Good morning contrarians! Welcome to the Daily Contrarian, our morning look at events likely to move markets in the day ahead. Today is Monday, Nov. 13. The Bottom Line segment of today’s podcast starts at (3:31) for listeners who want to skip ahead.
State of Play
Stocks put in a big rally on Friday, as had been presaged by Bitcoin prices. It was a pretty quiet weekend and as of 0635 futures markets are pretty quiet as well:
Stock index futures are pointing to a lower open, with small caps leading the drop. The Russell 2000 is down 0.4% whilst S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures are down about 0.2% each;
Commodities are showing some signs of life with copper up 1% and WTI crude oil up 0.2% to trade north of $77/barrel;
Bonds are unchanged. The 2-year yields 5.06% whilst the 10-year yield is 4.63%;
Cryptos aren’t doing much. Bitcoin is down 0.7% to trade around $36,900.
Known Events
It’s a pretty quiet day ahead of a busy week. We do have a pair of Fed speakers today:
Governor Lisa Cook is scheduled to speak today at 0850 at a conference on “Nontraditional Data, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing in Macroeconomics”
Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr testifies before the Senate Banking Committee at 1000.
There are a few earnings as well. Before the open Tyson Foods (TSN 0.00%↑) and Tower Semiconductor (TSEM 0.00%↑) report. Those are the biggest ones today. Most of the action is weighted toward the middle of the week with big-box retailers.
The Bottom Line©️
Friday’s rally was broad and follows two weeks of solid gains for stocks. There is some talk of FOMO returning and this leading to a year-end rally. That’s the kind of talk that contrarians look for to indicate a top of some kind. So far it’s just the Wall Street Journal reporting this, so there is that. Once the mainstream media and broader public catches on it’s definitely over.
For today it doesn’t look like much in terms of known event. We may be in a bit of a holding pattern until tomorrow’s CPI print.
Housekeeping
Obviously this is not investment advice (duh). Do your own research, make your own decisions.
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