Last week offered some lessons in career management, economics, and investor impulse, among other things. Derek Jeter, the well-loved Yankees shortstop, finished the final home game of his career by smacking a game-winning hit. Throughout his last season, ticket prices for Yankees games soared on the secondary market with $16 bleacher seats selling for more than $200. By the end of the season, ticket vendors were asking as much as $11,000 a seat. (more…)
….has persisted for more than 30 years. It began when The Cosby Show was in its heyday, when the first Apple Macintosh computers arrived in homes, and when Clara Peller famously asked, “Where’s the beef?” in a popular television commercial. The bull market began late in 1981 when 30-year U.S. Treasury bond rates hit an all time high of 15.2 percent and 10-year Treasuries topped out at 15.8 percent. Thirty-three years later, in mid-2014, 30-year Treasuries and their 10-year brethren offered rates in the low single digits. (more…)
2013 came to a close with the US Federal Reserve finally putting investment markets out of their misery.
When Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, started talking about the tapering of quantitative easing (QE) last May, the markets reacted badly. It was not that anyone expected bond buying by the US central bank to carry on buying government and mortgage-backed bonds at the rate of $85bn a month for ever, it was just that there were serious doubts about what an end to QE would bring. May’s speech suggested the taper would start in September, but it was put on hold, allegedly because of concerns about the budgetary battles on Capitol Hill. That was another surprise, but not an unsettling one. (more…)
Really?!
Okay. Okay. If you’ve been trekking through Siberia or Patagonia for about a year, then maybe it surprised you to hear the minutes from the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting showed it expects to begin tapering Quantitative Easing (QE) in the coming months.
If it’s not stocks, it’s bonds!
In a turnaround worthy of Bruce Willis in a ‘Die Hard’ movie, expectations for second quarter’s corporate earnings growth soared from below expectations, on average, in the previous week to beating expectations last week. Earnings growth estimates shot up to 4.1 percent which was a significant change from last week’s 2.8 percent. Of the companies that have reported so far, more than one-half have performed better than expected – an improvement on the last four quarters’ performance.
The second quarter offered a level of drama often found in homes with teenagers.
When investors realised their good friend, quantitative easing, might have an earlier-than-expected curfew in the US, they threw a hissy fit that resounded through global markets. The outburst interrupted the trajectory of FTSE and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, which finished June lower after hitting highs in May. As stocks fell, yields on the benchmark 10-year government bonds hit a high.
