Business

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Next week the Janet Yellen and her minions are expected, with 100% certainty, to lift the Fed funds rate by another 0.25% to 1.00%.

To summarize - this week saw chaos in emerging market stocks, high yield credit, Treasuries, crude, copper, Chinese money markets, and risk-parity funds... and US stocks hung in there:

All we can say is...

With oil's recent somnolent, low-vol levitation at their back, the number of hedge funds and other speculators who were soothed by the gradual move higher and betting on the success of OPEC reflationary strategy, had recently grown to an all time high, as seen in the chart below showing the number of long net-spec positions in the combined oil futures market.

So when the price of oil unexpectedly tumbled on Wednesday, then continued to slide over the next two days, many were wondering if this sharp reversal in prices would unleash a margin-call driven liquidation scramble.

Authored by Daniel Drew via Dark-Bid.com,

As the market meanders its way through a post-earnings, pre-Fed no man's land, I couldn't help but wonder if this was a unique aimlessness or a seasonal pattern.

The market is partly driven by quarterly earnings cycles, and one has to wonder, "Does the earnings hype always live up to expectations?" Not only do individual stocks move up and down around earnings announcements, but the entire market exhibits certain behavior as well.

For 45 years - until Alan Greenspan in 1994 - the average wealth-to-income of American households had held steady around 4.9x - but as of Q4 2016, for the first time in US history, household wealth has reached a point where it is 6.5 times large than inflation-adjusted household disposable income in America.