Promoting Useful Knowledge

  I love finance because you never know what is coming even when you think you do. Last week was quite a bit volatile across many markets. Whether it was the BoC becoming the first and maybe only hawkish central bank moving the Canadian Dollar and rates or Biden’s new tax plan moving nearly everything else. Lumber be damned, new home sales were amazing compared to estimates 1.02M vs 886K expected. This was the highest since 2006. Existing home sales weren't as strong as expected though, but not too far off. However, we saw a second negative number on the percent change side. Looks like those 2020 robust numbers pulled out a lot of the supply, just like a lot of other products. I had my eye on the BTC correction, and thought that it’s path sort of resembles the ‘Happy Gilmore’ plot. If you’ve never seen it, watch the trailer here . Now give me a little space here, you’ll see. Happy Gilmore is a guy that sees an opportunity to correct a problem by joining a long established, sort of ...

  There were a few major events that moved markets last week. CPI numbers came in much stronger than expected. Over the next few months we should continue to see these big numbers with the 2020 comparables being so terrible. Whether or not the CPI actually measures inflation effectively is one thing, but the market actually does react to it. Coinbase direct listing was widely followed. It opened pretty strong and rose 30% on the first day, but it didn’t close anywhere near the highs. It closed about 10% off it’s open and 20% off the highs, but still in positive territory from the listing price. The listing seemed to provide steam to Bitcoin, as it hit a new record high of $63,000 coming into the listing. In not so good news, the week it went public, Coinbase experienced an outage as did Robinhood’s crypto services. Perhaps the publicity of Coinbase or maybe the Dogecoin Tweets by Elon Musk drove a huge demand for trading these assets. J&J experienced a setback with its version ...

  Another week with a record high for North American large cap equity indices. The SPX moved above 4,000 and the TSX above 19,000 for the first time ever. We closed just a tad off all time highs on both. The other two major indices NASDAQ and Russell 2000 have bounced off recent lows, but have yet to move above their previous highs. Gold reversed its down trend and both the Dollar and Rates have halted their uptrends. Vaccine rollout excitement seems to be driving sentiment, but a corporate tax hike proposal from the White House may have some investors on edge. One thing that’s becoming a trend even before the ‘Sell in May’ proverb has been a trend lower in volume in both the US and Canadian equities. Options volume, especially calls, has been on the decline as well. This week we have the start of Q1 Earnings’ Season, starting with the big banks. ECM has a light calendar, but a few are quite big. The largest and most anticipated is the Coinbase direct listing, which looks like it'...