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.
“As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons.” – Harper Lee
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
After five straight weeks where the market has essentially gapped down 1% or more at the open to start a week, futures are surprisingly muted this morning, with the S&P 500 indicated to open fractionally lower (~0.10%). The subdued tone comes as there has been no change to the trade situation between the US and any of its trading partners. You can say no news is good news, but the longer we go with no news, the more anxious the market will become. In Europe, stocks are starting the week positively with the STOXX 600 up nearly half a percent, Germany and France lead the way higher, while Spain and Italy lag.
This will be an important week for economic and earnings-related news outside of trade-related news. On the earnings front, a third of the companies in the S&P 500 are scheduled to report, including Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon.com (AMZN), and Meta (META). The pace of economic data will be just as busy. While Dallas Fed is the only report on the calendar today, on Tuesday, we’ll get Consumer Confidence for April and JOLTS for March. On Wednesday, we’ll get ADP for April and the first read of Q1 GDP, followed by jobless claims and April Manufacturing PMI for April on Thursday. Then Friday, the week closes out with the April Employment report. After all these reports, we should have a much better read on how all the uncertainty over trade has impacted the economy.
After rallying as much as 12.4% month to date and rising above $3,500 per ounce last week, gold prices have significantly pulled back in the last four trading days. This morning, the price is little changed, trading right around $3,300 per ounce. While still up nearly 6% for the month, the magnitude of the gain has been more than cut in half.
When gold last hit a 52-week high on Tuesday (4/22), it pulled back sharply lower intraday and finished the day more than 2.5% from its intraday high. Since the mid-1970s, it was just the 33rd time that its price hit a 52-week high but finished the day down more than 2.5% from the intraday high. The chart below shows every prior occurrence with a red dot. While these types of reversals were evident at prior peaks, they were also scattered throughout longer-term uptrends. The most recent occurrence before last week was almost exactly a year earlier in mid-April of last year, and we all know what gold has done since then. In other words, it’s hard to put too much significance into any one day’s reversal.
Looking at gold’s performance relative to other commodities, it certainly has been doing its own thing lately. Year to date, both gold ETFs are up over 25% and finished the week more than 8% above their 50-day moving average after pulling back from extreme overbought levels. Most other commodity-related ETFs are either down or up by mid-single-digit percentages. Gold has its reasons to rally relative to other commodities, but as it rallied above $3,500 last week, its price became extremely extended.
