No Matter Who's in the White House, Stock Investors Win

By Sean Michael Cummings

My grandmother was on the phone, giving me her "stock market tip" of the week...

"I think this is going to be a big deal for stocks," she told me. "Kamala Harris just raised $200 million in her first week of fundraising."

Harris is now the Democratic presidential nominee after President Joe Biden's exit from the 2024 presidential campaign. Her campaign shattered fundraising records after the announcement.

Now, my grandmother is sharp for her age. But she absorbs the same amount of information as just about anyone else. And she's holding on to a classic misconception about the stock market...

We've already debunked this myth in DailyWealth. As I've shared a few times this year, the electoral horse race simply doesn't drive stock market performance.

Here Comes the Inventory of Vacant Homes: With Buyers on Strike despite Lower Mortgage Rates, Supply Spikes to Highest in 4 Years. Sales Drop Further except at High End

A game-changer is underway. Even the NAR concedes this “shift from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market.”

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

Mortgage rates have dropped to about 6.8%, down by a full percentage point from October last year, and yet sales of existing homes have plunged, and vacant homes for sale are coming out of the woodwork, the same vacant homes that the industry said didn’t exist, the second and third homes that people had moved out of but didn’t sell when they bought a new home over the past few years in order to ride the price spike all the way to the top. So now it’s time to sell those vacant homes. And supply in June spiked to the highest level in four years.

Sales of existing homes of all types – single-family houses, townhomes, condos, and co-ops – fell 5.4% in June from May on a seasonally adjusted basis, and also by 5.4% year-over-year to an annual rate of 3.89 million homes, the third-lowest sales volume since the depth of the Housing Bust in 2010, behind only October and December 2023, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR) today.

Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year

By Pam and Russ Martens July 17, 2024

We can’t remember a time when the Chairman and CEO of the largest, most complex and scandal-ridden bank in the United States, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, was too busy to squeeze in an appearance at the company’s heavily-scrutinized quarterly earnings call with analysts. That happened last Friday.

When something happens for the first time at a bank that has racked up five felony counts, has been doled out non-prosecution and deferred-prosecution agreements by the U.S. Department of Justice in a steady drumbeat since 2014, and spent most of last year in the headlines for a decade of sluicing tens of thousands of dollars per month in hard cash to the international sex trafficker of children, Jeffrey Epstein, it pays to sit up and pay attention.

Reuters’ reporter John Foley also found it “unusual” that Dimon had missed the earnings call last Friday, writing that “neither throat cancer nor an aortic dissection” had stopped Dimon from being present at earnings calls in the past.