...

Summary The headline number of NFIB Small Business Economic Trends for September is 92.1, up 0.3 from previous month. The index is at the 13th percentile in this series. Inflation and worker shortages continue to be the hardest challenges facing small business owners. A declin...

Summary The 13 years ending 2021 are among the best for stock market returns. This year could be the beginning of the bursting of a superbubble that inflated over the previous 13 years. Baby boomers cannot afford to bet against the bursting of bubbles at this time in their liv...

Summary As the weakness in equities continues, we wanted to provide an update on where the major averages stand relative to their pre-COVID highs in February 2020. As if equity market returns relative to the pre-COVID high weren’t pedestrian enough, keep in mind that once y...

Summary The effective overnight interbank lending rate is now 3.08%. It was just 0% a little over six months ago. The facts show that the economic conditions extant in 2018 placed it in a much better position to handle rising borrowing costs than what we see today. Total U.S. ...

Summary Our big energy bet will pay off handsomely in the upcoming months. OPEC+ announced that they plan a production cut of up to two million barrels per day. It wanted to “shock” energy markets to get crude oil prices back up to $100 per barrel. ISM announced ...

Summary The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index relapsed and is back to where it was in July 2020. The massive valuation overshoot in the recent everything bubble – and hence the downside now – is hard to appreciate until quantified and compared historically. Last ...

Summary We require a low be declared post its occurrence, whenever another price decline comes close to the first and does not fall much differently than the declared low. On Friday, we may have seen this phenomenon. Based on prior experience, evidence of a year’s low price...