Both the S&P500 and the DJIA are up on the day – of course they are as Goldilocks is in the room I guess and investors only know one way – and that is up, up and away. Maybe the continued upward movement is a reaction to the potential settlement between UPS and their workers–which obviously would be a relief to all those addicts of Amazon.
The FOMC meeting is now underway and I can hear Bullard already arguing for a 50 basis point rate hike–‘let’s just hit with two 1/4 point moves at once’ he is arguing.
I see Mike Wilson – the celebrated Morgan Stanley equity analyst has admitted that he was wrong on calling for stocks to go down in 2023 – missed that just a little. Just because he was correct last year in calling for a down market has nothing at all to do with being right for this year – a blind squirrel still finds an occasional nut and certainly these ‘talking heads’ are no better than a bunch of blind squirrels. At the same time we are seeing more warnings about the overvalued markets from JP Morgan – we have so much business news on the boob tube I guess we have to have these clowns blabber to stop from having ‘dead air’.
I am doing nothing at all in the markets. I did see that JP Morgan is offering a 5.50% 1 year CD – callable in 6 months of course – whoops just looked and it is now 5.45%. In theory we should see a CD rate of 5.75% – 5.80% from someone come Thursday. Data suggests that the CD rate increase should be slightly above the Fed Funds rate increase. If we get to that rate I most certainly will by some – how much I don’t know.
Economic news from yesterday and today doesn’t suggest any real distress in the economy–some a little softer than forecast with some hotter than forecast – same story all year long.
Banks are pounding the table ‘go long duration on any weakness’.
So next to none of them could guess the stock market. At our expense. Now they think they can guess interest rates too?
Not much happening to my portfolio. Tweaked some of my positions by adding to my preferreds positions. a small $5K 4.90% CD matured yesterday for me and rolled it this morning in a 5.35% treasury (4.375% coupon) maturing next October. August will see a lot of maturing treasuries in the 4.9-5.2% range in my accounts so will need to roll either back into treasuries from 3-9 months or maybe a CD or preferreds. It still seems weird to me to be able to get 5 to almost 6% in treasuries and CDs.