Author: Innovative Income Investor

With the 10 treasury off about 10 basis points today and common stocks essentially flattish preferreds and baby bonds are having another decent day.

Almost all preferreds and baby bonds have had superb gains in the last month – around 5%. One might think most of the bargains are gone–BUT there are plenty of opportunities still out there.

If you have never downloaded the sortable master list it is a good place to be able to peruse the entire universe of what is available I would suggest you do so. You can sort the sheet in a bunch of different ways. You will need to have Google Sheets to use it.

The sortable master list link is always under ‘additional links’ – if you break your copy you can come back for a new copy.

Today I listened to Jay Powell’s entire speech and found it very balanced–personally I didn’t hear too much new news, but I did hear him practically promise (not quite a promise) to slow the interest rate hikes in December.

Of course what I hear and what the computers hear aren’t too similar so up we go in equities and down we go in interest rates.

Oh well it is what it is – I care about next year, not the next hour or day. Besides we have inflation numbers coming out tomorrow morning and then the ‘official’ employment numbers on Friday. The employment numbers from ADP showed a softening of employment, but these numbers seldom, if ever, move markets. Directionally I hope that ADP is right – ADP showed 127,000 new jobs and the forecast for the ‘official’ jobs report on Friday is 200,000–certainly something a bit under forecast would be helpful.

My accounts were higher by a small amount prior to the rally–now are up 1/2%–can’t whine about that I guess.

The question everyone asks ‘have we seen rates peak’ can’t, of course, be answered, but if you are fairly fully invested it doesn’t matter too much – rates somewhat higher or somewhat lower doesn’t change anything I am doing–which isn’t much.