8/13/2015
By Dominique Paul, Research Analyst

We like the fight the market has been putting up. The major equity indices made a slow crawl to the upside despite China’s currency devaluation continuing to put pressure on stocks and international trading indexes. One great indicator of the market turnaround was Apple (AAPL). Shares of the company rose over $5 off of session lows and are closed the day with an intra-day gain of approximately 1.57%. We strongly feel that investors should be looking to add to their positions in the stock or making a fresh buy at these levels.

We had a couple domestic economic releases on August 12, 2015 that did little to move the market. The first report was the weekly Purchasing Applications report from the Mortgage Bankers’ Association. Consumers retreated quickly from the housing market. The week ended August 7^th saw purchase applications drop 4% week-over-week, negating the 3% gain observed in the last week of July. With mortgage rates remaining at 4.13% for conforming loans with balances of $417,000 or less, the refinance index was able to remain positive. For the week, the index sported a gain of 3% week-over-week, half of the prior week’s gain. Together, the changes in the two indexes resulted in the overall mortgage applications composite rising by a slight 0.1% for the week. We note that weekly applications are volatile. Hopefully, this does not set the tone for the rest of August.

A report that carries a little more weight is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). The report lags by about a month, so the figures are really for the month of June. In June, 5.249 million job openings occurred, this is down 2% from the month of May. However, the amount of hires increased by 2.31% month-over-month to 5.177 million. We saw a healthy 0.66% increase in the amount of quits (2.748 million). This tells us that consumers are a little more confident in the economy than consumer sentiment reports have been indicating.

Dominique Paul
Wall Street Strategies

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