Due to inflation, several retailers are already dealing with higher cost of goods and services (COGS) – and dealing with the supply chain crisis. They just finished reporting Q3 earnings; 141 retailers have already discussed inflation worries, and 192 have mentioned the supply issues during their earnings calls. Consumers’ short-term inflation expectations rose again, with the median cost of living increase for next year pushing up from 5.7% to 6.0%. This increase is twice the pace of expectations for income growth, which slid to 2.8% from 3.0%, according to the New York Federal Reserve. As a result, the latest Ipsos

With Donald Trump’s trade war, the role of media in driving market prices has become explicit. Below is an image of the CNY/USD exchange rate with two sentiment moving averages superimposed.  From 2017 to April 2018, media reports on the Chinese Yuan trended more positive, and the green shading between the two moving averages represents that trend.  However, in April 2018 Trump began to beat the trade war drums about implementing tariffs.  Initially these reports were seen as a bluff, but within two months it became clear they were not, and sentiment collapsed, following by the exchange rate.  An image of

The universe of numbers that represents the global economy. Millions of hands at work, billions of minds. A vast network, screaming with life. An organism. A natural organism. My hypothesis: Within the stock market, there is a pattern as well… Right in front of me… hiding behind the numbers. Always has been. ~ Max Cohen in Pi (1998, movie), Artisan Entertainment. The movie “Pi” follows Max Cohen – a genius mathematician – as he searches for a single number that will unlock the universal patterns found in nature.  As he hones his understanding in the stock market, he is pursued by

The social media herd can turn on a dime, praising a company one month and then trashing its reputation the next (see Papa John’s, below).  The past year has seen many such ups and downs, and this article looks at a few of those the herd ranked highest. In 2011 Thomson Reuters partnered with behavioral economics consultancy MarketPsych to bring psychological analytics into the investment arena.  MarketPsych’s patented natural language processing engine quantifies emotions and themes expressed in relation to a universe of over 12,000 global companies, 45 currencies, 187 countries, and 36 commodities.  The software scans articles and posts