Timing & trends

What’s Driving the Decline in the Goods-Based Sector, After the Boom of 2018?

Posted by Wolf Richter

on Wednesday, 11 December 2019 9:37

Services are growing at a decent pace, though more slowly than a year ago. The labor market is the strongest in years, so consumer spending is growing at a good pace, including retail sales, driven by red-hot ecommerce sales. Where the economy is in trouble is in industrial goods and in the huge oil-and-gas sector which also drags down the manufacturing segments that supply it with heavy equipment, tech equipment, vehicles, chemicals, and the like. And I have a couple of special thoughts on the consumer side, concerning apparel sales.

We’ll look at this situation via the detailed wholesale trade report by the Census Bureau, released today. Total wholesales in October fell 1.4% from October last year, to $494.3 billion, below where they’d first been in May 2018. It was the sixth month in a row of year-over year declines and the largest such decline since 2016, and it follows the boom last year when year-over-year sales growth peaked in May at nearly 11%…CLICK for complete article

The Most Innovative Jobs In The U.S. Are Clustering In A Handful of Cities

Posted by ZeroHedge

on Tuesday, 10 December 2019 9:48

The United States has a total area of 3,796,742 square miles. That makes it the third or fourth-largest country in the world by land area, depending if you count overseas territories. So what’s the point? Despite its size, the U.S. is facing a dilemma of sorts. According to a new report from The Brookings Institution, regional divergence in the U.S. innovation sector “has reached extreme levels.” The innovation sector, composed of 13 of the nation’s highest-tech, highest R&D industries, is vital to the U.S. economy. The innovation sector accounts for 3% of U.S. jobs, but generates 6% of the country’s GDP, a quarter of its exports and two-thirds of business R&D expenditures. The industries, such as software, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, consist of workers with degrees such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The report found that job gains in the innovation sector are becoming highly concentrated to a handful of “superstar” metropolitan areas. Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and San Diego captured more than 90% of all new jobs in the innovation sector from 2005 to 2017. These cities’ share of the nation’s innovation sector employment increased from 17.6% to 22.8% during this period.

One-third of the nation’s innovation sector jobs are now in just 16 counties, with more than half concentrated in 41 counties. The hardest hit cities, in terms of losing innovation sector jobs over this period, include Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas and Los Angeles.

The report discusses some of the negative externalities as a result of innovation sector jobs clustering to a few cities. The most obvious is housing. A separate report from PropertyShark found that California is home to 73% of the nation’s priciest zip codes. The Bay Area alone is home to 55 of the nation’s 125 most expensive zip codes….CLICK for complete article

10 Most Oversold Stocks In The S&P 500

Posted by Wayne Duggan

on Tuesday, 10 December 2019 9:30

Technical traders are always looking for signals that a stock could be due for a change in direction. Given that stocks rarely move in one direction for too long without periodic retracements, a stock that has endured heavy selling pressure and has become “oversold” may be a potential buying opportunity.

RSI Explained

One of the most popular metrics for determining whether a stock is overbought is relative strength index, or RSI. RSI is an oscillator that fluctuates from 0 to 100 based on the magnitude of recent price changes in a stock. RSI can be calculated on any number of different time periods, but the typical period is 14 days.

The formula for calculating RSI is RSI = 100 – [100/1+(average gain/average loss)]. However, all traders need to know is that the lower the RSI, the more oversold a stock is. The higher the RSI the more overbought a stock is considered to be. Typically, traders use 30 (oversold) and 70 (overbought) as potential buy or sell signals.

A stock with an RSI under 30 is a candidate for a technical bounce, at least in the short term….CLICK for complete article

The Best Way To Invest In The Energy Sector In 2020

Posted by Alex Kimani

on Tuesday, 10 December 2019 9:27

A record number of energy companies filing for bankruptcy coupled with poor performance by the industry in 2019 has made it incredibly hard to find investments in the energy space that can be considered safe or promising.

The industry’s favorite benchmark, the Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund, which tracks the price and yield performance of companies in the energy sector, has returned just 2.7% compared to the 24.2% produced by the S&P 500 year-to-date, easily one of the biggest laggards in the entire market.

But first, let’s look at some popular energy instruments that have turned quite risky for the average investor.

Snake oil bonds?

Many investors tend to turn to bonds when the stock markets become choppy.

‘Real Estate as a Service’ Now One of the Hottest Trends

Posted by Joannah Connolly

on Friday, 6 December 2019 14:34

Our friends over at Hawkeye Wealth thought our readers might be interested in this latest real estate trend. ~ED

One of the hottest trends in North American real estate is “real estate as a service” (REaaS), a Vancouver audience was told at the Urban Land Institute’s November 26 launch of its 2020 Emerging Trends in Real Estate report, compiled by PwC.

Integral to this trend is putting tenant, customer and resident experience at the heart of real estate design.

This means commercial and residential real estate has evolved to offer customers and residents more than the space alone, adding on layers of experience and amenities that…Click for full article.