Via FactSet's Director of ETFs, Dave Nadig,
This week, the SEC gave us a belated Christmas present. But what does it actually portend?
The present in question is an 88-page "Research Note" from the SEC's Division of Trading and Markets titled "Equity Market Volatility on August 24, 2015." It's an innocuous-enough title, but for us market-structure wonks, it's kind of a big deal.
Just before the aborted Santa Rally took off in earnest, on December 23 the famous US economic growth prognosticators at the Atlanta Fed (famous because unlike Wall Street they actually are right) slashed its Q4 GDP forecast from 1.9% to 1.3% citing weakness in real consumer spending and poor existing-home sales.
Saudi Arabia just doesn’t know when to quit.
The kingdom’s plan to deliberately suppress crude prices in an effort to bankrupt the US shale space and preserve market share has cost Riyadh dearly over the past 12 months. The country’s budget deficit for 2015 ballooned to some 15% of GDP as oil revenue collapsed. For 2016, the deficit is expected to come in at a still elevated 13% of economic output.
There is a saying that as January goes, so goes the full year market. But what about just the first day of January?
Courtesy of Reuters' Jamie McGeever, here is a quick snapshot of the worst opening days for the US stock market in the past century.
As of this moment, the S&P is down just about 2.4%. If the market closes here, that would make it a worse first day of trading than in such "dramatic" years as 2008 and 1933.
Following China's disappointing drop in Manufacturing PMI overnight, this morning started off poorly with Canada's PMI crashing to its lowest reading since records began at 47.5. Then US Manufacturing PMI tumbled to 51.2 - its lowest print since October 2012 (with US factory orders collapsing to weakest since 2009).