00:03 Josh
US stocks pulled back from records as the Fed kicks off its September policy meeting. Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre joining us now with the trading day takeaways. Jared.
00:08 Jared Blikre
Thank you, Josh. We had a couple of streaks end, they are no more. So that’s my first bullet point here. Nasdaq Composite had six record closes in a row. This is a one-month chart, each little candlestick is one day, and here was the streak, boom, but that is over now. It just closed slightly in the red there. And the Nasdaq 100 had a streak of nine days. They weren’t all records, but that is gone too. And I wanted to show you something else. Utilities had been up for five days, and then we got this today, and I didn’t really see a huge catalyst there, but uh it might be something we’re going to talk about next.
00:39 Josh
Yeah, let’s talk dollars.
00:41 Jared Blikre
Yes. It was a pretty bad day for the dollar. So that’s my point number two. The dollar nosedoved. I think that’s the proper past tense. Nosedoved. But let’s check out some of the charts here because the dollar has been hovering around three, four-year lows here and so we’ll tackle that first, but there’s a lot of stuff going on. Uh we know that it’s been under pressure for the for quite some time. Here’s the year to date, down 11.63%. That is a large amount for any currency to be down, not to mention the reserve currency of the world. But let’s check out a five-year chart and you can see we are just touching the lowest level since about uh, go, since about 2022. And you can see there’s not much keeping it from going lower there. So if we take the inverse of that, and this is going to be the euro versus the dollar, if you’re planning on going to Europe, guess what, vacations are getting more expensive. 11, 12% more expensive already, and they could easily head, this exchange rate could go from 1.1868 up to 1.2, 1.25 pretty easily. So there are a lot of ramifications here. What’s going on? Uh, real yields are coming down. There’s the Fed which is in easing mode, and so you also have questions of Fed independence. I would note that Stephen Myron was just confirmed today, and so all of this is feeding into that dollar weakness. And foreigners, they still like US assets, they still like our stocks, but they are hedging, and so they’re trying to prevent themselves from losing out on our gains by hedging that dollar risk, and that eats into the returns.
01:54 Josh
So if we talk to dollars, should we check out gold?
01:56 Jared Blikre
Yes, sir. And that brings me to my third point here, because gold hit another record and it finally crossed 3,700. So just inching closer day by day to that 4,000 mark. And let’s plot what’s going on there with the yellow metal. And it’s not just gold, it’s also some other things. We saw with big dollar weakness, you typically see commodities do fairly well. This is a five-year chart. I wasn’t even planning on showing this, but that shows the 90% run-up that it’s had in that time. Over the last year, up 40, 44%. And here is where that big breakout happened just uh under a month ago when it screamed higher after that nice consolidation. So we got gold heading higher. Silver futures were down today, but they’ve also been net up over the last year. You can see they kind of took off with gold up 40% and you can throw some other commodities in there as well.
02:44 Josh
So if we’re talking gold, what about digital gold?
02:46 Jared Blikre
All right. I’m glad you said Bitcoin. I’m glad you almost said Bitcoin. All right, so Bitcoin has actually doubled over the last year. and uh 100% is nothing to sneeze at, but we haven’t had a record high in probably a few weeks, maybe a month or so. Just kind of consolidating right here. I haven’t talked a lot about Bitcoin recently because I haven’t seen a lot of action and it’s either Bitcoin or some of the altcoins, but who knows, with dollar weakness, that just kind of supports the bull case for a lot of these different things, which would include crypto, which would include gold.
03:16 Josh
What are your expectations tomorrow? Give me the Jared Blikre read.
03:20 Jared Blikre
Oh, I think it’s going to be an, I think if there’s a lot of dissent, this could actually throw things for a, throw markets for a loop. So we could get dissents not only because things are too hawkish-seeming, because the result is too hawkish, but also because it’s too dovish. And a dissent like that, we haven’t seen since 1988. That was the beginning of the Greenspan era, I think. Um, I wasn’t following financials back then, but this is really an historic one. And the composition of the Fed itself with Lisa Cook and everything, that could really change the change the dynamic going into next year. So tomorrow’s a big one and we’re going to keep it right here.
03:55 Josh
All right, thank you, Jared. Appreciate it, sir.
03:58 Jared Blikre
Thank you.
