Weekend Market Report
Welcome to this weekend’s market report. I’m sharing with you some fun links that I read up on and make commentary about the markets, gold and silver, and the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco. Plus, I give an update on my SNOW position.
The Whoosh Effect on Weight Loss
A Reddit discussion on “The Whoosh Effect”.
Good article overall, but when it refers to a “cheat” meal to break a stall, it’s best to take that to mean a higher calorie meal rather than a higher carb one.
Moreover, even if your long-term goal is weight loss, eating at maintenance calories every once in a while can be good for the soul anyway. At least, I’ve found that past a certain point slower weight loss is happier weight loss.
Original link in Reddit discussion is dead but found via Internet Archive.
Regular Expressions for Data Scientists
An oldie but goodie. Regular Expressions are a must for anybody using Python, doing Data Science, or just ETL’ing data.
Regular expressions (regex) are essentially text patterns that you can use to automate searching through and replacing elements within strings of text. This can make cleaning and working with text-based data sets much easier, saving you the trouble of having to search through mountains of text by hand.
Via Dataquest
Intel to Receive $8.5 Billion in Grants to Build Chip Plants
Since Nvidia (NVDA) is all the rage these days and China is flexing its muscle, it makes complete sense to move more semiconductor manufacturing back on our shore. This doesn’t affect just Intel, but all semiconductor manufacturers.
The Biden administration, equipped with $39 billion in subsidies to distribute, is spearheading an ambitious effort to ramp up production of the tiny chips that power everything from smartphones to computers and cars. The effort is at the center of Mr. Biden’s goal to reduce America’s reliance on foreign countries: Although semiconductors were invented in the United States, only about 10 percent of the world’s chips are made domestically.
Via NY Times
General Market Commentary
All the major indices (Dow Jones, Nasdaq, and S&P500) closed higher this week, but the market can’t shake the feeling that inflation remains stubborn and rate cuts are nowhere to be seen. The market wants rate cuts to keep going higher but without clearer guidance from the Federal Reserve, I suspect this will be a volatile summer.
I believe there is more inflation in the pipeline and I watch the price of eggs, gold, and silver as my leading indicators. Right now the average price of a dozen eggs is $2.86, which is lower from the year before but in the chart below you can see that it was as low as $2.03 in August of 2023.
Inflation remains persistent and so does the possibility of rate increases. My suggestion is to keep a sharp eye on all your positions and keep your stops handy.
Gold and Silver Price Forecasts 1 Week Ahead
Gold and Silver had a down week as traders and investors move money back into the stock market and the metals market consolidate. There’s all kinds of rumors floating around on the newsgroups and many silver hoarders praying that the price of silver goes back to $50.
Will silver ever get there? You’ll have to sign up to become a free member to read what my forecast model has in store for next week’s gold and silver price forecast.
Silver Prices Forecast
Silver closed at $29.33 this week, down from $30.29 the week before, that’s a drop of -3.17%.
Last week’s higher close for silver was wrong. The mean silver price forecast for next week is $30.27, higher that last week’s close. We are forecasting a possible swing high price of $32.19 and swing low of $28.38 for next week.
Gold Prices Forecast
Gold closed down to $2,305.20 from $2,322.89, a price drop of -0.74%.
Last week’s price prediction for Gold was wrong. The mean price forecast for Gold next week is $2,318.62, which is higher than last week’s close. A swing high price of $2,393.59 and low of $2,246.14 is forecasted.
Selling Snowflake & the Snowflake Summit
I closed my SNOW position a few days into the Snowflake Summit because it was selling off. I darn near sold at the bottom but after watching CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy speak at the keynote. He’s definitely a successful startup guy after building a privacy focused search engine that Snowflake bought, but he’s extremely awkward.
Watching him speak on stage was cringey at times and when the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, joined him to discuss a NeMo I realized why SNOW is underperforming and Nvidia is to the moon.
A few days into the conference SNOW price cratered and I sold at a loss.
I went long last week in SNOW for two reasons, none of which had to do with my trading strategy. I went long because in the AI field, Snowflake is growing at rapid clip and I believed they were undervalued, and two of my ex-colleagues just quit my firm to go work there.
In the end those two reasons are just wishful thinking on my part. If I had followed my trading rules, I would’ve never bought SNOW in the first place.
I broke one of my cardinal rules for trading: SNOW wasn’t trading at an all-time high. Plus it was a market laggard. SNOW’s relative performance vs the Nasdaq is lagging considerably. I would’ve done better just buying QQQs.
It goes to show you that even experienced traders and investors make mistakes. The difference between successful traders and investors is to realize their mistake quickly and close that position quickly. There’s tons more opportunities out there to make money on. C’est la vie!
Where Are They Now?
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