Existing home sales will drop to 4.78 million in 2023, NAR predicts
In addition to a further drop in existing home sales, Yun said he expects the annual median home price to rise just 0.3% next year to $384,500.
In addition to a further drop in existing home sales, Yun said he expects the annual median home price to rise just 0.3% next year to $384,500.
Love them or hate them, you just canât ignore the phenomenon that is the Kardashian-Jenner family. For over a decade, this family of strong women has entertained us with their drama and scandals and kept us on our toes with their hit reality show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians. While many people may argue that […]
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Goldman Sachs, a multinational investment bank, forecasts home prices will fall further in 2023 than initially expected.
The decline in mortgage rates is only a reprieve, say experts who … The Washington Post
The first session of the holiday-shortened week was a wild one, as a deep Tuesday morning dip evolved into a severely split market featuring pockets of red and green alike.
On one side, you had big dips in economically sensitive sectors. Energy (-4.0%) fared the worst thanks to a drastic decline in U.S. crude oil futures, which plunged 8.2% to $99.50 â the commodity’s lowest finish in more than two months.
“This move came on the back of an ever-increasing number of economic indicators (Goldman Sachs US Financial Conditions Index, Citi US Economic Surprise Index, ISM orders) now pointing to sustained weakening of financial conditions as well as Street expectations,” says Michael Reinking, senior market strategist for the New York Stock Exchange.
Also weighing on oil was a strengthening U.S. dollar, which closed the session at a 19-year high. (Remember: Oil is priced in U.S. dollars, so a strong dollar will weigh on oil prices, and vice versa.) The aforementioned worries of weakness hampered other sectors, too, including materials (-2.0%) and industrials (-1.5%).
“Shifting to a more near-term view, with commodity prices coming a bit back down to reality, some investors may view this as a welcome sign that inflation is beginning to cool â the main driver of recent volatility,” adds Chris Larkin, managing director of trading for E*Trade.
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However, other parts of the market â namely, those pinned to the ground by rising interest rates â came off the mat as recent weakness in Treasury yields continued.
The 10-year T-note yield fell as low as 2.78% on Tuesday, sending communication services (+2.4%) and consumer discretionary (+2.2%) stocks higher. Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META, +5.1%), Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL, +4.2%) and Amazon.com (AMZN, +3.6%) â all members of the “FAANGs” â were among the session’s noteworthy winners.
That resulted in markedly divergent results among the major indexes, which all finished well off their morning lows. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, led lower by Chevron (CVX, -2.6%), dipped 0.4% to 30,967, while the S&P 500 finished with a tame 0.2% uptick to 3,831. The Nasdaq Composite, however, popped 1.8% to 11,322.
YCharts
Other news in the stock market today:
Inflationary pressures (and related stock-market pain) are hardly exclusive to investors in U.S. equities. For instance, the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (EEM) â one of the most popular funds holding emerging markets stocks â entered bear-market territory this year and is currently off 19% year-to-date.
Like with anything that’s down, investors might put EMs on their buy-the-dip list. BofA Securities does warn that a comeback isn’t necessarily imminent â but emerging markets won’t be down forever.
“We stay bearish into the summer but see emerging long-term value. Don’t turn bullish before central banks panic about recession more than inflation,” say BofA’s David Hauner and Claudio Irigoyen. But they add that “2023 is starting to come into focus: it might get better for EM. The EM-US growth differential is one of the more reliable top-down indicators. For 2023, our mid-year forecast update implies the best such number in a decade.”
Thus, investors would do well to at least start building their EM wish lists.
But if you find individual names to be a bit too risky, emerging markets mutual funds allow you to enjoy some of this category’s explosive upside while decreasing the chances that a single-stock blow-up will torpedo your portfolio. We look at five top emerging market funds.
On the heels of their worst session of 2022, stocks initially struggled to find direction Friday following the release of the April jobs report â though in the end, they settled for selling, again.Â
The Labor Department this morning said the U.S. added 428,000 jobs last month, while the unemployment rate held steady at 3.6%. This marked the 12th straight month U.S. employers have added at least 400,000 new jobs. At this pace, the economy could recover all of its pandemic-related job losses by mid-July, says Kiplinger economist David Payne.Â
Also notable in the report was wage growth, which rose 0.3% month-over-month and 5.5% year-over-year, and the participation rate â or the percentage of the population that have jobs or are seeking them â which declined slightly to 62.2%.
“While there’s no shortage of concerns to take the wind out of investors’ sails right now, this jobs read likely won’t be one of them,” says Mike Loewengart, managing director of Investment Strategy at E*Trade. “With a relatively rosy jobs picture, despite slight misses on participation and wages, the Federal Reserve likely won’t be swayed from its rate hike campaign. And since numbers came in mostly in line with expectations, the market may have already priced in a robust jobs read.”
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Stocks initially opened lower before finding their way higher by lunchtime. These intraday gains were short-lived, however, with all three markets sinking back into negative territory in the afternoon.
At the close, the Nasdaq Composite was down 1.4% at 12,144, the S&P 500 Index was 0.6% lower at 4,123 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 0.3% at 32,899.
YCharts
Other news in the stock market today:
The Fed is unlikely to change course with its monetary-tightening plan any time soon. That seems to be the general consensus around Wall Street, especially on the heels of today’s solid jobs report.Â
“We have been cautious all year given the unprecedented size of the Fed’s balance sheet, which they need to unwind due to the inflationary pressures we have been experiencing and a concern that valuations were too high as interest rates were poised to move higher,” says Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for registered investment advisor Independent Advisor Alliance. Zacarelli believes the Fed will continue to “aggressively fight inflation,” no matter how much damage might be inflicted upon the stock market in the near term.Â
With this in mind, he reminds investors that it’s prudent to be invested in quality stocks of companies that have the ability to power through a recessionary environment. This includes companies “with a competitive advantage, pricing power and a strong balance sheet (e.g. relatively low debt compared to operating earnings),” Zaccarelli adds.Â
There are many ways investors can track down companies with high-quality fundamentals, including looking for those that are consistently increasing dividends or issuing special dividends â both signs of financial strength.Â
There’s also money to be made with Wall Street’s newest dividend stocks. Despite a U.S. economy plagued by labor shortages, supply-chain woes and higher prices, these companies are flexing their financial muscle by initiating dividends.
Bausch + Lomb, a well-known leader in eye care, is about to hit Wall Street in what investment bankers almost certainly hope will jump-start a weak initial public offering (IPO) market.
Bausch Health Companies (BHC) is a global healthcare stock that develops pharmaceuticals, medical devices and over-the-counter medications, with focus areas in eye health, gastroenterology and dermatology.
However, to help streamline its operations and pay down debt, Bausch is spinning off its Bausch + Lomb eye care division in what is shaping up to be one of 2022’s most anticipated IPOs.
Bausch + Lomb sells contact lenses, eye drops and even implantable lenses for cataract surgery in more than 100 countries. The division boasts more than 400 products, more than 260 of which came on the market since 2017.
You can thank Bausch + Lomb’s robust R&D arm, which has about 850 employees. The current product pipeline includes more than 100 projects, such as treatments for dry eye, contact lenses to slow myopia, and next-gen cataract equipment.
The focus on innovation has helped to grow the top line. For 2021, division revenues jumped by 10.6% to $3.8 billion â part of BHC’s overall revenues of $8.4 billion, up 5% â and the company flipped from a loss of $17 million to a net gain of $193 million.
“While it faces significant competition from other brands and generic products, the company is highly profitable with strong cash flow, and it has global brand awareness of more than 70%,” says Renaissance Capital, an IPO-focused registered investment adviser.
The Bausch + Lomb IPO will see the company list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BLCO. The offering, expected May 5, should see 35 million shares listed at a price range of $21 to $24 per share. That would see the company raise $788 million at a valuation of $8.2 billion.
The offering is a breath of fresh air in what has been a lousy year for IPOs. Financial markets platform Dealogic says that more than a thousand companies went public in 2021, raising roughly $316 billion in the process.
However, a weakening environment for stocks in late 2021 and into 2022 cramped the market’s appetite for offerings. Renaissance Capital says just 26 IPOs have priced in 2022 â off 80% from the same point last year.
Expect other potential offerings to keep their eyes trained on the Bausch + Lomb IPO. A favorable reception could get a few more new stocks into the market.
The adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in comparison to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles has increased exponentially, fueled by government incentives and a friendly regulatory environment. This has resulted in even legacy car stocks going electric in a big way.
This transition from fossil-fueled cars to going electric got a big boost in 2021 when President Joe Biden signed an executive order targeting 50% of all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. should be electric by 2030.
But the industry has more recently been hampered by familiar pandemic woes, including supply-chain constraints impacting production and rising inflation being a key concern even as demand continues to be strong for these vehicles.Â
If this was not enough, the Chinese government imposed strict lockdowns across major Chinese cities like Shanghai to contain a wave of COVID-19. This has led to production halts at many key plants for EV manufacturers, which is only compounding a pre-existing automobile chip shortage.
Despite these short-term hurdles, the long-term implications for these car stocks is evident. EV sales hit 6.75 billion units in 2021 â more than double what they did in 2020, according to electric vehicle data site EV-volumes.com. While the impressive growth rate was due in part to easy year-over-year comparisons, expectations are for nearly 41% more EVs to be sold this year compared to last.
But which car stocks are poised to capture this growth? To answer that question, we used the TipRanks database, which allows investors to evaluate stocks using a variety of criteria, including analyst ratings and price targets.
Here, we’ll look at four popular car stocks and see what the pros are saying about each one. Each of the names featured here boasts mostly Buy or better ratings from analysts and each offers significant upside potential to current levels based on their consensus price targets.
Data is as of April 17.
Wall Street started the week on a shaky note as the 10-year Treasury yield hit its highest point in more than three years, but stocks’ difficulties were limited to mild declines.
Monday’s session saw the yield on the 10-year T-note climb to as high as 2.884% â a rate last seen in December 2018 â before easing a hair, to 2.866%. That spooked equity traders early, though BlackRock Investment Institute strategists say stock prices have already priced in rapid rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.
“We believe fears about a further downdraft in equities are overblown,” they say. “The rate hikes we expected are happening faster, but we don’t see central banks raising policy rates beyond neutral levels that neither stimulate or restrain the economy.”
Bank earnings were also front and center Monday amid what so far has been a lousy Q1 earnings season for the broader financial sector.
“Financials had the weakest start of earnings since 1Q20, with just 36% of the 11 companies that reported beating on both sales and [earnings per share] so far (40% beat last quarter after Week 1),” say BofA Securities strategists Savita Subramanian and Ohsung Kwon.
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Bank of America (BAC, +3.4%) headed higher as better credit quality among its borrowers translated into a modest 1.8% revenue improvement to $23.3 billion and a 12% profit decline to 80 cents per share â both ahead of Wall Street’s estimates.
However, Bank of New York Mellon (BK, -2.3%) also reported a double-digit profit decline (11%) that topped expectations but its stock was dragged lower. And Charles Schwab (SCHW, -9.4%) was the S&P 500’s worst performer after higher expenses weighed on profits and caused it to miss the mark on both the top and bottom lines.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (-0.1% to 34,411), S&P 500 (off marginally to 4,391) and Nasdaq Composite (-0.1% to 13,332) all traded similarly throughout the day, floating between positive and negative territory before finishing slightly lower.
YCharts
Other news in the stock market today:
Monday’s top-performing sector is certainly starting to become familiar with the winner’s circle. The likes of Marathon Petroleum (MPC, +3.3%) and Phillips 66 (PSX, +5.2%) helped keep energy stocks (+1.5%) way out in front in 2022, buoyed by a 1.2% rise in U.S. crude oil futures to $108.21 per barrel.Â
Indeed, the energy sector has now raced to a 46% gain so far in 2022, more than 40 percentage points ahead of the next closest sector (utilities, +5.8%) and far better than the 7.8% loss in the S&P 500.
An anticipated “return to normal” in global travel as summer starts to near, as well as a drastic reshaping of global oil supplies thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have driven U.S. crude prices up well more than 40% in 2022 alone â in turn lifting all parts of the sector, from refiners to pipeline master limited partnerships (MLPs).Â
Now, while it’s fair to argue that the easy money has likely been made in the energy sector, that doesn’t mean all the money has been made. Despite the sector’s torrid run, analysts see upside of at least 20% in a number of the sector’s shares.
Read on as we look at five oil and gas stocks that still command a large number of analysts’ Buy ratings, as well as lofty price targets suggesting even more gains ahead.