Author: starbpo

Financials, industrials and materials sectors are the most consistent Trump trades. The S&P 500 SPX 1.08% has gone down when Donald Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 election have gone up, and up when they have gone down. Traders in stocks need to know this because the political scene in the U.S. is changing so quickly, especially now that Joe Biden has dropped out of the race for president. A lot of traders make decisions about their portfolios based on their political views instead of an objective analysis of the facts. For this column, I looked at how the weekly…

The higher a stock soars, the more likely it is to plunge. An unknown sentiment index says that the U.S. stock market will probably do worse than average over the next 24 months. This includes 25 popular, high-flying U.S. stocks, such as Nvidia. 4.76 percent for NVDA, SMCI for Super Micro Computer, and AVGO for Broadcom. The market index, called the “U.S. Crash Confidence Index,” was created by Robert Shiller at Yale University 40 years ago and is now taken care of by the Yale School of Management. A group of individual and institutional investors are asked every month, “What…

On Sunday, President Joe Biden dropped out of the race for president in 2024 and immediately backed Vice President Kamala Harris. Investors should expect a Harris administration to support the economic policies that Biden put in place during his term. These policies include the Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies for electric cars and green energy projects, more money for the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats, taxes on stock buybacks, and a 15% corporate minimum tax for big businesses. A Harris presidency would basically be the same as the Biden administration, according to Isaac Boltansky, director of policy research at…

An issue with the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. caused Microsoft Corp. systems all over the world to go down. This could be the biggest outage ever. CrowdStrike’s stock CRWD, -11.10% dropped sharply on Friday after the outage. It had its worst day in more than 19 months. Computers that were powered by Microsoft MSFT, -0.74% were affected by the huge outage. It messed up flights and hurt banks, publishers, and many other businesses around the world. The outages were blamed on CrowdStrike by both governments and airlines. CrowdStrike’s stock fell 11.1% on Friday, the most in one day since…

If Donald Trump wins the election and lets Chinese cars into the U.S., Tesla Inc. and other companies that make electric cars will have to deal with a lot of price competition. Trump said he was okay with Chinese automakers moving production to the U.S. from Mexico in his speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night. He said this would create jobs in the U.S. auto industry. Trump also said he would put tariffs on Mexican auto imports to make it harder for Americans to buy cars made in other countries. Trump said, “Plants will be built in…

Card fees brought in more than $2 billion for American Express Co. for the first time in the second quarter. This was the 24th straight quarter of double-digit growth from card fees. “A super important metric for us,” said Chief Financial Officer Christophe Le Caillec, “the fact that we made over $2 billion in card-fee revenue. It means that people are buying into the value proposition and renewing their membership.” In the second quarter, Amex AXP, -2.74% saw “a lot of stability” in spending trends. Customers from the United States who travelled abroad and younger cardholders in general did especially…

New evidence that inflation is going down in the U.S. comes from the consumer price index, which fell for the first time in four years. The drop was mostly due to lower prices for petrol RB00, -0.18% and used cars. The June CPI report also showed that housing costs were rising more slowly. Even though the Federal Reserve doesn’t like the CPI as a measure of inflation, Thursday’s report makes it more likely that the bank will lower interest rates by September. A few weeks ago, the CPI report would have been very helpful for President Joe Biden’s campaign to…

Five of the Federal Reserve’s 12 regions reported flat or falling activity in the last two months, according to a survey released by the Fed on Wednesday. This suggests that the U.S. economy has been slowing down. Three more weak districts were found than in the last survey, which was done in May. According to the Fed’s Beige Book survey, people are becoming more frugal, which means that housing spending hasn’t changed much. The Fed survey found that in almost every district, stores were discounting items or price-conscious customers were only buying necessities, settling for lower quality items, buying fewer…

The numbers: For the second month in a row, industrial production went up in June. This was due to more people buying cars and air conditioners because it has been so hot this summer. The Federal Reserve said that output went up 0.6% last month, following a much bigger rise in May. The Wall Street Journal polled economists and found that they thought production would rise by 0.3%. Important facts: As people turned up their air conditioners to escape the summer heat, gas and electric utilities saw a 2.8% rise in production. Government records show that June was the hottest…

Last week, 243,000 Americans applied for unemployment benefits, which was the same number as the previous week and the highest number in almost a year. This was due to a rise in new jobless claims in Texas after Hurricane Beryl hit the state on July 8. The number of new claims went up by 20,000 in the seven days ending July 13. This is up from 223,000 the week before, the government said Thursday. Even if the hurricane’s effects are taken into account, the number of new claims seems to have gone up from very low levels earlier in the…