Doug Short Advisor Perspectives

[unable to retrieve full-text content] All eight indexes on our world watch list posted gains through April 19, 2021. The top performer is France's CAC 40 with a gain of 13.43%, Germany's DAXK is in second is with a gain of 11.27% and our own S&P 500 is in third with a gain of 11.43%. Coming in last is China's Shanghai with a gain of 0.13%.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] FINRA has released new data for margin debt, now available through March. The latest debt level is up 1.1% month-over-month and is at a record high.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] We are now living in the world of over 4K. The S&P 500 rose three out of the last five days and closed Friday at another record high (no surprise there!). The index is up 1.11% from yesterday and is up 11% YTD.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] The Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers (CPI-U) released this week puts the year-over-year inflation rate at 2.62%. It is below the 3.76% average since the end of the Second World War and above its 10-year moving average, now at 1.73%.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] Let's do some analysis of the Consumer Price Index, the best-known measure of inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) divides all expenditures into eight categories and assigns a relative size to each. The pie chart illustrates the components of the Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers, the CPI-U.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] Here is a table showing the annualized change in Headline and Core CPI, not seasonally adjusted, for each of the past six months. Also included are the eight components of Headline CPI and a separate entry for Energy, which is a collection of sub-indexes in Housing and Transportation. We can make some inferences about how inflation is impacting our personal expenses depending on our relative exposure to the individual components.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] This morning's release of the publicly available data from ECRI puts the WLI at 156.1, up 2.9 from the previous week's revised figure. The WLIg is at 25.0, up from last week and the WLI YoY is at 40.54% up from last week.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] The April Preliminary came in at 86.5, up 1.6 from the March Final. Investing.com had forecast 89.6. Since its beginning in 1978, consumer sentiment is 0.4 percent below the average reading (arithmetic mean) and 1.5 percent below the geometric mean.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] The U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have now published their findings for March new residential housing starts. The latest reading of 1.739M was above the Investing.com forecast of 1.613M and an increase from the previous month's upwardly revised 1.457M.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] The U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have now published their findings for March new residential building permits. The latest reading of 1.766M was up 2.7% from the February reading and is above the Investing.com forecast of 1.750M.