Capital Ideas & Analysis

Manpowers reserach finds, “The poll of 14,000 employers found the net employment outlook — the difference between those adding jobs and those cutting them — was unchanged for the fourth quarter from the third. The seasonally adjusted level of 18 compares with a reading of 20 a year ago, Manpower reported.” Link

This is strong support for the view that jobs in other areas of the economy are growing while Real-Estate and construction are declining. (MAN) is up roughly half a percent.

Same store sales ticked up for the week of Sept. 8th and was actually higher than last year for this week which gave a positive tone to todays market. Trade ballance also came in somewhat better than expected

Then ontop of this, OPEC released that they are increasing output for crude oil of less than two percent. All in all, enough not to sell on the back of the Fed meeting. I still don’t see us trading above 1480 on the S&P 5oo and would not be supprised to see a pullback on Thursday or Friday of this week.  

Random Musings: Tech is once again breaking out with BIDU being an absolute beast. The only real lagger is AAPL which has solid reasons for being in that position. Bio-Tech is also strong with IMCL up over 20%.

Consumer Credit came in roughly around consensus which is not really a bad number. However, July has little significance. If we look at 04 and 05 we can see that, for whatever reason (perhaps vacations?), June, July, August seem to be months where people take on more credit in relation to their income. Credit outstanding is not drastically different than the past three years. The August and September numbers will provide a clearer signal as to how much debt people need to take on vs yearly trends. Given the market action, uncertainty by the Fed, it appears impossible to predict these numbers ahead of time.