On Tuesday the Fed Powell will discuss US monetary policy and on Weds will announce whether he is keeping interest rates on hold or dropping them. In July Fed Powell lowered interest rates for the first time in a decade. Wall Street is expecting the same on Weds, pricing in an 86% chance of a quarter-basis point cut. If Fed Powell doesn’t continue to cut rates, many on Wall Street (and Trump) are saying the Feds will cause the next recession.
Interest rates and bond prices move in opposite directions. When interest rates fall, bond prices rise and when market interest rates rise, bonds fall (which is known as interest rate risk).
Lets say a treasury bond offers a 5% coupon rate, and one year later, interest rates fall to 4%. The bond will still pay a 5% coupon rate, making it more valuable than new bonds paying just a 4% coupon rate. If you sell the 5% bond before it matures, that bond will be in demand, so that bond will sell at a higher price. But what if interest rates rise from 5% to 6% If you sell the 5% bond, it will be competing with new treasury bonds that offer a 6% coupon rate. That 5% bond will be in less demand and will sell at a lower price.
The iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) is seeks to track the investment results of an index composed of U.S. Treasury bonds with remaining maturities greater than twenty years.
So, if Treasury yields are about to fall, that should mean that bond prices are about to rise. Similarly to the downtrend in place for yields that has yet to be broken, the 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) – despite selling off last week – is still above the uptrend that has been in place for most of the past year.
As Worth pointed out, each time the TLT has come close to that trend line, it has bounced off of it to the upside, and he’s wagering on it happening again.
“The betting is that TLT is going to be good for a bounce. So, I don’t see rates going more than about 1.95%, we’re close enough at this point. I think one wants to start rebuying TLT,” Worth said.
So based on the monthly chart Cart Worth’s trendline is just below the Gap Fill. However, the chart suggests to wait for price to come down to the monthly demand at $131.50 and go long.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advise. Do your own research before making investment decisions.
On Tuesday the Fed Powell
will discuss US monetary policy and on Weds will announce whether he is keeping
interest rates on hold or dropping them. In July Fed Powell lowered interest rates for
the first time in a decade. Wall Street
is expecting the same on Weds, pricing in an 86% chance of a quarter-basis
point cut.
If the US equity markets are going to continue their climb higher, the Russell 2000 must fall inline. The Russell 2000 index represents the largest 2000 small cap public companies in the US. But in recent months the Russell 2000 have been stubborn to rise with the DOW, NASDAQ and S&P 500 as indicated by the green line.
Usually towards the end of the business cycle, rising interest rates hurt smaller companies the most because they have a higher debt to earnings ratio and lower free cash flow relative to much larger companies. Also, smaller companies are more volatile and tend to react and respond to changes in economic conditions and changes in investor sentiment first. However, if rates are going to continue to get cut, that should help the Russell 2000 to finally join the party. And based on the Russell 2000 outpacing its friends last week, I think it things a rate cut is already “money in the bag.”
The iShares Russell 2000 ETF, which tracks the Russell 2000 Index of stocks with smaller market capitalizations, saw its largest weekly inflows in nearly a year during the week that ended September 6. Those inflows totaled $1.5 billion and followed a $340 million inflow during the final days of August. Since bottoming out on August 27, the iShares ETF has rallied nearly 9% compared to the S&P 500’s gain of 5% over the same period.
There is the possibility that the resurgence could be longer lasting if the Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut at the end of July is more than just a one-off and marks the beginning of a rate-cutting cycle.
Judging by history, further rate cuts would be supportive of small-cap equities. During the first year following the start of a Fed rate-cut cycle, small caps have risen on average 28% compared with just 15% for large caps, according to investment banking firm Jeffries, per the FT.
Fracking and horizontal drilling technology (which has created access to the once inaccessible shales of oil and gas) in the last 10 years has made the US a major player in the world of oil production.
The technology has bee so beneficial to the US, that in 2018, the US become the number one producer of oil in the world. However, I can’t leave Saudi Arabia out of this conversation. They are the number two producer of oil in the world at 12.4 millions barrels/day. As you know, the price of oil is probably one of the clearest examples of supply and demand. So say the oil rig count goes up in the US or Saudia Arabia increases oil production, the price of oil is surely to go down. However, if the oil rig count goes down or if the oil pipelines are sabotaged, supply will take a hit and oil prices will rise. This past Sat, drones attacked Saudia Arabia oil pipelines.
Drone strikes on key Saudi Arabian oil facilities, among the world’s largest and most important energy production centers, have disrupted about half of the kingdom’s oil capacity, or 5% of the daily global oil supply.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels on Saturday took responsibility for the attacks, saying 10 drones targeted state-owned Saudi Aramco oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais, according to the Houthi-run Al-Masirah news agency.
In a statement on Sunday, Saudi Arabian Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said that 5.7 million barrels a day of crude oil and gas production have been affected. The latest OPEC figures from August 2019 put the total Saudi production at 9.8 million barrels per day.
Yesterday was Chelsea’s game against Wolverhampton. Who would have ever thought Chelsea could win that game with a margin of three goals. It was unbelievable especially with the injury crisis within the Chelsea football club team.
It was a victory well deserved for the blues. They played really well. Their attacker was well proficient in front of goal and that gave them the edge to score as many as five goals in a single match against a side that haven’t lost a match at home for over eight months now. I think it is a good thing that the Chelsea manager decided to switch his formation from 4-2-3-1 to 3-4-3. However, I think Frank Lampard still need to work a lot on the defense side to avoid conceding too much goals.
I think the compactness of a playing as a team is better than other previous matches but believe they can do better with that. I think if the team can learn to be compact while playing, then that would really go a long way to help solve the issue of conceding too much goals. In general, the game a was an interesting one and the Chelsea team performed excellently and it was a victory well deserved for them.
If you still haven’t signed up on Uptrennd,sincerely your missing.
Uptrennd is a platform like Steem where you earn in various ways such as content creation.
I just withdrew 1170 1UP token worth $18, which you can actually earn within a week or two. Here is a proof to the transaction. 1UP token is listed on Coinmarketcap and can be traded on IDEX Exchange.
S&P 500 Smart Money Sentiment 9/12/19 – Is The Silver Breakout A Fakeout???
The Commitments of Traders (COT) is a weekly market report issued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) listing the positions held by commercial traders and the “Smart Money”, the hedge funds and bank institutions in various futures markets in the United States. Since the COT measures the net long and short positions held by speculative traders and commercial traders, it is a great resource to gauge sentiment in the Markets.
Since breaking out of the long term down trendline in July, Silver has climbed more than 30%. However, last week, Silver formed an inverted hammer candle on the weekly chart. A hanging man is a bearish reversal candlestick pattern that occurs after a price advance and hints at the reversal of an uptrend.
So is Silver’s breakout a fakeout?
Well, for the Silver Bulls out there, what we see is as price is increasing, so is the open interests, meaning the Smart Money is buying long futures contracts.
The buying frenzy is also being supported by the bullish sentiment, which has increased from 10% in June to almost 70% today.
But the raw data to put the Silver Bulls at ease. There was selling back in May, but since then, the Smart Money net positions continue to increase. Thus, the Smart Money has confirmed, this isn’t a fakeout, but a pullback before the continuation higher.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advise. Do your own research before making investment decisions.
A House of Commons committee has advised that loot boxes should be regulatedas gamblingand banned for children.
The recommendation features as part of the DCMSreport on immersive and addictive technologies and states that games featuring loot boxes that are paid for with real money (as opposed to earned as in-game rewards) should be marked as containing gambling and age-rated accordingly.
The report also touched on the concerning rise of deepfake videos, urging the government to include them as part of the duty of care principles for social media firms laid out in the online harms white paper.
Analysis and Comments
The most obviously impacted franchise would be EA’s FIFA, as Ultimate Team would presumably be captured by this proposal.
While not a helpful line for the broader industry, the regulatory overhang regarding loot boxes is not really news. Loot boxes are already banned in Belgium, which has resulted in several games being pulled from the market (as the only alternative would have been to obtain a gambling license).
In this case, the effectiveness of the measures will presumably be determined by their enforcement, as the rules could be easily flouted if parents or other adults allow their bank details to be used for under 18 year olds to purchase these type of features.
The country’s gaming trade body (UK Interactive Entertainment) said they would review the recommendations and “consult with the industry on how we demonstrate further our commitment to player safety – especially concerning minors and vulnerable people”. The government said it “will consider the committee’s report carefully before responding”.
After entering a deal in April 2018, Activision Blizzard and Nielsen have now released viewership figures (average-minute-audience) on the Overwatch League (OWL) for the first time.
The data compares digital streams last year vs. digital streams and linear broadcast this year, showing that the OWL averaged 313k viewers globally and 95k in the US, an annual increase of 18% and 34% increase, respectively.
Notably, the median age of OWL is 24, which according to Nielsen data is far younger than the other leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, the PGA Tour, and college football and basketball) which underscores the reach/impact esports have with younger demographics.
Analysis and Comments
The viewership figures are the most important metric when assessing an esport’s success; however, because companies and the media often provide different types of viewership figures with poor context, it is often unclear what thesenumbers actually mean.
As a result, streaming viewership is still often difficult to compare with traditional TV ratings, and previous attempts to do so have inflated the success of esports in problematic ways.
Activision Blizzard’s partnership with Nielsen is a big step in the right direction in establishing more usable and consistent metrics that will help better inform investors’ decisions (and will give them more confidence in the data).
Nielsen has been steadily growing its presence in the space and signed a deal with Riot Games earlier this year to measure League of Legends’ esports viewership – something we view as an exciting development as League is the world’s largest esport and has recently started introducing the franchise model to its national leagues as well.
In these vast age of internet, we would notice the daily massive increase in the number of people that makes use of social media platforms such as Instagram. However, despite the time and money people spend to use platforms like Instagram, they hardly get any reward in turn despite the high income they generate for developers of these platforms.
You don’t have to worry anymore about these issues. This is because a better alternative where you get to earn for doing the same things you do for free on Instagram and other social media platforms. That better alternative is called “Tata”.
What is Tata?
Tata is a blockchain-based platform that works more like steem where users get paid for creating and posting quality contents on the Tata platform. The users of Tata get to earn ACN crypto token for using the Tata application.
There is also a chat feature where by users get to engage with each other on the Tata platform. There are already thousands of users using the Tata platform and as such, it has been a perfect place for people to make new friends and connect with others across the entire world.
For you to get started on Tata, you are required to install the Tata App from play store (for Android users) or App Store (for iPhone users). Then create an account and choose your area of interest.
Earning on Tata Platform
For you to earn on the Tata platform, you are required to download TTC connect from play store (for Android users) or App Store (for iPhone users).
Open the Tata App, click on the last tab at the bottom right and click on earn reward.
Fill your KYC details and upload necessary documents. Note that it takes up to 48hours for it to be approved.
Comparing Tata with Steem
Tata works more like Steem where you get paid for content creation. But in the case of Tata, picture and video contents are mainly the point of focus. The chat feature within Tata makes it a better social media platform compared to Steem. Tata is a great platform and I see a lot of potentials in it.
New products and services keep unfolding day by day as they are brought into existence by various companies and developers. However, only a few of those products get the required hype to reach a wider audience and this may be due to poor digital marketing and so on. The entire team of Hunt Platform took note of this particular challenge and they decided to come up with Reviewhunt.
What is Reviewhunt
Reviewhunt is a platform powered by the steem blockchain that is built for both Makers and Hunters to provide solutions to the primary challenges they are currently on the blockchain. Reviewhunt create the avenue for Hunters to get rewarded for accomplishing some certain task listed by the makers on the reviewhunt platform, thereby creating the buzz and fostering the hype Makers (such as companies and developers) need for their products and services to get to a wider audience.
With Reviewhunt, it is a win-win situation for both the hunters and the makers. Another important you should note is that hunters get paid in form of the Hunt Platform native utility token known as HUNT token.
Hunt is a ERC-20 utility tokens which serves as a native currency of the SteemHunt and ReviewHunt platforms. Hunt token is currently listed on Daybit and Probit with more listing to come in the nearest future.
How to get started on Reviewhunt
Note that you will need to open a Steem account (if you don’t have one yet) for you to use Reviewhunt. For those who have before, you are goods to go like that.
Kindly Sign up using my referral link. You either sign up as hunter or a maker. Note that you constantly get 5% of all your referred friend earning on the platform as a hunter.
Then sign in and sync your reviewhunt account with your steem account via steemconnect by clicking on dashboard, and then logging into your profile to initialize this.
Makers do not have much to do on the platform yet since it is still in a closed beta launch for them. However, hunters will need to connect their social media account such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Steemit, Reddit, Medium and Twitch via the buzz channel section under dashboard.
After that, hunters are required to join a campaign of your choice where by you get to carryout certain optional tasks, and then you get paid in form of hunt token for task accomplished at the end of the campaign.
Final Thought
Reviewhunt is a platform that has come to offer a win-win situation for both the hunters and the makers. The hunters get rewarded for their actions while the makers get the hype they need for their products. Thereby, making it a profitable one for both sides.
The financial theme in 2019
has been the inverted yield curve. Why
is it so important…it’s only predicted the 5 or 6 recessions, meaning it has
given no false signals going back 50 years.
Another signal of a pending recession came last week when the US purchasing-managers
index contracted to 49.9 in August from 50.4 in July, the first such shrinkage
in almost 10 years.
The discussion of inverted yield curves is so important that I decided to repost my post on the topic from more than a year ago…withouth further ado.
A bond is like an IOU given to you by a bank. When you lend the bank money, they’ll give you back that same amount at a later time along with a fixed amount of interest. For example, if you bought a two-year bond for $100 with a 2% annual return on it, you get $104.04 back after two years. Bonds have a number of benefits that justify the small rate of return. Government bonds are stable investments and bonds issued by the US government have never defaulted…YET.
The term yield curve refers to the relationship between the short- and long-term interest rates of fixed-income securities issued by the U.S. Treasury. Typically, short-term interest rates are lower than long-term rates reflecting higher yields for longer-term investments due to the higher risks associated with long dated maturities. Also, in a growing economy, investors demand higher yields at the long end of the curve to compensate for the opportunity cost of investing in bonds versus other asset classes.
As the economic cycle begins to slow, the upward slope of the yield curve tends to flatten as short-term rates increase and longer yields stay stable or decline slightly. As concerns of an impending recession increase, investors tend to buy long Treasury bonds as a safe harbor from falling equities markets. As more and more investors begin to buy long-term bonds, the Federal Reserve lowers the yield rates. Since investors aren’t buying a lot of short-term U.S. Treasury bonds, the Fed will make those yields higher to attract them. Eventually, the yield on short-term bills rises higher than the yield on long-term bonds, and the yield curve inverts.
The inverted yield curve is the single greatest indicator of a coming bear market. The inverted yield curve has predicted the past 5 recessions going back to the late 1970’s. Every time the yield curve turns negative, a recession has occurred in the near future. Since 1956, equities have peaked six times after the start of an inversion in the yield curve and the economy has fallen into recession within seven to 24 months.
The most recent inverted yield curve first appeared in August 2006, as the Fed raised short-term interest rates in response to overheating equity, real estate and mortgage markets. The inversion of the yield curve preceded the peak of the S& P 500 in October 2007 by 14 months and the official start of the recession in December 2007 by 16 months, eventually leading to the Great Recession in which the S&P 500 dropped 50%.
This next inversion is upon us right now. Based on history, I’m predicting the yield curve will invert by the end of the year, the Markets will peak in 2019 and we will be in a recession in 2020 (a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters).
However, this time around balance sheets of the Fed and Treasury extremely over leveraged right from the start. Our national debt over $20 trillion dollars and the Fed’s balance sheet at $4.5 trillion. Thus, when the yield curve inverts for the third time this century, you can expect unprecedented chaos in markets and the economy to follow shortly after because the yield curve will not only invert at a much lower starting point than at any other time in history. This represents a huge opportunity for those that can identify these inflection points and know where to invest. Be sure I will be here to tell you those opportunities and how to protect your capital.
