Previewing the Week Ahead

September 8, 2014   10 am

When you look at the U.S. economic calendar for this week you will not find anything that will obviously move either equities or interest rates on the docket.  We have Goldman and Redbook retail sales on Tuesday and the Census Bureau retail number on Friday.  These numbers have been trending higher and expectations are for more strong numbers–but in the end 1 number will not move the markets either up or down.

We have consumer sentiment being released on Friday–again the numbers have been good and expectations are for more of the same.  We think these numbers move for 2 reasons—jobs and the stock market (or at least the headlines presented by the nightly news) and as such we think decent numbers will continue.

There are all types of treasury auctions this week–again not a moving factor for markets.

This brings us to geopolitics–Ukraine and Iraq.  The only obvious factor is Obama’s strategy announcement on Wednesday–and if he announced anything of consequence to markets we would be very surprised–todate the strategy has been slowly lifting U.S. actions and this will likely continue.

The bottom line is we don’t anticipate big moves this week although markets could be a bit nervous with the 9/11 this week.

Portfolios

We do not anticipate making many (if any) moves this week.  Our desire to buy something other than perpetual issues is leaving us with a minimal number of choices to purchase.  Preferred stocks in general have been stuck at unchanged for a couple weeks now, which is 1% off of the yearly highs–we will need to see a big drop in interest rates to move them to new highs.  MLP’s and REITs are right at new highs which is where they have been for sometime now.

All in all we are happy at near a 11% gain for the year.