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Global equity markets fought off quite a hard hit last week. Almost every major market was off 2% or more at their lows on Tuesday. But as Rocky Balboa said, “it ain't about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” Well equities seem to be able to take quite a punch right now. Looks like this rebound caught a few by surprise, see this Zero Hedge article . Looking at major global indices, most fought their way back to close up 1-2%. The one exception was China’s Hang Seng and it also started this week off roughly. As I write, Europe is also mostly down again. Can the equity markets hold on? Something not holding on is the deals market. It's been on fire and looks to be continuing. Yet another big deal hit the tape last week. Zoom Video (ZM) announced it would acquire Five9 in a $14.7B all-stock deal. This is just another in a long line of deals hitting the tape this year, as we’ll see below. For this week, it will mainly be Earnings result...

Richard Branson went into space and Virgin Galactic stock (SPCE.K) paid the price. Well, that’s not exactly how it went, but I do think it might have had something to do with it. As David Bowie said, "Am I sitting in a tin can far above the world, planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do". My thoughts are that people may have seen what a $250k trip gets you. While it may be cool, there aren’t too many that might have an interest or the bank account for this. On top of this, the company quickly followed up with a $500M secondary offering . I’m not even sure Ground Control will be able to help this company. Also, if you were able to watch Fed Chairman Powell in front of Congress this week, you are hard core. I cannot stand these knuckleheads in Washington with their grandstanding in front of the press and asking some of the dumbest questions. I couldn’t even watch the TV with the sound off. The worst I read about was talking at him (you read ‘at’ there correctly) about...

  Last week was a weird one for me. Coming off vacation then quickly into a holiday weekend, I think my brain has hit full summer mode when it comes to markets. I’m only half paying attention to the details. There are a couple of things that were hard not to pay attention to though. OPEC+ and oil, which hit a near term high of 77 in early AM trading on Tuesday, but then traded off about 10% during the week. Saudi Arabia and UAE are battling over production and it’s putting OPEC+ at risk. I don’t think it’s a large risk, because it benefits all those involved. However, there’s the story of the scorpion and the frog . The other things on the list to watch for me is China. First, they changed the rules on Crypto and now they’re pressuring foreign listed companies. DiDi got crushed after their $14 IPO. It was down about 20%. This follows the whole Any Financial and Jack Ma situation. The iShares China large cap ETF (FXI) is down 9% over the last two weeks. I think this continues, but t...

  Today is a holiday in the States, but I still wanted to share some of the best things I read last week. I’ll be skipping much of the rest of the normal sections in my posts. Honestly, coming off vacation last week, I didn’t pay much attention to what happened in markets last week anyway. Earnings Watch As we’re basically done with Q1 earnings, I thought it would be good to take a look at how things went using Refinitiv’s Starmine SmartEstimate. I took the Russell 3000 names with three or more analysts whose last fiscal quarter ended in February, March, and April. Here are some of the stats. The Surprise column is beat or miss on the Starmine Preferred Earnings field. This mainly is EPS, but helps with REITs and others that don’t use EPS as their main item. The Price change is the reaction on first trade post reporting in a matching direction. Then we see that in percentage terms. So only 56% of the names that beat traded up on the first trade. Next we have the Starmine +/- 2% Pr...