Good morning contrarians! Welcome to the Daily Contrarian, our morning look at events likely to move markets. It is Thursday, Dec. 5. The Bottom Line segment of today’s podcast starts at (4:00), followed by Stocks on the Contrarian Radar©️ featuring EWQ 0.00%↑ at (7:22) for listeners who want to skip ahead.
State of Play
Stocks advanced yesterday with tech setting the pace. The Nasdaq, Dow, and S&P 500 closed at fresh record highs yet again. As we eye our board of indicators for signs of direction at 0700 all is quiet outside of the crypto sector, where the party is raging:
Bitcoin is up another 7% to trade around $102,500 an all-time high. Congrats Bitcoin Bros. You did it!
Stock index futures are flat as a board with no major US index moving more than 0.1% from their break-even points;
Commodities aren’t moving either with WTI crude oil down 0.7% to trade around $68/barrel. Copper is unchanged;
Bonds are selling off a tiny bit at the short end of the curve. The 2-year yield is up 3 basis points to 4.15%. The 10-year is up 2bps to 4.20% (yields move inversely to prices).
(“Bitcoin Bro $100K Party’ by author via Grok AI)
Today’s Known Events
We start once again with earnings:
Dollar General (DG 0.00%↑) just reported disappointing earnings and that stock is sinking in the pre-market. This makes DG an outlier versus fellow discount retailers Dollar Tree (DLTR 0.00%↑) and Five Below (FIVE 0.00%↑), both of which had positive results yesterday;
Kroger (KR 0.00%↑) also reports before the open at 0930;
After the close we’ll hear from Lululemon (LULU 0.00%↑), UiPath (PATH 0.00%↑), Ulta Beauty (ULTA 0.00%↑) and DocuSign (DOCU 0.00%↑).
Seeing how it’s Thursday we’ll get initial jobless claims at 0830. Economists who were surveyed expect 215,000 new claims, effectively in line with the 213,000 reported last week as well as with the four-week average of 217,000.
US trade balance is also out at 0830. The expectation here is for a trade deficit of $75.7 billion versus $84.4 billion reported last month.
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