US retail sales, Philly Fed beat esitmates
Morgan Stanley beats estimates, raises targets
Stocks beat more records
A day without fresh records on Wall Street is a lost day. Today investors saw no reason to sell stocks as Morgan Stanley (MS.US) presented above-expectations results for both earnings and revenues and raised targets for the next 2 years. The stock leaped by nearly 10% and trades close to highs from March 2018. That capped a solid start of the earnings season for banks but still for 36 of the S&P500 companies that have reported so far the annual earnings growth is negative at -2.7%. That doesn’t seem to intimidate investors.
The US dollar is not the strongest currency today, being down to NZD and GBP, but USDIDX still recovered ground as EURUSD slid lower. US retail sales was up 0.3% m/m but as much as 0.7% m/m without counting passenger cars. What is more the Philly Fed business sentiment index rose from 2 points in December to 17 points. This could partly reflect trade deal optimism but nevertheless it’s the highest value since July, easily beating the consensus. Some emerging currencies were in trouble: Hungarian forint lost 0.7% to the greenback and Brazilian real slid to the weakest level since early December.
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USDIDX looked well positioned to test 96.50 just yesterday but solid US data caused a recovery today. Source: xStation5
Oil finally managed to recover after days of losses. Yesterday’s pin-bar from a $63.50 support zone worked very well for the bulls. Precious metals were all down today but the moves were limited. Cryptocurrencies also backtracked a bit.
Friday will begin with a package of the Chinese data, especially the Q4 GDP report and there will be reports on US output and consumer confidence so investors will have a lot of things to chew.
