Economic Market/Portfolio Happenings

Hello and welcome to this week’s Jones Financial Blog! Our goal at Jones & Associates is to help keep you up to date with interesting current economic/market happenings as well as some proprietary portfolio happenings. Knowledge is power and thought we would share some of ours with you. Enjoy!

All data is for the week ended July 10, 2020.

Economic/Market happenings:

Stocks

• Stock markets were largely positive for the week. The S&P 500 was up 1.79% and is nearly flat for the year. International developed stocks were up 0.34% and emerging market stocks were up 4.65%. Earnings season begins this week and current estimates or for a significant contraction from a year ago due to COVID-19 shutdowns. (1)

Fixed Income

• The U.S. Aggregate bond market was up 0.42% for the week as long rates have continued slightly downward. The 2-year U.S. Treasury rate was unchanged at 0.16% but 10-year rates declined from 0.68% to 0.65%. (1)

Commodities

• Oil prices were largely flat for the week, ending still above the $40 mark ($40.57). While oil has risen off the bottom, it is still 34% below the price from the end of 2019 and 33% below the prices from a year ago. Gold prices continued their rise, ending the week at $1,803, a 19% increase for the year. (1)

​Economic Data

• Weekly jobless claims totaled 1.314 million, below the expectation of 1.39. The total was a decrease of 99,000 compared to a week earlier. Continuing claims also fell, dropping by 698,000 to end at 18.06 million. (2)

Proprietary portfolio happenings:

Company News

• Alphabet (GOOG), parent company of Google and G33/Core Select holding, announced a 10-year partnership with Deutsche Bank for Google to provide cloud computing capabilities and assist with strategic transformation of Deutsche Bank’s banking business. (3)

• Costco, a Core Select holding, reported same store sales of 14.4% for June. E-commerce activity improved dramatically, rising by 86.7% over the prior year. (4)

Did You Know? IKEA doesn’t just have a booming furniture sale business, but also sells approximately 150 million meatballs per year. All total, their food sales at their stores currently total about $2 billion per year.

Sources: (1)JPM Weekly Market Recap 7.13.20, (2) CNBC 7.9.20, (3) Bloomberg.com 7.7.20, (4) thestreet.com 7.9.20