Jun 5, 2025
See what’s driving market performance around the world in today’s Morning Lineup. Bespoke’s Morning Lineup is the best way to start your trading day. Read it now by starting a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium. CLICK HERE to learn more and start your trial.
“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” – John Maynard Keynes
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
It’s been another quiet overnight session in the futures market, but that’s not for a lack of events. In Japan, JGBs managed to rally despite a weak 30-year bond auction. In the EU, the ECB just cut rates by 25 bps, and that will result in more ire from President Trump towards Fed Chair Powell. Concerning trade, markets are eagerly waiting for ‘the call’ between President Trump and President Xi as both countries look to make progress on trade talks. Yesterday was also the deadline for countries to make their ‘best and final’ offers, so be on the lookout for any of those details to emerge. Domestically, the status of the GOP’s big, beautiful bill remains up in the air as the Senate is unlikely to pass the bill without major changes, and Elon Musk continues to rail against it.
With all the concerns over deficits and the inability of Congress to rein in spending, it’s easy to understand why precious metals like gold have performed so well. After pulling back to the 50-day moving average in early May, gold prices found support and have seen a good bounce as the yellow metal makes a run for its recent highs. The last year has seen a monster run for gold as prices are up well over 40%, and besides the last few weeks where prices have been rangebound, the only other time in the last year that prices went this long without making a new high were leading up to the election and through year end of 2024.
As gold prices have been digesting big gains from earlier in the year, other precious metals have been playing catch up and moving into the driver’s seat. Let’s start with silver. Prices have been in a much more sideways range over the last year. Both last fall and earlier in the spring, silver traded around $35 an ounce but then quickly pulled back. This week, it made another run for $35 and broke right through to the upside this morning. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again!
Platinum prices have followed a similar path. Here, the resistance was just below $1,075- a level it approached last summer, last fall, and then again, this winter. It finally broke out from that level in mid-March, and while it briefly pulled back later in the month, this morning’s rally of nearly 4% looks like a convincing breakout.
Within the commodities space, gold, platinum, and silver have all now seen big rallies this year with gains of around 20% or more, and all three are well above their 50-day moving averages as well. Elsewhere in the commodity space, so-called ‘soft’ commodities have lagged. The DB Agriculture ETF (DBA) is barely up YTD with a gain of just 1%, while the DB Oil ETF (DBO) is down by double-digit percentages. Not all commodities are created equal.
Jun 4, 2025
See what’s driving market performance around the world in today’s Morning Lineup. Bespoke’s Morning Lineup is the best way to start your trading day. Read it now by starting a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium. CLICK HERE to learn more and start your trial.
“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again?” – John Wooden
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
To view yesterday’s CNBC interview, you can just click on the image below.
Futures were comfortably higher leading up to this morning’s ADP Employment report, but the headline number came in weaker than expected at just +37K versus forecasts for an increase of 110K. This report often varies widely from the Non-Farm Payrolls report, but for investors looking for any sign that the economy is weakening, this gives them something to latch on to. Coming up later, we’ll get the May ISM Services report, which will also likely move markets. Within minutes of the ADP release, President Trump hit the Truth Social account calling on “Too Late” Powell to cut rates.
Despite today’s post-ADP weakness, US equities just recently moved back into positive territory for the year, meaning stocks worldwide are now pretty much higher across the board. But the performance gap remains wide. While Latin American and European equities are sitting on gains of more than 20%, and most other regions of the world are up by double-digit percentages, the US finds itself in the unusual position of looking up to its global peers.
In the short term, though, US stocks have been outperforming. Over the last week, Latin America and Europe are down while the S&P 500 is up nearly 1%. Recent performance looks like it’s been a bit of a mean reversion trade, though, as all seven regional international ETFs shown are between 4% and 7% above their 50-day moving averages (DMA).
Price charts of the regional ETFs over the last six months also illustrate some of the performance disparity on both a YTD basis and over the last week. Over the longer-term, the US is the only one of the seven ETFs shown that hasn’t hit a 52-week high in the last couple of weeks, but whereas Emerging Markets (EEM), Latin America (ILF), and Europe (VGK) have been moving in more of a sideways direction over the last week or two, the S&P 500 just hit a post “Liberation Day” high yesterday.
Jun 3, 2025
This content is for members only
Jun 3, 2025
See what’s driving market performance around the world in today’s Morning Lineup. Bespoke’s Morning Lineup is the best way to start your trading day. Read it now by starting a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium. CLICK HERE to learn more and start your trial.
“In 1989, we were at a crossroads to see what kind of society China would have. Now it’s settled: You can get rich, but you can’t open your mouth.” – Adi Ignatius
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
US equity futures were under pressure before the sun came up on the East Coast this morning. As the sun rose, though, so too did prices, and based on where things stand now, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are on pace to open just modestly lower. In China overnight, the manufacturing PMI for May dropped back below 50 for the first time this year, indicating ongoing weakness as the trade war weighs on the manufacturing sector. In Europe, inflation was below the ECB’s 2% target as May CPI rose at just 1.9% y/y.
In the US, the only reports on the calendar are Factory Orders (expected to fall 3.1% y.y) and JOLTS (7.1 million), and the OECD lowered its 2025 GDP growth forecast for the US down from 2.2% to 1.6. On the earnings front, the only major movers this morning are Dollar General (DG) and Signet (SIG), and both stocks are trading up over 10%. While not related to earnings, shares of Constellation Energy (CEG) are also sharply higher after announcing a multi-year deal to supply Meta (META) with nuclear power.
Today also marks the 36th anniversary of the Chinese military’s crackdown on the pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square. Even if it has been ‘forgotten’ by the Chinese internet, who can forget the picture of “Tank Man” defiantly standing in front of a row of Chinese tanks? As Adi Ignatius, who covered the protests for the Wall Street Journal, put it, Tiananmen Square was a crossroads in history where citizens had the opportunity to get very rich as long as they could just keep their mouths shut. Jack Ma knows this all too well.
While the government’s actions in 1989 were a big blow to democracy and saw individual freedoms get crushed, China has seen a major surge in its wealth. In 1989, per capita GDP in China was less than $311. Today, it’s $12,614, representing an increase of 3,950%. Over that same period, US per capita GDP increased by less than 260%.
Comparing per capita GDP in China to the US shows how the gap has narrowed. While US per capita GDP is still 6.5 times the level of China, in 1989, US per capita GDP was more than 70 times China’s! While China has narrowed the gap in a big way, its rate of growth relative to the US has slowed considerably in recent years. In the ten years leading up to Xi Jinping becoming President in 2013, the ratio of US to Chinese per capita GDP shrank from 30.6 to 7.6. Since Xi became President in 2013, the ratio has declined from 7.6 to 6.5.
The slowing growth of China has also been reflected in the performance of Chinese stocks. While the iShares MSCI China ETF (MCHI) has seen some big moves, both up and down over the last 10+ years, its price is essentially unchanged from where it was 14 years ago.
Jun 2, 2025
See what’s driving market performance around the world in today’s Morning Lineup. Bespoke’s Morning Lineup is the best way to start your trading day. Read it now by starting a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium. CLICK HERE to learn more and start your trial.
“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” – Babe Ruth
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Another month has come and gone, and we’re now at the two-month anniversary of the “Liberation Day” ceremony at the White House Rose Garden. The event set off a massive roller coaster in global financial markets, even though markets are little changed from a point-to-point basis. With earnings season largely behind us, economic data and the President’s Truth Social account will be the most closely watched items of the week. While the scheduled start will be at 10 AM with the release of May’s ISM Manufacturing report and the April report on Construction Spending, the timing of headlines related to trade is as predictable as a thunderstorm in the summer. You never know when one will pop up, but you know they always will.
It’s hard to believe that even as the S&P 500 was on the cusp of a bear market in early April, the index’s total return over the last 12 months has been better than average. With a total return of 13.5%, the S&P 500’s gain over the last year outpaced the long-term average by 1.5 percentage points. Over the last two and five years, annualized returns have been even stronger at 20.6% and 15.9%, respectively. Both of those returns are also well above the historical average of about 10.5% for all periods since 1928. Even over the last 10 years, the 12.9% annualized gain is still more than two full percentage points better than average. You have to go out to the 20-year window to find a timeframe where returns are below average, and even there, the 10.5% annualized gain is only slightly less than the long-term average of 10.8%.
The chart below shows how the current one, two, five, ten, and twenty-year returns stack up relative to the long-term average. While the one-year gain is only slightly above the 50th percentile, the S&P 500’s two- and five-year performance is above the 75th percentile.
