Producer Prices, Jobless Claims

Good morning contrarians! Welcome to the Daily Contrarian, our morning look at events likely to move markets. It is Thursday, March 13. Today’s Stocks On The Contrarian Radar©️ segment features KMPR 0.00%↑ and starts at the bottom of this page.

State of Play

Yesterday saw a rally in tech stocks as the rest of the market was left behind. Staples actually dropped with bond prices. As we eye our board of indicators for signs of direction at 0705, all is quiet:

• Stock index futures are flat as a board, with no major US index moving at all from the break-even point;

• Commodities aren’t doing anything either. Copper is unchanged. WTI crude oil down 0.5% to trade around $67/barrel;

• Cryptos too are flat. Bitcoin unchanged to trade around $83.000;

• Bonds are consolidating after yesterday’s sell-off. The 10-year yields 4.33%. It was in the low 4.2s as recently as a couple of days ago.

Today’s Known Events

We start with earnings:

• Weibo (WB 0.00%↑), the Chinese social media platform, earlier beat analyst estimates even as its advertising revenues dropped. The stock is rising in the pre-market. More good news for China bulls, presumably;

• Dollar General (DG 0.00%↑), a sizable position in The Contrarian’s portfolio, just reported mixed results but importantly had positive same-store-sales and the stock is moving a big higher in the pre-market;

• After the close the highlights are DocuSign (DOCU 0.00%↑) and Ulta Beauty (ULTA 0.00%↑)

• TransAct Technologies (TACT 0.00%↑), a company none of you have likely heard of but which occupies a small portion of The Contrarian’s portfolio, also reports after 1600 this afternoon.

Yesterday we had consumer prices, today it’s the turn of producers. The PPI is out at 0830. This will likely be completely ignored by the market even though it is the more leading indicator for inflation under the premise that producers pass higher costs off to consumers.

Anyway, the numbers we’re looking for according to a survey of economists:

• 0.3% month-over-month headline PPI (0.4% last month)

• 0.3% MoM core PPI (0.3%)

• 3.3% year-over-year headline PPI (3.5%)

• 3.6% YoY core PPI (3.6%)

Seeing how it’s Thursday we’ll also get initial jobless claims. The expectation here is for 226k new claims, up a bit from the 221k recorded last week and just north of the four-week average of 224k.

“Confused trader studies wayward charts” by author via Grok AI