Since the start of 2024, McDonald’s (MCD) stock has fallen 7% while the S&P 500 has risen over 50%. More recently, since the start of hostilities with Iran, MCD is down nearly 20% while the broader market recovered initial losses and rallied to record highs. It’s not just fast food giant MCD trading poorly. Many […]
We recently read someone’s take that the graph below decisively points to the “bond market being under serious pressure.” The graph, courtesy of Bloomberg, shows that the yield on the ten-year US Treasury note is about 1% more than the earnings yield on the S&P 500. The S&P 500 earnings yield is calculated by dividing […]
At the April 29th FOMC meeting, Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack and two others (Logan and Kashkari) dissented. Unlike most dissents historically, the objection wasn’t about whether to change the Fed Funds rate; it was about the language in the FOMC policy statement. She specifically took issue with the wording: ” In considering the extent […]
When businesses have concerns about the economy, they often lay off or stop hiring temporary workers before firing full-time employees. For that reason, temporary staffing employment has been a reliable early warning signal of labor market weakness and recessions. As we share below, declines in temporary help services employment preceded the last three recessions by […]
The graph below shows that the US oil rig count has been slightly declining despite much higher oil prices. While many investors may assume that no growth in the number of operating oil rigs implies limited oil production growth, that assumption is not necessarily true. To wit, we share Diamondback Energy’s May 2026 stockholder letter. […]
Michael Nicoletos wrote a thoughtful paper titled “The Index Trap,” making a compelling case that active investing, i.e., picking individual stocks versus buying baskets of stocks (ETFs), will outperform in the future. If correct, that would reverse the trend over the last two decades, in which investors increasingly relied on passive investment strategies. The following […]
The Treasury General Account (TGA) is effectively the US Treasury’s checking account held at the Fed. The changing balance of the TGA affects the financial system’s liquidity, thereby influencing broader economic and market activity. For example, when the Treasury raises its TGA balances by issuing more debt and or collecting more tax revenue than it […]
The semiconductor leaderboard has quietly flipped over the past month, and the NVDA to CPU rotation is worth pausing on. NVDA, the name that defined the AI trade for two-plus years, is up just 13.4% over the trailing month. The CPU cohort has run circles around it. AMD has ripped 70.4% higher, MU has added […]
Wednesday’s mega-cap tech earnings produced one of the cleaner real-time experiments we’ve seen this cycle. Four hyperscalers reported. All four beat on revenue and earnings. All four committed to massive AI infrastructure spending. Yet the market reactions were wildly divergent: Alphabet surged 10% higher, while Amazon rose 0.8%, Microsoft fell 3.9%, and Meta fell 8.6%. […]