股海一粟的博客
投资是一门艺术，投资是一所永远的学校。股海一粟第一次接触到股票还是在1988年，那时候上海只有老八股，没有正规的交易所。。。那一年股海一粟只有10岁。
正文
It has been a while that we see the market behave in such a quiet way. The Dow was swinging between plus 0.5% and minus 0.5% for the whole day and closed the day modestly up. We did get some mixed economic news but the spotlight of the day was in Washington, where the Fed Chairman and other officials testified before the Senate Banking Committee regarding the Bear Stearns collapse.
The weekly jobless claims came much worse than expected. Economists expected a reading of 365k but the actually number was 407K, the highest since Sep 2005. Also, the continuing claims jumped 97K to 2.94 million. It seems that last week’s surprising drop in weekly claims was an outlier and the job market needs more time before it can find a bottom. Although today’s worse-than-expected jobless claims didn’t have an immediate effect on tomorrow’s Non-farm payrolls report as the latter doesn’t include today’s data, it nonetheless will have an impact on the payroll reports for the next few months. Separately, we got a better reading on the Non-Manufacturing ISM report for March. The index came at 49.6, still indicating a contraction but better than consensus of 48.5. Among its components, the Business Activity was 52.5 compared to 50.8 in February while New Orders were 50.2 vs. 49.6. It is worth noting that the Price Index increased to 70.8 vs. 67.9, indicating inflation pressure is not ebbing despite a slow down in broad economy.
Commodities especially basic materials were doing well in today’s session. Financials were initially weak but turned higher after Merrill CEO indicated the firm had no plans of raising new capital. Similar to the equity market, there was little movement in the currency, treasury and commodity markets although several commodities did hit new historical highs. One final note: spreads between treasuries and average high-yield bonds narrowed over 100bps during the past two weeks, which may indicate a return to normal in the credit market.
The weekly jobless claims came much worse than expected. Economists expected a reading of 365k but the actually number was 407K, the highest since Sep 2005. Also, the continuing claims jumped 97K to 2.94 million. It seems that last week’s surprising drop in weekly claims was an outlier and the job market needs more time before it can find a bottom. Although today’s worse-than-expected jobless claims didn’t have an immediate effect on tomorrow’s Non-farm payrolls report as the latter doesn’t include today’s data, it nonetheless will have an impact on the payroll reports for the next few months. Separately, we got a better reading on the Non-Manufacturing ISM report for March. The index came at 49.6, still indicating a contraction but better than consensus of 48.5. Among its components, the Business Activity was 52.5 compared to 50.8 in February while New Orders were 50.2 vs. 49.6. It is worth noting that the Price Index increased to 70.8 vs. 67.9, indicating inflation pressure is not ebbing despite a slow down in broad economy.
Commodities especially basic materials were doing well in today’s session. Financials were initially weak but turned higher after Merrill CEO indicated the firm had no plans of raising new capital. Similar to the equity market, there was little movement in the currency, treasury and commodity markets although several commodities did hit new historical highs. One final note: spreads between treasuries and average high-yield bonds narrowed over 100bps during the past two weeks, which may indicate a return to normal in the credit market.
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