A daily market update from FS Insight — what you need to know ahead of opening bell
“Usually the opposite of what we fear is our greatest fear.” ― Charles F. Glassman
Overnight
Swiss franc depreciated in nominal and real terms, SNB’s Schlegel says
China at the World Court: Palestinians have the right to ‘armed struggle’ against Israelis
US to sanction Iran for backing Russia’s war in Ukraine
Summers warns markets may be underpricing risk of disorder
Biden grants gasoline shift to boost ethanol in Corn Belt
U.S. commercial property foreclosures spike in January
Economic confidence among small business owners hits highest level since Biden took office
IMF staff reach agreement with Ukraine on $880m disbursement
Vice Media laying off hundreds of staffers, ceasing to publish on its website
First news
- Walmart sloughs off transportation assets to a trusted partner, expects business as usual
- Elon Musk is on a rocket ship toward the voting control of Tesla he wants
- Matter-antimatter experiment that suspends particles for study might have implication for markets, but don’t hold your breath.
Charts of the Day
MARKET LEVELS
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| Date | Time | Description | Estimate | Last |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2/26 | 10AM | Jan New Home Sales | 684.0 | 664.0 |
| 2/26 | 10AM | Jan New Home Sales m/m | 3.0 | 8.0 |
| 2/27 | 8:30AM | Jan P Durable Gds Orders | -4.5 | 0.0 |
| 2/27 | 10AM | Feb Conf Board Sentiment | 114.8 | 114.8 |
| 2/28 | 8:30AM | 4Q S GDP QoQ | 3.3 | 3.3 |
| 2/29 | 8:30AM | Jan PCE m/m | 0.3 | 0.2 |
| 2/29 | 8:30AM | Jan Core PCE m/m | 0.39 | 0.17 |
| 2/29 | 8:30AM | Jan PCE y/y | 2.4 | 2.6 |
| 2/29 | 8:30AM | Jan Core PCE y/y | 2.8 | 2.93151 |
MORNING INSIGHT
Good morning!
Yesterday showed there’s still gas in the tank of the current rally (17 weeks now). NVDA was good EPS = rising stock. Warning sign is stocks falling on good news. With NVDA -3.46% EPS behind us, the focus will shift back to macro and inflation and Fed. Generally, we see potential positive surprise for Feb CPI (lower than consensus).
Click HERE for more.
TECHNICAL
Emerging markets have slowly but surely joined the rally party, and much of this is China-related after 4 of 5 weeks of gains off the lows. EEM is set for its highest weekly close since last spring. While some structural progress is needed to expect a large intermediate-term rally (and this will involve USD rolling over), we expect EEM 1.02% to rally to $41.50 from current 40.63, around 2.5%, but no real resistance here after this breakout, and we expect this to push even higher near-term. In the bigger scheme of things, above $42 is a longer-term green-light signal for EEM and Emerging markets in general.
CRYPTO
FIL Presents Compelling Upside
What is Filecoin and How Does It Work? Filecoin leverages blockchain technology to create a decentralized storage market. It allows anyone to participate as storage providers, who earn FIL by offering their unused storage to clients. Clients pay providers to store or distribute data, with transactions and proofs of storage recorded on the Filecoin blockchain. The network’s unique consensus mechanism, Proof-of-Replication (PoRep) and Proof-of-Spacetime (PoSt), ensures data is stored correctly and securely over time.
Filecoin Traction Filecoin witnessed significant growth last year across several key performance metrics. The network saw a substantial increase in total storage capacity, reaching over 1,800 PiB (pebibytes), indicating a robust and growing network of storage providers. There was a marked rise in storage utilization, and the number of active storage deals, reflecting increased adoption and usage of the Filecoin network for decentralized storage needs.
Click HERE for more.
FIRST NEWS
Hitching on a Truck They Used to Own. As Walmart treads on Amazon’s new turf – ads – it is allowing a specialty transport company to buy its intermodal container and chassis fleets as part of a new multiyear shipping deal with J.B. Hunt Transport Services; also as part of a possibly strategic shedding of assets. The companies have worked closely for decades and count on the new intermodal agreement to deepen their ties, increasing the amount of volume and number of capacity commitments. The deal will also bolster a truck-rail operation that is Hunt’s biggest business segment by revenue, accounting for $6.2 billion last year, making up nearly half of the company’s top line from more than two million loads handled. As the broader U.S. intermodal market, a linchpin of operations transferring imported containers from seaports to inland distribution centers, has stumbled in recent years, Hunt may be looking for increased economies of scale. It’s also working on expanding a long-term agreement with BNSF Railway on intermodal transport out of the U.S. West Coast. The opportunity for Hunt may be in converting freight from highway into intermodal. The advantage for Walmart is a reliable, hyper-optimized transportation relationship that is no longer part of its P&L.
Intermodal shipping refers to moving freight by two or more modes of transportation; by loading cargo into intermodal containers, shipments can move seamlessly between trucks, trains, and cargo ships. Morningstar, BusinessWire
All Vote for Dear Leader! A new SEC filing shows that Elon Musk increased his ownership of Tesla (TSLA) to 20.5%, drawing him ever closer to his goal of having a 25% voting stake in the company. It’s been a wild 2024 so far for the EV maker, with its shares under pressure and Musk’s massive $56 billion Tesla pay package struck down by a Delaware court, prompting him to seriously consider moving the company’s incorporation to Texas.
Westly Group Founder and Managing Partner; also former Tesla board member; Steve Westly says, “They need to scramble to find the next growth wave, $25,000 car, at least 18 months out, that may be a game changer, might get them back to 30 or 40% growth. What are you going to do in the next 18 months? I think they’ve got three shots on goal. They’ve got the self-driving vehicle with robo-taxis; that’s probably still three-five years out. They’ve got an energy division which most people don’t even think about, and that is doing $6 billion last year on the way to maybe $8 or $9 billion this year, growing 50%. It could be a $20 billion division. Then, they’ve got the global charging network, because everybody has basically thrown up the white flag, signed a deal with Tesla to be able to use their global charging network [now known as the North American Charging Standard]. They’ve got to make one of these three things to work to get the growth cycle back.”
Cathie Wood of Ark Invest, a long-term Tesla bull (and recent Nvidia bear) defended Musk, calling him “the inventor of our age, and… also our Renaissance man”, and pointing out that the shares don’t represent additional economic interest, but rather voting interest. Wood has every right to sell shares of the best-performing stock in recent memory since Tesla right before they re-skyrocket, but surely she can make the mental leap and imagine how the concentration of voting interest can translate itself into economic advantage. If not, an AI-enhanced Neuralink device is standing by. YouTube
Augurers, Astrologers, Oracles. In a breakthrough, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, achieved an important laboratory condition with tantalizing implications for a number of fields. Using lasers, they were able to freeze positronium, an exotic atom made of both matter and antimatter – an electron and its anti-particle, a positron. In a positronium, a positron and an electron orbit each other. If matter and antimatter cross paths, they tend to annihilate, releasing huge amounts of energy, which normally dooms positronium to a typical existence of only 142 billionths of a second. By freezing things to -148 degrees Fahrenheit, the CERN scientists slowed the atoms down for study. The hope is that further breakthroughs will teach them about the early universe; there are also practical implications for medical imaging, cancer treatment, and even interstellar travel.
If only it were possible to slow down the frenetic flight of interest-rate doves and hawks, so as to study the possible method behind the seeming madness, then their flightiness might be deciphered, their flight paths predicted with a degree of scientific assuredness for the benefit of all who are economically and analytically inclined. Rumors of a joint cross-continental program involving the Fed and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory could not be confirmed at the time of publication. Semafor
