Good Evening, Wednesday nights are busy nights for me. So you can always expect my blogs to be short if I am able to get one in at all…. Given that we had a FOMC (Federal Open Monetary Committee commonly referred to as the FED) meeting today I am doing a short one tonight. The Fed concluded their meeting with a quarter point rate hike as expected. So there was no surprise there. Their statement indicated that they were confident that the economy would continue to improve. Jerome Powell held his first press conference following the meeting. Between the Fed statement and the news conference, the market seemed undecided as to whether the Fed was more hawkish or dovish. Stock prices reflected that as they moved up and down with the major indices finishing the day slightly in the red. One take away from the meeting was that there was no indication that there would be a fourth interest rate increase in 2018. However, most notable was that the Fed indicated that it would become more aggressive on increasing rates in 2019/2020 which reflected their strong confidence in the economy moving forward. The market seemed a little rattled by this talk, but I say the worries of the day are sufficient. We’ll deal with 2019 and 2020 when we get there. A lot can and probably will happen between now and then…..
The days trading left us with the following results: Our TSP allotment actually did quite well posting a gain of +0.40%. For comparison, the Dow was off -0.18%, the Nasdaq -0.26%, and the S&P 500 -0.18%. Praise God for another good day for our group!
The days action left us with the following signals: C-Neutral, S-Buy, I-Neutral, F-Neutral. We are currently invested at 100/S. Our allocation is now +1.79% on the year not including the days results. Here are the latest posted results:
| 03/20/18 | Prior Prices | ||||
| Fund | G Fund | F Fund | C Fund | S Fund | I Fund |
| Price | 15.6288 | 17.7222 | 38.3808 | 49.7443 | 30.6284 |
| $ Change | 0.0012 | -0.0360 | 0.0570 | 0.0570 | -0.0592 |
| % Change day | +0.01% | -0.20% | +0.15% | +0.11% | -0.19% |
| % Change week | +0.03% | -0.18% | -1.27% | -0.91% | -0.82% |
| % Change month | +0.16% | -0.08% | +0.23% | +3.23% | -0.41% |
| % Change year | +0.57% | -2.17% | +2.05% | +2.64% | -0.74% |
| L INC | L 2020 | L 2030 | L 2040 | L 2050 | |
| Price | 19.6694 | 27.089 | 31.0216 | 33.8116 | 19.6051 |
| $ Change | 0.0003 | 0.0015 | 0.0043 | 0.0057 | 0.0042 |
| % Change day | +0.00% | +0.01% | +0.01% | +0.02% | +0.02% |
| % Change week | -0.20% | -0.37% | -0.66% | -0.79% | -0.89% |
| % Change month | +0.21% | +0.26% | +0.36% | +0.42% | +0.48% |
| % Change year | +0.61% | +0.74% | +0.93% | +0.99% | +1.07% |
I look at the fact that there will probably be only a total of three rate increases in 2018 as a positive. We’ll see if the rest of the market agrees with me in the coming days. That’s all for tonight. Have a nice evening and I’ll see you tomorrow!
