1) I refuse to use Twitter because it's always been filled with so many trolls and other garbage.
But I have to admit there really is some great stuff on it, so my compromise is to have my analyst Kevin DeCamp follow it and send me only the good stuff.
We've been working together for more than a decade, so he's a good judge of what I'm interested in. Here's some of the best stuff he's found over the past week...
Following up on yesterday's e-mail about my friend Doug Kass' point about the market being overly concentrated among the biggest tech stocks, my colleague Enrique Abeyta tweeted this interesting chart:
2) Speaking of popular tech stocks, my friend Scott Galloway tweeted an interesting chart showing the carnage among the stocks of hot IPOs in the past few years:
3) In yesterday's e-mail, I also discussed what the Fed might do the rest of this year.
Here's a thread with more powerful evidence that supports my view that it's finished raising rates for good:
4) A related tweet:
5) Metrics regarding the health of the economy are more mixed than I can ever recall.
For example, the sharp upturn in interest rates has cooled off the housing market and put pressure on banks, leading to a tightening of credit (if not a full-blown credit crunch). For more on this, see this article from the front page of today's Wall Street Journal: Banks Raise Roadblocks to Small-Business Loans).
That would indicate a looming recession, except unemployment is low, the job market is tight, corporate balance sheets are strong, and flights and hotels are full. Go figure...
Here's a data point indicating a recession, tweeted by CNBC's Carl Quintanilla:
6) Here's another bearish data point:
7) In my May 3 e-mail, I called the bottom for regional bank stocks, writing:
I think these fears are way overblown and that yesterday's sell-off – and this hysterical, over-the-top, wrongheaded article – may mark a bottom for the sector...
That day, the SPDR S&P Regional Banking Fund (KRE) closed at $38.16.
I was a day too early, as the next day KRE plunged to an intraday (and multiyear) low of $34.52 and closed at $36.08. But since then, the sector has stabilized as the KRE has risen to close yesterday at $39.76, leading Quintanilla to tweet a link to a Financial Times article, Some investors see bargains in tentative US regional bank recovery:
In the last two issues of our Empire Investment Report newsletter, I recommended a basket of six banking stocks that look like classic "babies thrown out with the bathwater" situations.
Subscribers can access both issues here and here... And if you aren't a subscriber, you can learn more about Empire Investment Report and find out how to gain instant access to these five recommendations by clicking here.
8) Activist short seller Nate Anderson of Hindenburg Research has been knocking the cover off the ball, as he documents here:
9) My friend Marcelo Lima of Heller House Capital posted this excellent reading list.
I actually think it's the reading list that former Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) executive Tracy Britt Cool put together for interns at her new firm, Kambrick – see: A Warren Buffett Protégée Strikes Out on Her Own:
10) Lastly, this tweet highlights sobering trends in American values:
Best regards,
Whitney
P.S. I welcome your feedback at [email protected].
