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Pre-Markets Book Profits; Housing Starts, J&J Q2 Up
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Wednesday, July 17th, 2024
Pre-market futures are down this morning. This does not appear to be as a result of any releases ahead of the open, but as sort of a mass realization that markets have climbed historically high over the past few weeks — even the Dow hit an all-time closing high yesterday — and another round of profit-taking seems to be in order. The Dow is down -120 points at this hour, the S&P 500 is -56 points, the Nasdaq is down a significant -300 and the small-cap Russell 2000 is -17. To be clear, we’re not seeing anything like a correction at these current levels.
Housing Starts for June are out this morning. Across the board, these look to have bounced back off levels not seen since the heart of the Covid pandemic — June 2020. New Starts came in at 1.352 million seasonally adjusted, annualized units, up from the upwardly revised 1.314 million, which remains at multi-year lows. Today’s numbers are back to where they were in April, amounting to what looks like a mere glitch in the system.
Building Permits followed suit. Its headline 1.446 million seasonally adjusted, annualized units surpassed the 1.40 million expected, and finished notably above the upwardly revision for May of 1.399 million. Going back to last year, we’d hovered around the 1.4 million level, which is still historically pretty weak. But the past decade-plus is not the place to compare these numbers; much of this was digging out of the hole of the mortgage-based crisis which led to the financial meltdown in 2008.
On CNBC this morning, Diane Olick gave a breakdown of Housing Starts. She noticed that Multi-family units led gains, +22% month over month, while Single-family units were down -2.2%. Yet developers have been pulling back on Multi-family developments because are not in short supply; that rests in the Single-family space (though mostly because existing homes are not going up for sale at a normal rate, as current homeowners do not appear interested in trading in their current 3.5% mortgage rates for ones more than twice as high.
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ - Free Report) beat Q2 estimates this morning. This in itself is not really a surprise, as J&J simply does not miss earnings estimates (though usually only beats them by single-digits). Earnings of $2.82 per share topped expectations by +4% this morning, with revenues of $22.45 billion outpacing the Zacks consensus by +0.45%. However, shares are only up modestly on this down trading day so far, not cutting much into the -3% selloff in the stock year to date. For more on JNJ’s earnings, click here.
We have more Q2 earnings results after today’s closing bell. Still not near the heaviest flood of widely held equities reporting — that happens over the next couple weeks — but we will hear from United Air Lines (UAL - Free Report) and Alcoa (AA - Free Report) , which had formerly announced the start of a new earnings season. Still, these numbers do count, and as the big Wall Street banks have started earnings season on a good step forward, we look for this to continue outside the banking sector. Questions or comments about this article and/or author? Click here>>
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Pre-Markets Book Profits; Housing Starts, J&J Q2 Up
Wednesday, July 17th, 2024
Pre-market futures are down this morning. This does not appear to be as a result of any releases ahead of the open, but as sort of a mass realization that markets have climbed historically high over the past few weeks — even the Dow hit an all-time closing high yesterday — and another round of profit-taking seems to be in order. The Dow is down -120 points at this hour, the S&P 500 is -56 points, the Nasdaq is down a significant -300 and the small-cap Russell 2000 is -17. To be clear, we’re not seeing anything like a correction at these current levels.
Housing Starts for June are out this morning. Across the board, these look to have bounced back off levels not seen since the heart of the Covid pandemic — June 2020. New Starts came in at 1.352 million seasonally adjusted, annualized units, up from the upwardly revised 1.314 million, which remains at multi-year lows. Today’s numbers are back to where they were in April, amounting to what looks like a mere glitch in the system.
Building Permits followed suit. Its headline 1.446 million seasonally adjusted, annualized units surpassed the 1.40 million expected, and finished notably above the upwardly revision for May of 1.399 million. Going back to last year, we’d hovered around the 1.4 million level, which is still historically pretty weak. But the past decade-plus is not the place to compare these numbers; much of this was digging out of the hole of the mortgage-based crisis which led to the financial meltdown in 2008.
On CNBC this morning, Diane Olick gave a breakdown of Housing Starts. She noticed that Multi-family units led gains, +22% month over month, while Single-family units were down -2.2%. Yet developers have been pulling back on Multi-family developments because are not in short supply; that rests in the Single-family space (though mostly because existing homes are not going up for sale at a normal rate, as current homeowners do not appear interested in trading in their current 3.5% mortgage rates for ones more than twice as high.
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ - Free Report) beat Q2 estimates this morning. This in itself is not really a surprise, as J&J simply does not miss earnings estimates (though usually only beats them by single-digits). Earnings of $2.82 per share topped expectations by +4% this morning, with revenues of $22.45 billion outpacing the Zacks consensus by +0.45%. However, shares are only up modestly on this down trading day so far, not cutting much into the -3% selloff in the stock year to date. For more on JNJ’s earnings, click here.
We have more Q2 earnings results after today’s closing bell. Still not near the heaviest flood of widely held equities reporting — that happens over the next couple weeks — but we will hear from United Air Lines (UAL - Free Report) and Alcoa (AA - Free Report) , which had formerly announced the start of a new earnings season. Still, these numbers do count, and as the big Wall Street banks have started earnings season on a good step forward, we look for this to continue outside the banking sector.
Questions or comments about this article and/or author? Click here>>