Having seen New Home Sales disappoint and Existing Home Sales crash in November, Pending Home Sales plunged 0.9% MoM (against expectations of a 0.7% MoM rise). Having plateaued in October near 8-month lows, today's huge miss was driven by a plunge in sales in The West (-5.5%) and NorthEast (-3.0%). Home sales rose just 2.6% YoY - the weakest since October 2014.
In mid-August we warned that Noble Group's downgrade to junk by one or more rating agencies, was inevitable, a downgrade which finally took place yesterday when Moody's downgraded the firm from Baa3 to Ba1, keeping it on outlook negative (we expect S&P to follow suit in the next few days).
Sell Mortimer, Sell!
Traders are selling stocks...
And bonds (no safe haven there)
And gold (no safe haven there)
As Crude tumbles...
Even as the dollar drops..
And Europe is getting slammed...
Charts: Bloomberg
Last week, when the S&P rallied 2.8%, the smartest money in the room sold. At least, that's what happened according to BofA's equity and quant team, which provides a weekly snapshot of what its clients do in any given period.
Here are the details:
On Tuesday, we took a close look at the forecast for the Russian economy given various assumptions about the price of oil in 2016.
While Russia has thus far managed to weather the crude storm relatively well (indeed, Moscow is now pumping more crude than ever before and expects oil exports to rise for the first time in six years in 2015), the numbers do not lie.