/ December 17
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Tuesday:
Retail Sales MoM (0.5% exp.)
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Wednesday:
Building Permits (1.43M exp.)
Fed Interest Rate Decision (0.25% cut exp.)
FOMC Economic Projections
Fed Press Conference
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Thursday:
Initial Jobless Claims (240K exp.)
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Friday:
Core PCE Price Index MoM (0.2% exp.)Personal Income MoM (0.4% exp.)
Personal Spending MoM (0.5% exp.)
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Tuesday:
Cal-Maine Foods CALM
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Wednesday:
General Mills GIS
Micron Technology MU
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Thursday:
Nike NKE
Accenture ACN
CarMax KMX
Darden Restaurants DRI
FactSet FDS
Paychex PAYX
FedEx FDX
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Friday:
Carnival CCL
Winnebago WGO
Daily Briefing
*A healthy rebound occured yesterday, as the S&P 500 (+0.4%) and Nasdaq Composite (+1.5%) closed off session highs, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was trading higher initially, settled 0.3% lower; market participants took advantage of weakness following last week's pullback in the major indices; the "buy-the-dip" mentality also aligns with the seasonally strong period for equities that we are now entering (mid-December);
*At the outset, advancers were outpacing decliners by a 3-to-2 margin at both the NYSE and Nasdaq. At the close, decliners at the NYSE led advancers by a 3-to-2 ratio, while advancers continued to hold a fractional advantage at the Nasdaq;
*Rising interest rates, which surged last week following hotter-than-expected inflation data, dampened initial buying interest; the 10-year Treasury yield has edged up one basis point to 4.41%, while the 2-year yield has similarly risen one basis point to 4.25%;
*Despite the pressure from rising rates, some individual stocks traded sharply higher, providing integral support to the S&P 500 and Nasdaq; notable contributions came from Broadcom (AVGO, +11.2%), Alphabet (GOOG, +3.5%), and Tesla (TSLA, +6.1%), all of which reached fresh 52-week highs;
*Meanwhile, the equal-weighted S&P 500 (RSP) closed -0.3% lower and seven S&P 500 sectors closed with declines;
*The energy sector (XLE) registered the largest decline by a wide margin, dropping -2.2% amid sliding oil prices ($70.83/bbl, -0.46, -0.7%); the health care (XLV, -1.3%) and materials (XLB, -1.0%) sectors also logged solid declines; the XLV ETF (Healthcare) would normally be stopped out if it were part of any of our portfolios, as it has violated its lower channel trendline;
*The communication services (XLC, +1.3%), consumer discretionary (XLY, +1.7%), and information technology (XLK, +1.0%) sectors showed the largest advances among the four sectors in the green;
*Dip buying did occur at the dark pool level in some select names, like Alpha and Omega Semiconductors (AOSL, -4.82%); the stock fell on profit taking after announcing the world’s first 4-Phase controller for NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs;
*This week features a slate of market-moving events, including including the November Retail Sales, Industrial Production, Housing Starts, Existing Home Sales, and Personal Income and Spending reports, the latter of which features the Fed's preferred inflation gauge in the PCE Price Index;
*The main event will be the FOMC decision tomorrow, so investors have one more session to position ahead of the announcement;
*There is a 96.3% probability in the fed funds futures market of a 25 basis points rate cut on Wednesday, according to the CME FedWatch tool;
*TLT was able to maintain support, but only barely so; the benchmark long term government bonds ETF rose +0.3% on the day and is at the limit of being considered investible in our system; Enterprise decided to remove bonds from today’s allocation;
*Signal Sigma strategies will rebalance portfolios today, so look out for trade alerts in your inbox; we will not be reviewing these trades at the moment, since our main focus remains launching the new version of the app; we will most likely issue a trade alert for the Sigma Portfolio tomorrow;