S&P 500

Via Simon Black of SovereignMan.com,

It’s my usual custom whenever I land at a major airport to stop by the rental car counters and inquire how much it costs to rent a vehicle.

For me this is a sort of informal, albeit imperfect, economic indicator.

High prices suggest strong demand from plenty of business travelers and tourists, which will likely have a positive economic impact.

Cheap prices, conversely, suggest that there’s something wrong.

Well, there’s definitely something wrong in Mexico.

Traders are on edge ahead of tomorrow's key address by President Trump to Congress, in which as Bloomberg writes "trillions are at stake."

Since Trump’s election, the S&P 500 has risen by 10%, posting 17 record closes in a rally that’s added $2.8 trillion in value to the U.S. equity market, with economists divided on how much of the rally is due to hopes from Trump's pro-growth promises, how much due to corporate earnings growth (which are expected to rise 12% from last year's energy-depressed levels), and how much due to the organic growth of the economy.

Submitted by Daniel Drew via Dark-Bid.com,

Warren Buffett released his annual letter over the weekend, in which he praised Jack Bogle as his "hero" for promoting index investing. The irony is that investors would have been better off buying Berkshire shares. Over the last 10 years, Berkshire stock is up 139% while the S&P 500 is up 71%. The real question is why Buffett just doesn't tout his own stock rather than promote index investing. He tries to explain himself:

It has now become a weekly ritual: Goldman warns the market is overvalued and poised for a selloff, market proceeds to ramp to new all time highs.

While over the past several years many have observed the peculiar last half-hour ramp in the stock market, leading to a variety of amusing knock-off phenomena, perhaps nowhere was it more noticeable than what happened on the last two Friday afternoons, and especially the most recent one when with the market down notably going into the last 30 minutes of trading, the Dow soared in the last minute, turning green with 7 seconds of trading left, continuing the streak of 11 consecutive all time highs, the longest such stretch since early 1987.