Never let a good hurricane go to waste. So when a couple turn up within a few weeks of each other (Harvey hitting Texas on 25th August and Irma skimming Western Florida on the 10th September) no one is going to take the estimated employment data for September as being particularly indicative of the underlying […]
Continue reading
Can it get much worse for Theresa May? Having botched an unnecessary general election, her grand solution to the Brexit negotiations is basically to try and do nothing. Having been sucked into the EU’s negotiating agenda of pay now, talk later on trade (or perhaps not at all), her ‘Florence’ proposal is now to seek […]
Continue reading
Slow start to the new fiscal year for FEDEX (fdx) and DIAGEO (dge_l). Fedex Q1 disappoints on cyber-attacks and hurricane headwinds, while Diageo blames a late Chinese New year and US spirits investment for a weak start to its FY18. Management innocent on all counts, of course ;-) Fedex – Q1 FY18: […]
Continue reading
“There’s an old saying. Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining” (The Outlaw Josey Wales – 1976) The headlines, such as the one above from the Guardian may have juiced up the point a little, but underlying the attempted prevarication in his recent speech on Globalisation and inflation, this is pretty […]
Continue reading
It’s difficult to get overly excited with the shares. Having briefly rallied after the better than expected Q3 results, the long awaited new product launches do little to resolve the big question and the shares are back below their relative market level when I closed the GrowthRater long position back on 13 May, for a 29% […]
Continue reading
GM provided the standout in August, with its heavy incentives clawing back some of its earlier shortfalls in sales to deliver a +7.4% YoY improvement in domestic unit sales for August and bringing its YTD average to -2.4% and therefore slightly ahead of the overall industry’s -2.7% YTD decline as well as its principal domestic […]
Continue reading
In between hurricanes, German elections, North Korean bomb and missile tests and the usual Jackson Hole navel gazing fest for central bankers, the August non-farm payroll estimates from the BLS may have struggled to make the front pages. At +165k, net private sector job additions for the month (+174k excluding movements in seasonal adjustments), it […]
Continue reading
With the WPP share price down -11% on its Q2 earnings release, as FY17 revenue growth forecasts are trimmed along with market estimates for global advertising growth, I thought about writing a long winded post about markets propensity to increasingly aim below guidance towards the end of an economic cycle and in particular while the […]
Continue reading