Medicare Agent News: Not So Spooky

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Not So Spooky

By Nicholas Jasinski | Monday, October 31

Calm Before the Storm. Stock indexes slipped today, ending an otherwise strong month for stocks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average surged 14% in October—its best month since January 1976. The Nasdaq Composite, which is more heavily weighted in technology and growth stocks, added less than 4% during the month. The S&P 500 split it down the middle, adding 8% in October. All three indexes snapped two-month losing streaks.

Over the in bond market, yields ticked higher today to end a big month: The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield rose 0.27 percentage point in October, to 4.07%. That's its third-straight month of gains, during which the yield has added 1.43 percentage points, its largest three-month yield gain since 1984.

Today was a relatively quiet day ahead of a big week of potentially market-moving news and events. The latest inflation data from the Eurozone showed a record 10.7% rise in consumer prices from last October. That data highlights the challenges facing the European Central Bank as it tries to balance a slowing economy and acceleration in inflation.

Big Tech stocks resumed their declines from last week, with Meta Platforms leading the slump, down 6.1% today. Oil-and-gas stocks, on the other hand, rallied following ebullient results from Exxon Mobil and Chevron late last week.

The Dow slipped 0.4%, the S&P 500 lost 0.7%, and the Nasdaq slid 1.0%.

The parade of earnings continues tomorrow with results from Airbnb, Advanced Micro Devices, BP, Pfizer, and Uber Technologies. In all, some 160 S&P 500 companies are scheduled to report this week.

The Federal Open Market Committee begins a two-day meeting tomorrow, with a policy decision scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. Officials are widely expected to increase the fed-funds rate target range by 0.75 percentage point, to 3.75% to 4.00%.

What comes next is more of a topic of debate, and comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell at the post-meeting press conference will be closely watched for clues. Will the Fed gradually reduce the pace of its hikes? Will it pause soon and let the higher rates flow through to the real economy? Will it remain "data-dependent" and decide meeting by meeting what to do? There's little consensus in futures-market pricing or among economists.

The Bank of England will also announce a policy decision this Thursday.

Then there's jobs Friday. The U.S. economy is expected to have added 195,000 nonfarm payrolls in October, down from 263,000 in September.