The Long Term Investor

Here is the week to end June:

DOW year to date +3.72%
DOW five days (-0.17%)

SP5000 year to date +15.13%
SP500 five days +0.02%

NASDAQ 100 year to date +19.01%
NASDAQ 100 five days +0.19%

NASDAQ year to date +20.09%
NASDAQ five days +0.52%

RUSSELL year to date +1.73%
RUSSELL five days +1.21%

I did not have access to my account last Friday so I don't know where I was at that time. BUT today......I am at +43.99% year to date for my entire account.

 

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND EVERYONE. WE START THE SECOND HALF OF THE YEAR ON MONDAY. It was a great first half in spite of all the expert predictions.

 

A good little reminder.

A Midyear Portfolio Checkup in 7 Easy Steps
Reviewing your year’s performance so far, and positioning yourself for the future.

https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/midyear-portfolio-checkup-7-easy-steps

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"If we were to close the books on the year right now, most investors would be pretty satisfied with their portfolios’ results.

Bonds have been no great shakes, as the Federal Reserve has left interest rates unchanged amid stubborn inflation. But stocks have soared thanks in large part to continued strength in US technology shares. A portfolio with 60% in US stocks and 40% in US bonds would have gained about 8% for the year to date through late June, and more equity-heavy portfolios would have gained even more than that.

Because 2024′s strong stock market gains build on fabulous equity returns in 2023, it’s an opportune time to check up on your portfolio. With the July 4 holiday approaching, you may even find yourself with a bit of extra time to do so. As you go through the process of checking up on your portfolio and your plan, here are the key items to keep on your dashboard.

Step 1: Conduct a wellness check.

Start with an assessment of the state of your plan. Are you on track to reach your financial goals?

If you’re still accumulating assets for retirement, check up on whether your current portfolio balance, combined with your savings rate, puts you on track to reach whatever goal you’re working toward. Tally your various contributions across all accounts so far in 2024: A decent baseline savings rate is 15%, but higher-income folks will want to aim for 20% or even higher. Not only will high earners need to supply more of their retirement cash flows with their own salaries (Social Security will replace less of their working incomes), but they should also have more room in their budgets to target a higher savings rate. You’ll also need to aim higher if you’re saving for goals other than retirement, such as college funding for children or a home down payment. In addition to assessing your savings rate, look at your portfolio balance: Fidelity Investments has developed helpful benchmarks to gauge nest-egg adequacy at various life stages.

If you’re retired, the key gauge of the health of your total plan is your withdrawal rate—your planned portfolio withdrawals for 2024, divided by your total portfolio balance at the beginning of the year. The “right” withdrawal rate will be apparent only in hindsight, and ideally you would vary your withdrawals each year based on how your portfolio has performed and your life expectancy. But the 4% guideline is a reasonable rule of thumb for new retirees, and our recent research points to its viability as a starting point for people seeking a fixed real withdrawal through retirement.

Step 2: Assess your asset allocation.
Once you’ve evaluated the health of your overall plan, turn your attention to your actual portfolio. Morningstar’s X-Ray view—accessible to investors who have their portfolios stored in Morningstar Investor—provides a look at your total portfolio’s mix of stocks, bonds, and cash. (You can also see a lot of other data through X-Ray, which I’ll get to in a second.) You can then compare your actual allocations to your targets. If you don’t have targets, the Morningstar Lifetime Allocation Indexes are useful benchmarking tools. High-quality target-date series such as those from Vanguard and BlackRock’s LifePath Index Series can serve a similar role for benchmarking asset allocation. (Compare the allocation of the funds that correspond to your own anticipated retirement date with your own asset allocation.) My model portfolios, geared toward people who are saving for retirement as well as those who are already retired, can also help with the benchmarking process.

Thanks to the long-running rally, many hands-off investors are apt to find that their portfolios are quite heavy on stocks relative to the above benchmarks. A portfolio that tilts mostly or even entirely toward stocks is fine for younger investors with many years until retirement. At this life stage, you absolutely need the growth potential that comes along with stocks, so it usually makes sense to maintain as high an equity allocation as you can tolerate. And it’s not like the alternatives are all that appealing right now, with cash and bonds yields still extremely low.

toBut a too-heavy equity portfolio is a far more significant risk factor for investors who are nearing or in drawdown mode: Insufficient cash and high-quality bond assets serve as ballast could force withdrawals of stocks when they're in a trough, thereby permanently impairing a portfolio's sustainability. If your portfolio is notably equity-heavy relative to any reasonable measure and you're within 10 years of retirement, derisking by shifting more money to bonds and cash is more urgent. You could make the adjustment all in one go or gradually via a dollar-cost averaging plan. Just be sure to mind the tax consequences of lightening up on stocks as you're shifting money into safer assets. Focus on tax-sheltered accounts to move the needle on your total portfolio's asset allocation, or steer new allocations to the safer asset classes that need topping up.

Step 3: Assess adequacy of liquid reserves.
In addition to checking up on your portfolio's long-term asset allocations, midyear is a good time to check your liquid reserves. A dedicated emergency fund is of course the best option: I recommend that working people hold three to six months' worth of living expenses in liquid reserves, and higher-income workers and contractors/gig economy workers should target an even higher cushion.

For retired people, I recommend holding six months’ to two years’ worth of portfolio withdrawals in cash investments; those liquid reserves can provide a spending cushion even if stocks head south or bonds take a powder, or if both things happen at once, like in 2022. Retirees whose portfolios are equity-heavy can use rebalancing to top up their liquid reserves.

Cash yields have come up a lot, but make sure you’re getting a reasonable payout, as some banks and investment providers aren’t sharing the wealth. Online savings accounts and certificates of deposit are usually among the highest-yielding FDIC-insured instruments, but money market mutual funds, which aren’t FDIC-insured, offer you the convenience of having your cash live side by side with your investment assets. Yields on brokerage sweep accounts, which offer convenience for traders who like to keep cash at the ready, are often stingy on the yield front.

Step 4: Assess your equity positioning.
Your broad asset-class exposure will be the key determinant of how your portfolio behaves. But your positioning within each asset class also deserves a closer look, especially because we’ve seen growth stocks beat value, large trump small, and US best non-US over an extended period. Check your portfolio’s Morningstar Style Box exposure in X-Ray to see how your equity holdings are arrayed across the size/style grid. While you’re at it, check up on your sector positioning; X-Ray showcases your own portfolio’s sector exposures alongside those of the S&P 500 for benchmarking.

Step 5: Evaluate your fixed-income exposures.
On the bond side, review your positioning to ensure that your bond portfolio will deliver ballast when you need it. Lower-quality bonds have performed better than high-quality bonds during this period of rising interest rates, but lower-quality bonds also tend to be more vulnerable during weak economic environments when stocks are also struggling. If you’re adjusting your fixed-income portfolio, redeploying money from higher-risk bond segments into lower-risk alternatives will improve your total portfolio’s diversification and risk level, even as it’s likely to lower the yield. To the extent that you make room for lower-quality bonds, think of them as equity alternatives, not bond substitutes.

Step 6: Check up on your individual holdings.
In addition to checking up on allocations and suballocations, take a closer look at individual holdings. Scanning Morningstar’s ratings—Morningstar Ratings for stocks and Morningstar Medalist Ratings for mutual funds and exchange-traded funds—is a quick way to view a holding’s forward-looking prospects in a single data point.

If you're conducting your own due diligence, be on alert for red flags at the holdings level. For funds, red flags include manager and strategy changes, persistent underperformance relative to cheap index funds, and dramatically heavy stock or sector bets. For stocks, red flags include high valuations and negative economic moat trends.

Also take note of highly appreciated positions that are taking up a larger share of your portfolio than might be ideal. (More than 5% of your total equity assets is a good benchmark for “too much.”) Company stock is a frequent culprit in this context. Such holdings are easily addressed if they reside in a tax-sheltered wrapper like a 401(k) or an IRA, where selling won’t trigger a tax bill. If you’d like to reduce holdings in a taxable account, run some projections on how selling might affect your tax bill. If you're not conversant with the ins and outs of capital gains taxes, seek out the advice of a tax advisor or financial advisor.

Step 7: Make changes judiciously.
Whether you act on any of the conclusions you drew from your fact-finding in Steps 1-6 depends on a couple of factors—the type and severity of the issue, as well as your life stage and situation and the parameters you’ve laid out in your investment policy statement. (If you don’t have an IPS, you can use a template to create one.)

If you’re many years from retirement, tend to be unruffled by market volatility, and your portfolio has 90% in stocks even as many asset-allocation benchmarks suggest 80% or 85% for people at your age, repositioning your long-term portfolio probably isn’t urgent. But if you do decide to make changes, be sure to take tax and transaction costs into account. Focus any selling in your tax-sheltered accounts, where you won’t incur tax costs to do so, and you can usually skirt transaction costs, too. Making changes can be more pressing if you’re getting close to or in retirement, especially if your portfolio is too aggressively positioned and you don’t have enough in safe assets to tide you through sustained weakness in the stock market. In that case, it’s wise to think about redeploying some of your enlarged equity portfolio into cash and bonds."

MY COMMENT

The first step is to actually have a plan. Too often investors are simply.....investing.....with no real plan to guide what they are doing.

Is your plan successful? Are you achieving your goals? If not, why not and what do you need to change. Is the issue your own behavior or the actual stocks and funds you own? Is your plan rational and realistic.

This sort of evaluation gets into risk tolerance, portfolio management and make-up, your investor behaviors, etc, etc, etc.

 

This is the decision of the year for business and those that invest.

Businesses gain upper hand with Supreme Court decision to curb regulators' power

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/busi...ision-to-curb-regulators-power-163837595.html

 

Here is where we are at mid year......at least with my preferred measure.....the SP500.

S&P 500 returns 15% in the first half in an unusually smooth ride

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/29/sp-...e-first-half-in-an-unusually-smooth-ride.html

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"It’s hard to complain about the stock market’s first half performance and how it sets investors up for the rest of 2024 – hard, but not impossible.

A 15% year-to-date total return in the S&P 500 is the 21st best run through June since 1900, according to Goldman Sachs. Among years when the index was up at least that much at this point, the rest of the year was up 72% of the time for a median further gain of almost 9%.

The reward collected by investors in big-cap American stocks per unit of risk has been extraordinary, the 12-month Sharpe ratio for the S&P 500 (return compared to statistical volatility) more than three times the long-term average. The S&P 500 since the October 2023 correction low is up 33% for an annualized total return pace of 56%.

Not only has the index’s smooth ascent allowed its owners to sleep well at night, the extreme calm has meant it’s been safe to snooze right along with the market during the day.

The S&P has gone eight sessions without a move of as much as half a percent. Its worst daily decline during June was a negligible 0.4%. The CBOE Volatility index is near a multi-year low around 12, yet that seems positively rich compared to the S&P’s realized volatility over the past 30 days: just above 7, in VIX terms.

There’s not much on the surface to dislike here, but that shouldn’t keep us from looking.

Market worries

The most popular objection to this happy story got that way from being the most obvious: The stellar returns have largely come from a relative handful of huge-cap companies, with the typical ticker dawdling far behind. True in magnitude: The market-cap-weighted S&P 500 has outgained its equal-weighted version by more than ten percentage points this year.

Without Nvidia’s pileup of an additional $1.8 trillion in market value since Jan. 1, we’d not be dishing out so many superlatives about the rare and rosy 2024 market performance.

I’m long on record as arguing that narrower rallies are still legitimate ones, that money is chasing a scarce supply of high-conviction secular growth that is landing disproportionately on the fundamentally strongest and macro-insulated companies.

I’ve also made the case that the prevailing tone of frustration and grievance among investors toward this top-heavy rally phase has in a way helped sustain a beneficial wall of worry that otherwise would not exist in a market making 30-plus record highs in six months. What’s more, the equal-weight S&P is running at a 9% annual return pace this year – not stellar but not outright weak either.

It would be more worrisome if the traditionally defensive sectors were beginning to outperform to deliver a sobering economic signal. Credit conditions have grown a bit less sturdy in recent weeks, though from extreme strong levels.

Jeff deGraaf, founder of Renaissance Macro, has argued that the powerful “breadth thrust” of the fourth-quarter rally brought with it positive implications for gains three-, six- and 12 months out. The three- and six-month projections were met, which leaves him expected upside persistence – with hiccups along the way – into the fourth quarter of this year.

All this remains the case, perhaps the most credible base case in fact – and yet, the perverse internal dynamics in this market could be building more hazardous extremes that could make the tape more fragile under a bout of stress. Not only haven’t up days been broadly inclusive, the direction of the S&P 500 has been running inverse to the daily breadth over the past month.

Sure, this is partly a quirk of the very index concentration we already have noted (three stocks worth 20% of the S&P), but still shows a certain sub-surface dissonance. The extreme tendency of individual stocks to go their own way often independent of the S&P is illustrated by the CBOE Implied Correlation Index here. It measures the market-based expected volatility of large index members against that of the S&P 500 itself.




CBOE

This is both an observed pattern and an active tactical strategy. The so-called dispersion trade – shorting index volatility while owning single-stock volatility typically via options – has grown popular. It goes without saying that a burst of market-wide stress would upend such trades, to unknown knock-on effect.

Momentum stumble

A separate but related bit of weather has been the recent sprint-and-stumble performance of high-momentum stocks, which peaked more than a week ago as Nvidia reached a buying crescendo. This break of stride in the “momentum factor” resembles, in some respects, what happened in early March with a very similar reversal in Nvidia.

That month, the market held near highs for a while through some salubrious rotation among the Magnificent Seven and the remainder of the market. Until late March (the very end of the prior quarter), when the broad tape peaked and the 5% S&P 500 pullback – the only notable drawdown in eight months – ensued.





That setback in an overbought market at quarter’s end coincided, of course, with a bit of a macro scare. Treasury yields broke higher out of a range, the 10-year racing toward 4.5% as hot inflation readings forced a rethink of the Federal Reserve’s rate-cutting path and the obvious questions about whether the economy could weather “higher for longer” rates.

This past Friday, as the quarter closed with a new intraday high, the index sagged through the day despite a friendly PCE inflation report, while Treasury yields ticked back above 4.3%. Whether election-handicapping traders grew mindful again of the fiscal setup should the Trump tax cuts be extended or what, the interplay bears watching.

More broadly, of course, the macro inputs have been softer but largely benign, consistent with an economy decelerating toward some version of a soft landing, with oil prices in check, earnings forecasts making new highs and inflation down enough to confer some flexibility on a data-dependent Fed.

Investors still can’t be sure whether the Fed’s patience in holding rates at cycle highs since last July will outlast the market’s ability to wait for an “insurance” rather than an “emergency” easing move.

Other nagging items to ponder:

• Wall Street strategists have been hustling to jack up their year-end S&P targets (though they in general remain subdued), depleting the reservoir of skepticism that has nourished this bull market.
• Extreme hostile reactions to earnings disappointments in big-cap stocks hints at pockets of unreasonable expectations (Micron) and spring-loaded reflexive selling in fallen bellwethers (Walgreens, Nike). This as second-quarter consensus estimates have not been pared back to lower the hurdle over the course of the quarter, as they typically are.
• Outsized but justified attention on mechanical and structural machinations hints at a market that is, in a sense, outgrowing its shell. We’ve spent weeks treated to intense analysis and fevered chatter about massive options-expiration influences due to the gusher of retail call-buying in tech.

How big is the dispersion trade? The long-short momentum “factor” has whipped the tape around on its own some days. Not to mention huge index rebalancings and the distortive effects of diversification rules, requiring a big swing in the weightings of Apple versus Nvidia in the Technology SPDR. In 2018, Standard & Poor’s felt forced to revamp the Communication Services sector to house some big names engorging the tech sector (Meta, Alphabet, Netflix). Tech was trimmed back to 20% of the index from 26%; today it’s at 32.5%.

None of this is directionally predictive for equities, and one should never scapegoat “the machines” or “quants” for what’s ultimately an asset market pricing in economic reality. Still, it’s easy to observe greater friction these days between the underlying market and the vehicles being used to ride it."

MY COMMENT

The primary reason for being a long term investor is you never know when the explosive market gains are going to happen. The only way to capture those gains is to be in the markets.

As we head more toward a normal market and away from the pandemic and the pandemic disruptions......the future looks bright. I do see good potential for another 5-10% upside in the SP500 over the rest of the year. If that happens the index will have BLOWN AWAY the expert predictions and expectations for 2024.

 

Speaking of portfolio evaluation and the gains of the SP500 to date......brings us to NVDA.

It feels clear to me that some of the EXTREME excitement and exuberance over NVDA has subsided. This happened quickly over the past week or so. I am glad to see this happen. There is HUGE upside in this company.....but....now it is time for them to GRIND IT OUT for the long term.

 

Now that it is going to be July on Monday......we are in the month where second quarter earnings will begin. The BIG BANKS as usual will kick things off in a few weeks followed by many, many, regional and smaller banks.

HERE is the tentative earnings schedule for my nine stocks:

GOOGL July 23.
CMG July 24.
MSFT July 30.
AAPL August 1.
AMZN August 1.
PLTR August 5.
HD August 13
NVDA August 21.
COST September 26.

It never ends.

 

This seems like a......BIG TRAP....for those that have an IRA.

The No. 1 fatal error that will end your IRA
These errors cannot be fixed, so you must be careful when moving your IRA funds

https://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/no-1-fatal-error-end-your-ira

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"The tax rules that apply when you attempt to roll over your IRA funds are all complicated, and some are rigid and unforgiving. So, violating one of those rules can be fatal, and costly.

There are no do-overs. These errors cannot be fixed, so you must be extremely careful when moving your IRA funds.

The once-per-year IRA rollover rule

One particularly insidious rule limits the number of IRA rollovers you can do.

For an IRA worth $500,000, between income tax and penalty, you could be looking at an unexpected tax bill of over $200,000 – and you no longer have an IRA. (iStock / iStock)

Say you’d like to move your IRA funds from one account at a bank, broker or fund company to another, or from one financial adviser to another. You might want to change advisers, investments or banks, for example. That’s OK. But be careful how often you move those funds.

You can only do an IRA-to-IRA rollover (or Roth IRA-to-Roth IRA rollover) once a year, but it’s not a calendar year. It’s 365 days. For example, if you do a rollover in December, you cannot do another one in January just because it’s a new year. You must wait a full 365 days until the following December to do another IRA-to-IRA rollover.

This rule covers what’s known as a "60-day rollover," where you withdraw your IRA funds from one IRA and roll them over (deposit them) to another. You have 60 days to return the funds to another IRA, or they become taxable.
Private equity fund manager Grant Cardone unpacks his warning to Americans about their retirement savings on ‘The Big Money Show.’

If you miss the 60 days, that mistake may be fixable if you had a good reason why you could not complete the rollover in time, like an illness, a death in the family or an error by the financial institution. The IRS can allow an extension of the 60-day rule in cases like this.

However, if you break the one-rollover-per-year rule, that is a fatal error, and it cannot be undone or excused by the IRS. Taxes will be owed, and you will no longer have that IRA. In addition, if you happen to be under age 59½ you could also be subject to a 10% penalty for an early distribution.

For an IRA worth $500,000, between income tax and penalty, you could be looking at an unexpected tax bill of over $200,000 – and you no longer have an IRA. Thirty years of sacrifice and savings is gone in 30 seconds!

This strict rule has caught many by surprise, especially when you have several IRAs. The once-per-year rule applies to all your IRAs, not separately to each one. Once you do an IRA-to-IRA rollover from one of your IRAs, you can no longer do any more 60-day IRA-to-IRA rollovers with any of your other IRAs for another 365 days. And that includes any SEP or SIMPLE IRAs you may have.

Fortunately, there are exceptions to this rule. The once-per-year IRA rollover rule does not apply to rollovers from your 401(k) to your IRA, or from your IRA back to your 401(k). It also does not apply to a rollover from your IRA to a Roth IRA, because that is a taxable Roth conversion. The rule only applies to rollovers from IRAs to other similar types of IRAs.
Before accepting your IRA funds, any worthwhile financial firm or adviser should ask you whether you have done a previous rollover within the last 365 days. Even better, to protect you, they should not even accept your funds as a 60-day rollover. But not all advisers think about this or provide this advice. (If yours doesn’t, think about taking your business to one who knows these rules.)"

MY COMMENT

This is a real TRAP for the unwary. Especially this part:

"The once-per-year rule applies to all your IRAs, not separately to each one. Once you do an IRA-to-IRA rollover from one of your IRAs, you can no longer do any more 60-day IRA-to-IRA rollovers with any of your other IRAs for another 365 days. And that includes any SEP or SIMPLE IRAs you may have."

 

The week to come.......a very short week......since the markets will only open for half a day on July 3.......and......will be closed on July 4. HAPPY BIRTHDAY......USA.

June jobs report ushers in new quarter during holiday-shortened trading week: What to know this week

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/june...ng-week-what-to-know-this-week-123222324.html

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"A crucial week of labor market data will greet investors during a holiday-shortened trading week that begins the month of July, the third quarter, and second half of 2024.

The S&P 500 (^GSPC) enters Q3 up 14.5% so far this year, while the Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) rallied more than 18%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) gained a more modest 3.8% in the first six months of the year.

With stocks sitting near record highs and recent inflation trends proving more positive, all eyes have turned to the labor market for signs of weakness as the Fed maintains its restrictive interest rate stance.

The June Jobs report will provide a robust look at the labor market on Friday, while updates on private payrolls and job openings will also be in focus throughout the week. Updates on activity in the manufacturing and services sectors will also be scattered throughout the schedule.

Constellation Brands (STZ) is expected to be the focus of the lone notable corporate earnings report during an otherwise quiet week before big banks officially kick off second quarter earnings season the following week.

Markets in the US will close early on July 3 (1 p.m. ET) and will remain closed on July 4 for Independence Day.

A look at the labor market

The June Jobs report is due for release on Friday morning and is expected to show further cooling in the job market.

The report is expected to show that 188,000 nonfarm payroll jobs were added to the US economy last month, with unemployment holding steady at 4%, according to data from Bloomberg. In May, the US economy added 272,000 jobs while the unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 4%.

Bank of America US economist Michael Gapen reasoned a report along these lines would continue to show a labor market that is "cooling but not cool."

On Friday, the latest reading of the Fed's preferred inflation gauge showed inflation eased in May as prices increased at their slowest pace since March 2021.

The print was viewed as a step in the right direction for the Federal Reserve's fight against inflation.

Positive trends in inflation, combined with signs of slowing in economic activity, have economists arguing the Fed should be leaning toward cutting interest rates sooner rather than later.

"Emerging signs of softness in the labor market show [Fed] officials also need to be attentive to risks to the full employment side of their mandate," Oxford Economics deputy chief US economist Michael Pearce wrote in a note to clients.

Halftime report

Just like 2023, most of 2024's stock market rally has been driven by a few large tech stocks.

Midway through the year, more than two thirds of the S&P 500's gains for the year have come from Nvidia (NVDA), Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), and Broadcom (AVGO). Nvidia alone has driven nearly one-third of these gains.

Despite some short-lived rallies throughout the year, just two sectors have outperformed the S&P 500 this year: Communications Services and Information Technology. Both are up more than 18% compared to the S&P 500's roughly 15% gain.

This has kept the debate going over whether the second half of the year will bring a broadening of the stock market rally, a hot-button issue on Wall Street.

Morgan Stanley's chief investment officer Mike Wilson recently argued in a research note that given weakening economic data and high interest rates, a true broadening in which sectors unrelated to tech pick up the slack is unlikely to happen.

"Narrow breadth can persist but it's not necessarily a headwind to forward returns in and of itself," Wilson said. "We believe broadening is likely to be limited to high quality/large cap pockets for now."


More megacap exceptionalism

Most strategists have reasoned that megacap tech companies have led the rally for good reason, given their earnings continue to outperform the market. That's expected to be the case during second quarter earnings as well.

Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are expected to grow earnings by a combined 31.7% in the second quarter, per UBS Investment Bank US equity strategist Jonathan Golub.

The S&P 500 itself is expected to grow earnings by a more modest 7.8%.

This means that the lion's share of earnings growth is once again expected to come from Big Tech. And a similar trend has been seen in earnings revisions for the second quarter.

Since March 31, Golub's work shows earnings estimates for the S&P 500 have fallen just 0.1%, far less than the typical 3.3% drop seen on average. This is due in large part to a 3.9% revision upward for the aforementioned six biggest tech companies.

Entering the second half of the year, the debate over whether these Big Tech companies' consistent earnings beats will fall off will remain at center stage."

MY COMMENT

First.......click on the link to see the many VERY FINE graphs and charts in the article.

Second.....I could not care less if the rally broadens. This is exactly how bull markets and rallies work......a handful of leaders drive the general averages up. I dont see this as unusual at all.

Third.....the economic data.....WHATEVER. I dont really trust any of this "stuff" to be accurate or predictive.....especially for stocks longer term. I dont think the FED is going to change course.......we are looking at a rate cut about November or December.

 

And as to the above.......I have been posting on here about the SP500 turning upward and going into stealth rally mode since.....JULY of 2022.

Although.........it hit a....very short term..... 2022 LOW on October 14, 2022.....which only lasted for about TWO DAYS. It has been an UNSTOPPABLE and relentless march UP since than.

The media loves to talk about this like it is just something that happened recently......or.......just since October or 2023. They are completely WRONG......as usual.

 

OK....first market day of the second half of the year. We are starting with all the averages now in the green. BUT.....the ten year yield is up significantly. So....nothing has changed....same old, same old.

 

The economic news of the day....that no one will really care about.

US manufacturing mired in weakness; prices paid gauge hits six-month low

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-manufacturing-mired-weakness-prices-140247383.html

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. manufacturing contracted for a third straight month in June and a measure of prices paid by factories for inputs dropped to a six-month low amid weak demand for goods, indicating that inflation could continue to subside.

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said on Monday that its manufacturing PMI slipped to 48.5 last month from 48.7 in May. A PMI reading above 50 indicates growth in the manufacturing sector, which accounts for 10.3% of the economy.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the PMI climbing to 49.1. Manufacturing is being pressured by higher interest rates and softening demand for goods.

Government data last week showed manufacturing contracted at a 4.3% annualized rate in the first quarter, with most of the decline coming from long-lasting manufactured goods.

The Federal Reserve has maintained its benchmark overnight interest rate in the current 5.25%-5.50% range since last July. Financial markets expect the U.S. central bank to start its easing cycle in September, though policymakers recently adopted a more hawkish outlook. The Fed has hiked its policy rate by 525 basis points since 2022 to quell inflation.

The ISM survey's forward-looking new orders sub-index rose to a still-subdued 49.3 reading from 45.4 in May. Output at factories decreased for the first time since February. The production sub-index fell to 48.5 from 50.2 in May.

Against the backdrop of weak orders, inflation at the factory gate was much cooler last month. The survey's measure of prices paid by manufacturers dropped to 52.1, the lowest reading since December, from 57.0 in May.

Declining goods prices accounted for much of the unchanged reading in monthly inflation in May. The decrease in input prices last month bodes well for the continued disinflationary trend in the broader economy.

The survey's measure of supplier deliveries rose to 49.8 from 48.9 in May. A reading below 50 indicates faster deliveries.

Factory employment slipped after briefly rebounding in May. Factories are reducing head counts through layoffs, attrition and hiring freezes.

The overall labor market is gradually cooling. The government is likely to report on Friday that nonfarm payrolls increased by 195,000 jobs in June after surging 272,000 in May, according to a Reuters survey of economists. The unemployment is forecast unchanged at 4.0%.

MY COMMENT

Good news for the FED and future rate cuts. That is about it.....and....we already knew that rate cuts are going to happen. It is just a question of when.

The consumer revolt over too high prices is happening and will continue to grow. As businesses cut prices and offer deals we will see better inflation numbers. Much of inflation right now is being driven by the rental market and sometimes gas prices.

As a stock investor.......YAWN.