Coming in on Tuesday morning, investors were expecting to sift through earnings from the largest banks and the CPI data. Instead, IBM stunned investors by pre-releasing its earnings 8 days in advance. Its earnings were much weaker than expected, with revenue well below expectations and EPS declining 2% year over year. As shown below, IBM […]
Semiconductor chip companies have been benefiting from strong momentum and a powerful narrative. For instance, memory chip producers like Micron, AMD, and Intel have risen by 192%, 138%, and 166%, respectively, year to date. While they provided a nice boost to the Nasdaq and an impressive, albeit lesser, tailwind to the S&P 500, the impact […]
The graph below paints a very interesting picture of US energy efficiency and a key structural economic change in this country. For roughly 25 years after WWII, the US economy’s crude oil consumption nearly tripled. Feeding the growth were a booming post-war economy and strong population growth. To put consumption in a different context, the […]
The FOMC released the minutes from Chair Warsh’s first meeting on Wednesday, and the best word to describe the Fed’s advice is “ambiguous.” Merriam-Webster defines ambiguous as a state or, in this case, a statement that allows for more than one interpretation. Officials entertained policy scenarios in both hawkish and dovish ways. Some see inflation […]
Goldman Sachs’s volatility desk made the following comment: “With the VIX back to its lowest levels in more than a month, our Vol desk is focused on hedging opportunities as 1-month S&P implied correlation is near its lowest level in 20 years.” Simply, a low VIX can convey a sense of market calm on the […]
Michael Howell, founder of CrossBorder Capital, is one of the most followed global liquidity analysts. Howell’s Global Liquidity Index (GLI) often tracks closely to a 65-month sine-wave cycle that has tracked liquidity conditions well since 1965. As we share below, the 65- month cycle (green) bottomed in October 2022 and peaked in August 2025, exactly […]
Months ago, the financial headlines were littered with stern warnings that the dollar was depreciating rapidly. There was a popular narrative drawing fear that a dollar demise was imminent. A few short months later, the dollar narrative has flipped. According to today’s headlines and narratives, the tide has turned for the dollar. To wit: we […]
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh used his first major public appearance, a panel at the ECB’s annual forum in Portugal, to formally bury one of the Fed’s most relied-upon tools of the last 25 years: forward guidance. Warsh could not be more direct about his opinion of forward guidance. To wit, when the moderator repeatedly pressed […]
As shown below, the Japanese yen has fallen to levels not seen since the late 1980s. (Note the chart quotes yen per dollar, thus a higher figure represents a depreciating yen) We have written extensively about why the yen matters to US markets: the yen carry trade. The trade is relatively simple. An investor borrows […]