Risk-Off Monday

Good morning contrarians! Welcome to the Daily Contrarian, our morning look at events likely to move markets. It is Monday, March 10. Today’s Stocks On The Contrarian Radar©️ features PSTG 0.00%↑ and is available at the bottom of this page.

State of Play

Non-farm payrolls on Friday were decent enough to cause a small rally for stocks. The weekend provided some cooling inflation data from China. Negative inflation is usually a good thing, until it isn’t. For China, this may mean slowing growth, clearly not a good thing.

As we eye our board of indicators for signs of direction at 0650, risk-off is the story:

• Stock index futures are down, led by tech. The Nasdaq is down 1.3%, followed by the S&P 500 (-1%);

• Cryptos are dropping as well. Bitcoin is down 3% to drop below $83,000;

• Bonds are rallying, in keeping with the risk-off trend. The 10-year yield is down 7 basis points to 4.25% (yields move inversely to prices);

• Commodities aren’t looking great, with copper down 0.7% and WTI crude oil unchanged at $67/barrel.

Today’s Known Events

It’s a slow start to the week. All we have are some earnings and the interesting one isn’t until after the close. That would be Oracle (ORCL 0.00%↑).

The rest of the week is probably anchored by the release of the latest Consumer Price Index on Wednesday morning. The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, is out tomorrow. Earnings scattered throughout but nothing particularly groundbreaking there either: Dick’s Sporting Goods (DKS 0.00%↑) tomorrow, Adobe (ADBE 0.00%↑) on Wednesday, and Dollar General (DG 0.00%↑) on Thursday probably the most interesting.