You Can’t Keep This Market Down

This stock market just continues to hang in there–no matter the news good or bad.  The S&P 500 is less than 1% from an all time high–even with interest rates creeping higher.  Corporate earnings are not sensational as the strong dollar contributed to a stagnation in sales and earnings.  Oh well, guess it doesn’t matter.

The 10 year treasury has moved up to 2.13% this morning–more than an 1/8th of a point in the last week.  No real reason for this happening except traders starting to anticipate a highly likely move in short rates by the FED later this year.  The key here is that rates are moving slowly–if we get a day in which the 10 year moves 20 or 30 basis points in a single day we will likely see a strong negative reaction in stocks and all interest sensitive instruments (preferreds, REIT etc.).  Let’s hope for slow moves.

Last Friday we did unload some shares of REIT Independence Realty Trust (ticker:IRT).  We were overweight in this issue and in a move to limit REIT exposure cut back in this issue.  Additionally we doubled up on NGL Energy (ticker:NGL) a issue we first bought on 4/23/2015.  We wrote a bit on this issue earlier.  NGL is up around 5% from our 1st purchase (although it shows as being up just 3% it went ex-dividend last week which was by around 2%).  We had considered cutting utility Southern Company (ticker:SO), but have not done so yet.

Currently we have no firm plans for buys or sells this week–but of course this is subject to change.  We await employment stats on Friday of this week–we will see if we have strength back or if this economy is heading for trouble.