Mike on Markets

The big news this week (sort of) has been the rally in the bond market. The 10-year Treasury yield closed on Thursday at 1.3%, which is down 44 bps (34%) from the end of March. That’s a big move in bonds! So, to recap, the bond market got smacked the first three months of the…More

Happy Friday! I enjoy laughing at day traders, but that’s not because I think trading is stupid and/or doesn’t work. You absolutely can make money trading markets. It’s just really hard to do it consistently. That’s what I wrote about this week – what it takes to be a trader. The short version is that…More

Happy Friday! I’m not going to spend too much time on AMC, but couple points that I found interesting about this week’s drama. First, 761 million shares of AMC traded on Wednesday, but there were only 450 million shares outstanding. Read that last sentence again. More shares were traded than actual shares issued by the…More

Happy Friday! Let’s touch on inflation real quick. A colleague sent me the chart below with three lines: Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is a broad measure of inflation (orange line) Core CPI, which strips out food and energy (blue line) Median CPI (white line), which removes the effects of outliers in the basket of…More

There’s a story out there that Stalin once ripped off the feathers of a chicken and then threw it some food. The chicken was in a lot of pain but still followed Stalin around. The apparent lesson he was teaching his troops was that a dictator can do anything he wants to “the people,” so…More

As discussed for over a year now, you can’t increase the money supply by 25%, send people checks in the mail, tell them to stay at home for months, and not expect inflation. Take the last three months and we are running at an annualized inflation rate of 7.2%. That’s really high, but I don’t…More

This could be the best earnings season I’ve ever seen. Check out this chart from FactSet as of April 30th (60% of S&P 500 companies reported by then): According to Refinitiv, the current “beat rate” (how many companies are reporting results above Wall Street’s consensus) is running at 87%. That’s the highest since Refinitiv started tracking these numbers…More

Here’s an interesting (albeit sad) chart depicting the impact to small businesses over the last year: And here are some interesting charts on the impact of COVID on kids: Yet here is the current state of schools: Bill Miller was also in the news this week. He’s the former manager of the Legg Mason Value Trust that got annihilated…More

Earnings continue to pour in, but that’s boring so let’s turn to some funny stories that could only happen in 2021. First, dogecoin is now worth more than Ford and Kraft. That’s right. The cryptocurrency that was created as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies now has a market cap north of $50 billion. By…More

Few topics to discuss this week… Retail sales for March rose a mind boggling 9.8%, which blew away consensus forecasts at 6.1%. And if you’re thinking this is due to the government sending checks in the mail, pat yourself on the back. But what’s encouraging is that it appears that these checks are being used…More