Don't look now, but the New York Mets are in first place and while Chris Rock's friends never heard of a Met, so far this baseball season reminds us that things can, and do, change.
And the last shall be first gives many earthly hopes that things will get better and so it is in the stock market that from time to time there are shifts – the winners fade, pause or even become losers while the latter leads the parade.
They call this phenomenon in the stock market a “rotation”.
As the market has been spinning its wheels in the past week, energy and utilities have improved reflecting (in my mind) greed and fear. Coming into today's session, there was a noticeable drop off in the performance of consumer cyclical and defensive stocks in hindsight then perfect harbinger for the initial read on first quarter GDP.
But as stocks like Apple stall and others like Twitter get hammered, I think it will be slow-moving names that are largely ignored that will attract buyers. On that note, however, we aren't looking to force the issue.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
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This morning's GDP report is downright demoralizing. Sure, there were signs all along, but the print of 0.2% hits like a ton of bricks. The economic rate of growth has decelerated since peaking in the third quarter of last year. Note: last year, the initial GDP release was +0.2%, but the final read was -2.1%, not a great omen for the true state of our economy.
Earnings mostly disappointed, save for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. (HOT) and GoPro, Inc. (GPRO) which is fighting off Wall Street's relentless hate machine that has ignored all signs the company is a budding juggernaut, instead to focus on the eventual victory of a cheaper Chinese knockoff.
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