00:00 Speaker A
US stocks closing lower to start the week. Let’s bring in our data and markets editor Jared Blickry. So Jared, a bit of a blah day for markets, I would say.
00:11 Jared Blickry
Well, you know, I might have I was excited on the open because we got a we got a pop in tech, we got a record high in the Nasdaq. Uh not only the Nasdaq composite, but the Nasdaq 100. And you can see that. That was shortly after the open. It didn’t take much. But, you know what, we slid into the close and so it’s kind of a meh close to a meh day. And this is what we have in bull markets. Not every day is exciting in the indices. Sometimes you got to peel back the hood and check out what’s going on underneath. And I’m going to show you the semiconductors. Semiconductors also kind of sputtered out towards the end. Nvidia was looking somewhat solid all day, but then kind of slipped into the close. We had some favorable news about chip stocks that we were talking about all day. Intel and and Micron were kind of the stars of this. But then you take a look at software and you got some bigger losses here, and that’s kind of what I was looking at. And this reminded me of some of the boards we had last week. Not all tech is the same, semiconductors more cyclical. But what we’ve seen is software, the recurring software names just haven’t performed as well recently. Oracle is a bit of an exception here along with Take Two. Always exceptions, but the norm is, you know, you get in a bull market, you have rotation and that is the lifeblood of the markets. And so today we’re just kind of rotating a little bit.
02:33 Speaker A
Right, it’ll be interesting what happens tomorrow, too, because we’ll have that consumer price index, CPI, that’s fueling a lot of the debate when it comes to what the Fed is going to do in September.
02:45 Jared Blickry
Exactly. And that brings me to point two, which is are we going to get that Federal Reserve Reserve cut? And it’s interesting, not only are we thinking about September, we’re thinking about all the way next May, when we get a new Fed share, assuming it happens May and not sooner. But the BFA Global Fund Manager Survey, which we’ve been covering throughout the day here, they they pull all these big investors, and this is what they’re expecting for the next Fed share. They’re going to are we going to see quantitative easing again or yield curve control? Both of those are extraordinary measures and uh yield curve control is about kind of containing those long-term interest rates that we have um, you know, they’ve been surging at various times. We’ve seen the 30 year above 5% and that’s been a concern for markets. So 54% are saying yes, we’re going to see extraordinary measures versus 36%. No, that is becoming a consensus opinion. I also want to add to this. We did have a Stocks and Translation sit down today with uh Colin Martin over at Schwab and we talked about all of this stuff in addition to these Fed rate cuts. Here’s what he had to say.
04:40 Colin Martin
Right now, let’s say you can get a T bill, three month T bill, we’ll say at four and a quarter percent close to the Fed funds rate in a few months, when that comes due, maybe it’s 4% or maybe it’s less. So reinvestment risk in a declining short-term interest rate environment means that if you’re holding short-term investments, you might see your income decline over time.
05:19 Jared Blickry
If you’ve ever wondered what the yield curve is, what it means, what quantitative easing is, what yield curve control means, we break it all down. That episode is dropping tomorrow, August 12th in the morning, so.
05:32 Speaker A
Love it, Jared. Give me all the shameless plugs. But it has been interesting to look at the long-term yields, right? Because largely they moved sideways since the start of the year. Yes, we’ve had pops here and there, but now we seem to be pretty chill. But one thing that hasn’t moved sideways is crypto, right? I mean, continuing to surge.
06:03 Jared Blickry
That brings us to our next point. Cryptocurrency got a little bit of a jump today. It also kind of fizzled, but uh it retained more of its territory. And let’s go to our crypto board here and we’ll take a look at Bitcoin, kind of the Kahuna here. But Ethereum really caught my interest. So here we go. We got this pop around midnight 1:00 AM and this just kind of fizzled out here. But check out the year to date. There is no denying that this is a a nice bull market here. And we’re just kind of trying to struggle and struggling to get beyond this resistance area about 120,000. You know, it’s been higher, but this is uh kind of par for the course. Crypto will go sideways for a while, a little bit down, scare people, shake people out, and then it pops higher. So are we seeing the next beginning of that in Bitcoin? I don’t know. But check out Ethereum because Ethereum has finally exploded to the upside above 4,000. And that is not a record high, but 4,500 is a record high. Now that this resistance has been cleared, I think it’s kind of easy sailing to get to 4,500. That’s where the rubber meets the road. We’ve also seen pickups in all these other currencies, uh the altcoins for instance, and we’ll just have to see. I like to see breadth on these moves. Not a lot of breadth right now, but we have seen it within the last month, so we’ll have to see if that continues.
08:07 Speaker A
Great point here. I mean, the focus is usually on Bitcoin, the star of the show, but Ethereum.
08:14 Jared Blickry
With the stable coins, you got to look at ether now.
08:17 Speaker A
That’s true. Absolutely, Jared. Well, thank you so much.