Search

AMD stock has been one of the market’s best performers. But yesterday it fell 20% on earnings. The decline wasn’t really about the earnings.

A very promising start to the trading week, which saw the indexes surge higher by 5%, was somewhat washed away by Friday’s post Jobs Report sell-off. And while the steep declines Friday were worrisome, big picture the S&P 500 still managed to gain 1.5% on the week, the Dow rallied 2%, and the Nasdaq added 0.7%.

The traditional last week of summer on Wall Street went out with a whimper, as the market fell for a third straight week. The numbers weren’t pretty for the bulls as the S&P 500 fell 3.3%, the Dow declined 3%, and the Nasdaq fell another 4.2%.

High inflation and an aggressive Fed have been headwinds for the stock market this year, but is a “November Surprise” in the cards?

As central banks around the globe aggressively raised interest rates, the stock market had its second straight awful week of trading. The S&P 500 fell 4.6%, the Dow lost 4%, and the Nasdaq continued its ugly slide, falling another 5.1%.

For many months, I’ve been telling you what a bargain the leading cannabis stocks have become, and now it appears that increasing numbers of investors have come to the same conclusion, as selected stocks have lifted off their bottoms, with some even climbing above their 25-day moving averages.

Macro environment aside, this SaaS stock has all the hallmarks of a future sector leader and is poised to break out when the market turns.

As a practitioner in the investing world, I find theoretical debates to be sometimes interesting but usually not highly applicable to my work. This mirrors a favorite saying of mine, attributable to Albert Einstein: “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”

With earnings season starting next week, few if any companies had much to say this past week. We had no companies reporting earnings this past week and only one provided news of any note.

So, we delve briefly into cryptocurrencies and more deeply into the fascinating financial, strategic and governance train wreck that is Wayfair (W).



Next Friday, Wells Fargo (WFC) reports earnings, and Mattel (MAT) and Nokia (NOK) report the following week. Then, the earnings deluge starts with 13 companies reporting during the week of July 24th.

There are a lot of high-quality stocks trading at value prices out there. For next week’s recommendation, I’m looking at semiconductor companies worldwide and will try to pick the stock with the most upside and lowest downside risk. This is as Congress wrangles over the $52 billion CHIPS act to support the domestic semiconductor supply chain.

The major indexes had another good day, today—both the Dow and Nasdaq rose 162 points.

Other than Citigroup’s earnings release and Barrick Gold’s release of preliminary sales data, no other company produced meaningful news. Perhaps this is to be expected when investors are putting immense weight on company-specific results and their respective outlooks.

Although it’s already a bear market, there is a good chance that stocks fall to new lows before the market recovers.

The broader S&P 500 hit a low in mid-June on recession fears resulting from persistent high inflation and the Fed’s aggressive actions to tame it. The market has since bounced off the lows, but the issues that drove the market to those lows haven’t really improved.

In last week’s issue of Cabot Stock of the Month, I introduced you to a new section of the newsletter—ETF Strategies, which combines the portfolios and strategies of the former Cabot ETF Strategist newsletter.

I also created Risk Tolerance classifications: A for Aggressive, M for Moderate, and C for Conservative, for both ETF Strategies and the investments in the Cabot Stock of the Month portfolio.