I watched my six year old play in a chess tournament with the grammar school across the street (only in places like London can you get a rival school at such a young age, this alone is quite amazing). Small tables separated by age, three six year olds talking to their three opponents, as my stomach was in knots on the side wall. Wins & losses aside, most notable when we got home was that the score was irrelevant, the idea that they could play chess at all was what mattered to them. They were pl…

Don’t take our weekends from us…. A broadening out of the rally on the surface is good, allows for more companies to share in the higher stock prices, and we are seeing it with the Russell 2k taking the reins from the Nasdaq & SPX (up 4.7% in 2 days is the second best relative performance this year) which seems reasonable. Unless you are of the mind that seasonality rules, and the Mag7 will/should not go down the last part of this 4th quarter. I just wonder how this market will respond to a li…

Rebalances, Rotations, Rolling stones and all… The S&P hasn’t had a daily move in either direction of more than half a percent for 6 days now, so let’s take a closer look under the hood….. Markets continue to rotate in the direction that the peak in yields is behind us – with the most obvious leader being US tech marking all-time high this week – but under the surface in Europe it’s very interesting to follow the flows.. We are seeing (and we would agree with, in this environment), a strong bia…

Well that happened fast… It has been so ingrained in us that inflation is the root of all evil and that central banks will do as much as they can to keep it from overgrowing, and yet, we wake up today with significantly cooler prices for the month in Australia (4.9% CPI vs. 5.2% expected), in Spain (3.2% against consensus rise to 3.7%), the UK November BRC shop price index falling to 4.3% from 5.2% in Oct, and most exciting Germany (CPI drops from 3.0% to 2.3% in Nov, vs 2.6% exp and some regio…

We all need leadership.. 7 Mega-tech companies have proven very reliable, carrying Nasdaq to hefty 10.8% gains mtd – and with yields making fresh lows as I type/send this and the US$ on 10 week lows, we have reasons to believe… Here in Europe, we depend more significantly on China to drive our shares, but with the China Exposed Basket only 1% above its recent November relative LOW – a breakdown of trust may soon be confirmed (we are looking squarely at 12m relative lows from Burberry, Kering,…