Wholesale Prices

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

State of Play

Stocks finished roughly unchanged yesterday thanks to a late-day rally, apparently spurred by reports of progress on ending the war in Ukraine. Earlier, hotter-than-anticipated CPI caused a sell-off. As we eye our board of indicators for signs of direction at 0645, all is pretty quiet:

• Stock index futures are flat with the exception of small caps. The Russell 2000 is up 0.4%;

• Commodities are moving lower again. WTI crude oil is down 1% to trade around $70.50/barrel. Copper is unchanged;

• Cryptos aren’t doing anything. Bitcoin is unchanged at $96,000;

• Bonds are seeing a few bids after selling off due to yesterday’s CPI print. The 10-year yield is down 3 basis points to 4.60% (yields move inversely to prices).

Today’s Known Events

Yesterday we had consumer prices in the form of the CPI. Today’s it’s the turn of producers with the PPI, out at 0830.

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

• 0.3% month-over-month headline PPI (0.2% last month)

• 0.3% MoM Core PPI (0.0%)

• 3.3% annualized Core PPI (3.5%)

It’s Thursday so we’ll get initial jobless claims at 0830 as well. The expectation here is for 217k new claims, effectively unchanged from last week’s 219k and right in line with the four-week average of 217k.

There are some earnings as well:

• Deere (DE 0.00%↑), the tractor maker, just reported mixed results and the stock is dropping in the pre-market, down 7% at the time of this writing;

• Datadog (DDOG 0.00%↑) and Crocs (CROX 0.00%↑) also report before the open at 0930;

• Coinbase (COIN 0.00%↑), Draftkings (DKNG 0.00%↑), Twilio (TWLO 0.00%↑), and Airbnb (ABNB 0.00%↑) are the highlights after the close this afternoon.

‘Producer prices’ by author via Grok AI