Vital Statistics:
| Last | Change | |
| S&P futures | 3629 | -7.6 |
| Oil (WTI) | 45.47 | 0.31 |
| 10 year government bond yield | 0.85% | |
| 30 year fixed rate mortgage | 2.78% |
Stocks are flattish this morning despite positive COVID-19 vaccine news. Bonds and MBS are flat.
Today is Cyber Monday and investors are hoping that it will offset the weakness we saw on Black Friday, where traffic was down 50% due to the pandemic. That said, retailers are expecting a robust holiday, with spending expected to rise 3.6% according to the National Retail Foundation.
We will have a lot of data and Fed-speak this week as we enter the final month of 2020. Data-wise, we have construction spending, the jobs report, and PMI data. Jerome Powell will be speaking Tuesday and Wednesday.
New home sales rose 23% YOY to 999,000 in October, which was more or less flat with September’s million unit print. As a general rule, new home sales can be a volatile number and I kind of thought September’s big print would be revised away. Turns out, it wasn’t. This will be an under-appreciated economic boost to the country going forward. Housing is back.
Janet Yellen is Biden’s nominee for Treasury Secretary. She will be confirmed easily, as she is liked by the banks and is a known quantity. She is considered a bipartisan pick, and will advocate for additional federal spending to combat the economic weakness caused by COVID.
Pending Home Sales fell 1.1% in October, according to NAR. “Pending home transactions saw a small drop off from the prior month but still easily outperformed last year’s numbers for October,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist. “The housing market is still hot, but we may be starting to see rising home prices hurting affordability.”
Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
The E.U. plans to ask the U.S. to form an alliance to stand up to China. The bloc will call on America to set aside differences on trade and global taxes to create a unified approach on regulations and overhauling the World Health Organization, according to the FT.
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Could be good. As long as the EU doesn’t get to decide where we can fish and what kind of toaster we can buy.
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https://nelson.cpa/avoiding-taxes-on-ppp-loan-forgiveness/
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“Today is Cyber Monday”
Cyber Monday is a relic from the 90’s when most people only had dial up connections at home and had to wait until they got into the office to do their online shopping with their company’s faster internet connection. I really wonder how much of a spike is left with it.
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seems it’s been a month of sales.
i”ve long decided its like airline tickets. shop until you find a price you’re happy with, purchase, and don’t look back.
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My old personal laptop is a Latitude E6430, with 16gb DDR3 ram, and a Samsung 256GB SSD and an Nvidia discrete graphics card. I have updated it many times, including AC WLAN and one of the first quad core I7 laptop CPUs [3rd generation]. Dells are good to tinker with as all the essential internals are accessible. These were indestructible from the outside, with heavy metal cases. I am on it now. I run Ubuntu. But after seven years it is showing some signs of wear that are not so easy to fix.
So I bit the bullet and bought a Costco Black Friday special. Comes next week.
https://www.costco.com/asus-tuf-gaming-a15-laptop—amd-ryzen-7—geforce-gtx-1660-ti—144hz-1080p.product.100579408.html
I don’t need a screaming game machine, but I do find a discrete graphics card useful. I use CAD to plan remodels, etc. Because I don’t like Windows [which I was forced to use in my law office because of proprietary law software] I chose this machine because I intend to swap out its 2.5″ secondary hdd with the SSD in my laptop, giving me dual boot capability. There is also room for a second m.2 2280 drive which I will use for expansion if I need to. I will also dock to a 25″ monitor for design work. Hope to get as many years out of it as I have from the old one.
The old one [this one], with a new drive unformatted, will go to the Middle School computer lab as a project machine.
TMI, I know.
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“[which I was forced to use in my law office because of proprietary law software]”
Yep.
What was your case/practice management software?
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What was your case/practice management software?
Well, this’ll date me. We began using LOTUS ORGANIZER in the early 90s on W3.1, then on NT. There was a “law” module for it that included time management and case management. It was part of something adjacent to Organizer called Smart Suite, that include Organizer, WordPro, 123, and 45 or so custom modules for different businesses. We never reinvented that wheel, just updated it until IBM killed updating. However, it still works in its last [9th, I think] edition even on W10, but we never got past W7 in my office.
At the time we bought it it was expensive but perhaps the least buggy interactive group software piece out there. You could replace the W GUI with a LOTUS GUI, IIRC. That might have been in W95. We didn’t do that.
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SSDs for everything. The best computer innovation since the original hard drive.
That said I can’t get work to buy me a better laptop (or new laptops for my team, despite all of them being out of warranty and my own barely used Dell inoperable because of HD failure) so I’m still using a 2012 iMac. Internal drive is dead on it, too, but I’ve been booting from an external SSD for awhile now. Hoping it lasts a long time!
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like MAC OS, hate the untinkerable hardware. If no proprietary software is involved, LINUX is the real deal, and Ubuntu and its offspring are versatile as all get out.
I know guys who have booted Mac OS on PCs without virtualization. But I have never tried it.
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