Over the past week, we saw quite a bit of turbulence in markets, with the indices finding themselves up, down, and all around. To finish off the week, the Dow was up 0.27% and the S&P was up 0.34%, whereas the Nasdaq was down 0.12% and the Russell was down a whopping 1.41% on a week-over-week basis. Although we’ve largely made it through earnings season and inflation readings this month, we’re not out of the woods yet!
Last week, we saw both CPI and PPI tick back up as inflation continued to prove how stubborn it is. This, of course, led to widespread worry in financial markets, causing the indices and the much broader market to give up the gains they had found throughout the week. Unfortunately, the scary thing for markets isn’t the fact that inflation is ticking back up. Instead, markets are worried about what the Fed will have to say about this uptick in prices.
Fortunately for us, we won’t have to wait very long to hear what the Fed has to say about inflation, as we’ll get their interest rate decision this week on Wednesday afternoon, followed promptly by Powell addressing the people. In addition to the highly anticipated interest rate decision, we’ll also get some very important information on the housing market, starting with the home builder confidence index on Monday, followed by housing starts and building permits on Tuesday, and wrapping things up with existing home sales on Thursday.
Although earnings season has more or less come to an end, we still have some fairly economically important companies reporting their earnings this week, such as:
03/18 – StoneCo (STNE)
03/19 – Tencent Music Entertainment (TME), Core & Main (CNM)
03/20 – PDD Holdings (PDD), Micron Technology (MU), General Mills (GIS), Prudential Public Limited Company (PUK), BioNTech SE (BNTX), Five Below (FIVE), Chewy (CHEWY), KB Home (KBH)
03/21 – Accenture plc (ACN), Nike (NKE), FedEx Corporation (FDX), lululemon athletica (LULU), Darden Restaurants (DRI), FactSet Research Systems (FDS)
It will be important to pay attention to what NKE and LULU say on their earnings calls. These companies have their fingers on the pulse of consumers across the country, and across the world, so they will be able to provide some great insight as to how consumers are feeling.
FDX is another company that will give some great information regarding consumer spending habits. After all, FDX is part of an oligopoly focusing on the fulfillment and delivery of parcels, so their commentary will be key to listen to!
Monitoring the market conditions this week.
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