Good Friday evening to all of you here on r/stocks! I hope everyone on this sub made out pretty nicely in the market this past week, and are ready for the new trading week ahead. :)

Here is everything you need to know to get you ready for the trading week beginning June 19th, 2023.

S&P 500 breaks six-day win streak on Friday, but still notches best week since March: Live updates - (Source)

The S&P 500 rose slightly Friday, touching the 4,300 level for the first time since August 2022 as investors looked ahead to upcoming inflation data and the Federal Reserve’s latest policy announcement.

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Stocks slipped on Friday as Wall Street closed out a huge week in which investors received a pause on rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, plus encouraging inflation data.

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The S&P 500 ticked down 0.37% to close at 4,409.59, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 108.94 points, or 0.32%, to close at 34,299.12. The Nasdaq Composite lost 0.68% to finish the session at 13,689.57.

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Here are the major market milestones on the week: * The S&P 500 is up 2.6% on the week, its best performance since March. * It’s the S&P 500′s fifth positive week in a row, the first such streak since November 2021. * The benchmark is now up more than 26% from its bear market low. * The Nasdaq Composite is up about 3.3% on the week, its best week since March. * The Nasdaq is up eight weeks in a row, its best winning streak since 2019. * Both the Nasdaq and S&P 500 were up six days in a row through Thursday. * The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up nearly 1.3% for the week, its third positive week in a row. * The S&P 500 and Nasdaq have hit their highest levels since April 2022.

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The Federal Reserve delivered what investors wanted this week when the central bank left rates unchanged Wednesday after 10 consecutive hikes. While the Fed signaled that two more rate increases were coming this year, many traders and economists on Wall Street believe the Fed could be nearly done. Earlier in the week, the May consumer price index came in at the lowest in two years.

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Adobe added 0.9% after beating results and issuing upbeat guidance, the latest tech stock to rally. AI darling Nvidia gained 10% this week, adding to its 192% surge this year. Microsoft added 4.7% this week and hit a record Thursday. Tech shares were the hardest hit initially when the Fed embarked on its rate-hiking campaign.

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“Wall Street remains upbeat that the AI wave won’t be going away anytime soon and that investors will prefer US stocks as we see diverging central bank policies worldwide,” said Ed Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda. “This stock market rally seems a bit overextended but too much money remains on the sidelines, which means if the AI trade remains intact, this winning streak for the S&P 500 can continue.”

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Friday brought more good news on the inflation and economic front. Consumer inflation expectations fell in June, with one-year assumptions for price pressures declining to 3.3% from 4.2% in May. The headline reading from the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers came in at 63.9, higher than estimates of 60.2 from Dow Jones.

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Friday’s session saw choppy moves across the stock market as stock options, index futures and index future option contracts.

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Friday also marks the final trading day before a long weekend, with the market closed Monday in observation of Juneteenth.

This past week saw the following moves in the S&P:

(CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL S&P TREE MAP FOR THE PAST WEEK!)

S&P Sectors for this past week:

(CLICK HERE FOR THE S&P SECTORS FOR THE PAST WEEK!)

Major Indices for this past week:

(CLICK HERE FOR THE MAJOR INDICES FOR THE PAST WEEK!)

Major Futures Markets as of Friday's close:

(CLICK HERE FOR THE MAJOR FUTURES INDICES AS OF FRIDAY!)

Economic Calendar for the Week Ahead:

(CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ECONOMIC CALENDAR FOR THE WEEK AHEAD!)

Percentage Changes for the Major Indices, WTD, MTD, QTD, YTD as of Friday's close:

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

S&P Sectors for the Past Week:

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

Major Indices Pullback/Correction Levels as of Friday's close:

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

Major Indices Rally Levels as of Friday's close:

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

Most Anticipated Earnings Releases for this week:

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

Here are the upcoming IPO's for this week:

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

Friday's Stock Analyst Upgrades & Downgrades:

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART LINK #1!)

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART LINK #2!)

Four Things the Bulls Need to Know

“The stock market is the only place where things go on sale, yet everyone runs out of the store screaming.” -Old stock market axiom

Here are four things that have caught my attention over the past week.

First up, you might have heard by now, but the S&P 500 moved into a new bull market, up more than 20% from the October ’22 lows. We wrote about this in detail here, but investors need to know that a year after this happened, the S&P 500 was historically up 17.7% on average and higher 12 out of 13 times.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

Adding to the fun, S&P 500 finally made a new 52-week high this week, the first one since early January 2022. What does this mean? Below we looked at all the times stocks went at least one year without a new 52-week high and the good news is more strength is quite likely. A year later stocks have been higher an incredible 15 out of 15 times and up more than 17% on average. Adding that to the numbers in the first table and the next year could continue to surprise to the upside.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

Next up, this week marked officially eight months since the bear market ended. To think stocks would be up more than 20% by now would have been crazy to most investors if they were being honest. The quote I used above is one I always think about when stocks fall and it really does sum up investor sentiment well. Very few were saying ‘buy stocks’ last October and most didn’t say it early in 2023 either.

We did note the week of the lows why the lows were likely in (and boy did the bears hate that call), but even I’ve got to admit the strength this year has been impressive. We moved to overweight equities in our Carson House View models in mid-December and we added to equity risk in late March during the regional bank crisis. To sum it up, we’ve been in the lonely bullish camp and continue to think higher prices are coming.

What does eight months without a new 52-week low mean? It would be extremely rare for stocks to roll over and make new lows from here for starters. Also, three months later the S&P 500 was up 85% of the time, six months later 90% of the time, and a year later 80% of the time higher. The bottom line, once you get to eight months without a new 52-week low, the upward trajectory likely stays in place.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

Lastly, the bear market officially started a year ago this week, as the S&P 500 moved to down 20% from the January ’22 peak on 6/13/2022. That wasn’t a fun time for investors at all, but here we are a year later, and stocks are up more than 16%. In other words, had you had the intestinal fortitude to buy when all the headlines were negative, you’d be sitting on some great gains a year later. Again, think about the quote at the top of this blog. This is what is important to always remember. Stocks go up and they go down. If you want to get some good deals, you need to buy when they are lower.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

Why the Fed Wasn’t As Hawkish As Everyone Thinks

The Federal Reserve (Fed) didn’t raise rates in June, leaving the Federal Funds rate in the 5-5.25% range. This was the first meeting in which they held back ever since they started raising rates back in March 2022.

However, the big news was that Fed members project rates to be 0.5%-points higher than what they projected back in March. Members updated their projections for rates to hit 5.6% at the end of 2023, up from the previous estimate of 5.1%. By itself, this was viewed as a very hawkish signal, despite the pause in rate hikes.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

If you recall, the last set of projections was made in March soon after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. At the time, they said that potential credit tightening would be equivalent to rate hikes, so they left projections unchanged.

Fast forward three months and the economy looks to have weathered the banking crisis, even as core inflation (excluding food and energy) remains elevated. Hence the update to where they believe rates should be at the end of 2023.

However, the rest of the materials they released, along with Fed Chair Powell’s comments suggest more rate hikes are not a certainty.

The Fed is (finally) acknowledging the economy’s resilience

Along with interest rate projections, Fed members also updated their economic projections. This is where things got interesting. The updated projections included:

• Raising 2023 real GDP growth from 0.4% to 1%
  • Dropping the 2023 unemployment rate from 4.5% to 4.1%

Despite projecting more rate hikes, they seem to believe that economic growth will be stronger than they expected back in March, and the unemployment rate lower.

At the same time, they also expect inflation as measured by the core personal consumption expenditures index (their preferred measure) to be 3.9% y the end of 2023. In March, the expectation was 3.6%. The higher projection makes sense within the context of the economic strength we’re seeing currently (we’ve written about this).

Moreover, Fed members expect core inflation to slow to 2.6% in 2024, leading them to project interest rate cuts worth about 1%. Even as the economy grows 1.1% in 2024.

Take all these projections with several grains of salt. Moreover, these projections are not forecasts – instead, they’re more like best guesses.

However, it is a sign that Fed officials finally believe that inflation can slow down without a recession. That’s a significant turnaround from what they’ve been signaling over the last year, i.e. a huge economic slowdown/recession is necessary for inflation to fall.

In fact, Powell acknowledged that the conditions are in place for inflation to slow down – economic growth has fallen below trend though activity remains strong, the labor market is less tight, and goods supply chain disruptions are easing.

Pausing in June allows them to get more information about the impact of rate hikes and the banking crisis. Now, the July Fed meeting is only 6 weeks away and there’s not enough data that will give them that information. Instead, they’re looking for at least 3 months of data to see how things evolve.

That buys time and indicates that 2 more rate hikes (each worth 0.25%) are not a sure thing. At the same time, raising the 2023 estimate ensures that investors believe they are serious about curbing inflation, and gives them the optionality to increase rates if inflation remains persistent.

Good news: inflation looks to be headed lower

Headline CPI inflation has decelerated from a peak of 9.1% year-over-year in June 2022 to 4% in May. Over the past three months, inflation is running at a 2.2% annualized pace, the slowest 3-month pace since two and half years.

The big driver of the pullback has been energy, but more recently, food prices have also started falling. Vehicle prices, which boosted inflation last year, are also moving lower – used car prices rose over the last two months, but private data indicates that it’s going to reverse soon.

What’s left? As the chart below indicates, a lot of it is shelter inflation (the dark green bar). This is the main reason why core inflation remains elevated, running at a 5% annualized pace over the last three months. That’s simply too high for the Fed.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

The good news is that shelter inflation looks to be at an inflection point. We’ve discussed in the past how the official rental inflation data has a significant lag to the private market data. Private data have been showing rents to be decelerating for more than a year now. It’s taken a while, but the official data is now turning around as well. It is a bit like turning an aircraft carrier around, and so it is going to take a while. But it is just a matter of time before core inflation decelerates on the back of falling shelter inflation.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

Now, the Fed has said that they need to see even services inflation excluding shelter decelerate. We received good news on that front. The Atlanta Federal Reserve calculates something called the Sticky Price CPI excluding food, energy, and shelter. It measures inflation for items whose prices typically don’t change frequently. Over the past 3 months, this measure is running at a 2.5% annualized pace, well below the peak of 7.3% we saw last year.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

On top of this, the producer price index, which measures input prices for businesses and typically leads inflation, has collapsed to just 1.2% year-over-year in May. That’s well off the peak pace of 11.6% we saw in March 2022, and lower than the pre-pandemic average of 2%. Even excluding food and energy, PPI is down to 2.8% now from 9.7% 14 months ago.

All in all, there’s encouraging news on the inflation front even as the economy remains resilient. Powell’s comments reflect that. This is why we’re not quite so convinced that two more rate hikes are baked in. But expect them to leave rates higher for longer.

Why Strong Stock Returns on Friday is Bullish

One of the most hated and despised rallies continued last week, with the S&P now up nearly 12% on the year and officially up more than 20% from the October lows. If you’ve been reading or listening to what the Carson Investment Research team has been saying, then you know we’ve been in the camp we’ve been in a new bull market for quite some time now, expecting continued higher prices. None the less, with stocks now officially up 20%, we see others finally coming around. For instance, check out the cover of Barron’s over the weekend. Yeah, we sure weren’t seeing things like that in January, were we?

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

Sonu and I both wrote blogs last week on stocks being up 20% from the lows and you can read them here and here. Additionally, here’s a Yahoo! Finance hit I did on October 13, the exact day that stocks officially bottomed. I noted many reasons to think better times were coming and fortunately, that is exactly what has happened.

Additionally, here’s the blog I wrote a week after the October lows titled Why Stocks Likely Just Bottomed. Our bullish tilt since late last year wasn’t popular and has been widely mocked by many bears for months and months. We aren’t hearing so much chirping from them now though

One thing we’ve notice lately is buying and strength in stocks later in the week, specifically on Thursday and Friday. We love to see this, as it shows there is confidence to hold stocks over the weekend. Those of us that have done this long enough remember how volatile (and usually bearish) Friday afternoons would be during the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) or during the COVID bear market in February and March of 2020. Even last year during the bear market we saw historically weak returns on Friday.

So, to now see buying and confidence on Thursday and Friday in ’23 are significant changes from what we saw during previous bearish phases and could be another clue that this bull market is indeed healthy and likely has legs left.

This first chart shows just how much better Thursday and Friday are doing than the other days this year. Again, we like to see this late week buying as a clue things are healthy and confident. (For those wondering how we did the annualized return calculations, the average Friday return this year so far has been a gain of 0.40%, so we multiplied that by 252 (the number of trading days per year) to get an annualized return).

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

Let’s talk specifically about Friday, shall we? As of last week, Friday was up an incredible 101.7% on an annualized basis in ’23. This would come in as the best Friday EVER. Now, let’s be honest, the odds do favor this coming back to earth some over the remaining rest of the year, but overall we are on a great start to this year being one of the best ever for stocks on a Friday.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART!)

What does it all mean you ask? In the final table below, I