A Busy Week on Tap After Monday

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Our View — The Week Ahead

Strong earnings reports from Microsoft and Alphabet on Thursday helped push the S&P 500 to its biggest weekly gain since early November following its first 5% pullback of the year. The S&P 500 is up 7% in 2024 and roughly 24% since late October. 

Going into this week, there are a few major focuses. 

First, Tuesday is the last trading day of April and we get earnings from Amazon, AMD, and Super Micro Computer — the latter two are chip and AI stocks. Second, the FOMC rate decision and Fed Chair Powell press conference are on Wednesday. Then Apple reports earnings on Thursday, while the jobs report is on Friday. 

According to JPMorgan strategists led by Mislav Matejka, they wrote in a Sunday note to clients that major firms are “likely” to top average analyst profit estimates in quarterly reports, but rather than indicating strong bottom-line growth, it’s a matter of “aggressively” lower expectations as earnings for S&P 500 companies actually are projected to come in lower compared to a year ago. In order for stocks to rally past their all-time highs, there “really needs” to be some significant profit upgrades rather than just topping the modest estimates. The JPMorgan group added that the “key driver” of the S&P’s 15% rally over the last three months — significantly lower bond yields — is “likely over for the time being,” meaning there needs to be a tangible upward trend in earnings to justify the stock index’s lofty level.

Sometimes I call it better than I trade it and other times trade it better than I call it. Either way, this is not a game for the faint of heart. 

After the close on Wednesday, I had a long discussion with PitBull about trading the ES and NQ. He said I have it right with the hit-and-run trading that I do. He went on to say that other than his 30 dot signals, all the strategies he used to make millions with do not work anymore. He also said he has always been a gold bug and he enjoys trading the crypto ETFs. 

On the call, I asked him to do his stocks list and sure enough it was in my email 4 hours later. Every stock on the last exploded higher on Thursday and Friday. This is one experience that has always worked and I can honestly say if I had traded his stock picks over the last 30 years I would have made 100X. 

I'm sorry, I can not give his active list away but when you get a good look at this your eyes will pop out. This is the list I asked him to make in March of 2020: