Submitted by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,
Earlier this week, I noted that due to the technical breakout of the market above the downtrend line from last May, an increase in exposure to equity risk was required. To wit:
“With the breakout of the market yesterday, and given that ‘short-term buy signals’ are in place I began adding exposure back into portfolios. This is probably the most difficult ‘buy’ I can ever remember making.
Coming off big wins in New York this week, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton look to move one step closer to the nomination next Tuesday as five states (Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island) will be choosing their candidate.
The New York Times digs into Clinton’s foreign policy hawkishness:
Her affinity for the armed forces is rooted in a lifelong belief that the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national interests, that American intervention does more good than harm and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as Bush once put it, into “any dark corner of the world.” Unexpectedly, in the bombastic, testosterone-fueled presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk left in the race [bold mine-DL].
The biggest catalyst for overnight markets, first reported on this site, was the announcement by Kuwait that its oil workers had ended their strike which disrupted oil production in the 4th largest OPEC producer for 3 days cutting it by as much as 1.7 mmb/d, and had served to offset the negative news from the Doha debacle. Kuwait Petroleum also added that it would boost output to 3m b/d within 3 days, which in turn has pressured the price of oil overnight, and the May WTI contract was back to just over $40 at last check, sliding 2%.
Dan Drezner considers the possibility that some Republican policy elites could start moving to the Democrats, but remains skeptical:
The thing is, that polarization has been going on for four decades now. Elites within the major political parties of 2016 are more ideologically distant than they were in, say, 1971. Indeed, this election cycle has exacerbated that polarization at the presidential level. So disaffected GOP intellectuals would have to travel a much longer ideological space to feel comfortable as Democrats.