1. China Stock Trading Turnover Hits Records
2. Earnings Season Kicks Off …Expectations for Slowdown from Q2
SMH ETF 30 Points below highs.
4. Nuclear Production by Company
5. Exxon Mobil New All-Time Highs
6. Google Challenged in Search
WSJ By Suzanne Vranica and Miles Kruppa
Amazon is expected to have 22.3% of the market this year, with 17.6% growth, compared with Google’s 50.5% share and its 7.6% growth. “This space has been ripe for a shake-up for a long period of time,” said Brendan Alberts, head of search and commerce at the ad-buying firm Dentsu. Google remains in an enviable position: far ahead of the pack in the search market, with plenty of resources to counter moves by its rivals. Still, advertisers are eager for more competition. “For the first time in probably 15 years, we will have viable alternatives to Google,” said Nii Ahene, a veteran digital-advertising executive.
7. Office Glut Update
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET
The glut of vacant offices on the market for lease, as depicted by availability rates, rose to new records in many major office markets in Q3, despite pronouncements by landlords that the office glut has bottomed out. The availability rate is the office space on the market for lease either by the landlord directly or by a tenant as a sublease, expressed as a percentage of the total office market.
Of the 15 office markets for which Savills released data today, these five had the biggest office gluts:
- San Francisco: 36.6%
- Atlanta: 30.6%
- Dallas-Ft. Worth: 30.0%
- Chicago: 29.4%
- Houston: 29.0%
Of the 15 markets, 6 hit new records, and 1 matched its prior record:
- San Francisco: 36.6%
- Atlanta: 30.6%
- Chicago: 29.4%
- Los Angeles: 28.3%
- Seattle: 28.2%
- Silicon Valley: 27.6% matched prior record
- Washington DC: 24.4%
Within a hair of their record were Dallas-Ft. Worth (30.0% v. 30.1% in Q1 and 29.8% in Q4 2023) and Philadelphia (25.2% in Q3 from 25.3% in Q1).
The chart shows the availability rates at three different points in time: red = Q3 2024; purple = Q1 2021; gray = Q1 2019.
Epic Office Glut Hits Records in San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington DC. Dallas Availability Rate Dips to 30%, Houston rises to 29%
8. Commercial Real Estate Loan Maturities 2024-2025
Irrelevant Investor Blog
https://www.theirrelevantinvestor.com/p/new-post
9. Covid Stimulus vs. 2008 Crisis
Kailash Concepts
Kailash Concepts, LLC – Behavioral Finance, Portfolio Strategy & Quantamental Tool Kits
10. Two Questions You Should Ask About Any Piece of Market Information
The Noise Factory OCTOBER 8, 2024 / JOE WIGGINS
What will the Fed do next? How will conflict in the Middle East impact the oil price? What does a new bout of stimulus mean for the Chinese Equity market? Is the US economy heading into a recession or reflation? Investors are trapped in a vortex of noise. We are compelled to engage with and react to a rotating cast of inescapably prominent and impossibly complex issues. This constant state of flux is the lifeblood of the investment industry but poison for clients. For most investors 99%, of what we see, hear and feel in financial markets is not just irrelevant to what we are trying to achieve, it actively makes it harder to make good decisions and attain our goals. Why is noise so ubiquitous and what can we do about it?
Critical to the success of any investor is the ability to cancel out the noise that surrounds us and focus on the elements that will have a material influence on our outcomes. Given the sheer complexity and chaos inherent in financial markets this can seem like an impossible task – how can we figure out what is significant?
There are two key criteria we can apply to help us identify harmful noise in financial markets (which is the vast majority of what we encounter). For any issue or event, we should ask two questions:
– Does it matter?
– Is it knowable?
Unless we can answer both in the affirmative, we can classify it as unhelpful noise.
Let’s take each in turn:
– Does it matter? Here we are seeking to understand whether the subject we are focusing on will actually matter to what we are trying to achieve. Let’s assume I have a 20-year investment horizon, will the next decision by the Fed have any obvious impact on my investment goals? Absolutely not. The same can be said for whatever geopolitical issue is the focus of our attention at any given point in time. If something is likely to have either no effect or a random influence on us meeting our investment objectives, then it is just noise. Spending time thinking about it is likely to leave us worse off.
Even if something does matter – we are confident that some variable or topic will have a material impact on our investments over the time horizons that matter to us – it can still be noise, because it also must be knowable.
– Is it knowable? Being confident that something actually matters is a pretty high hurdle for investment information, but even that is not sufficient. For it not to be noise, it must be knowable or predictable. Why? Well, let’s say I was certain that the near-term decisions of the Fed or the latest geopolitical issue would have an impact on meeting my investment objectives – this is only meaningful if I know or can predict the outcome of these things. I need to know both that the Fed decision matters and believe that I can predict it, otherwise, what am I going to do about it?
If that isn’t tough enough, there is another problem. We often need to know two things – both what is going to happen and how it will impact financial markets. Many wonderful (lucky) predictions about a particular event have been rendered worthless because someone got the second part wrong. Forecasting any future occurrence is usually a herculean task, adding on a prediction of how it will then influence something else (alongside all the other unforeseeable things that might also impact it) is getting us pretty close to impossible.
So, how can we tell what matters and what is knowable? Well, we can apply some simple tests.
Does it matter?
Test: If I had a crystal ball and knew something would occur in advance, would it change my investment decision making?
This is a useful test for long-term investors because most things really should not influence our choices. There is a danger, however, of being overconfident and believing that certain pieces of information will move markets in an obvious way. Imagine having some foresight of 2020 ‘Covid’ economic data and making investment decisions based on that – it probably would have ended badly.
Is it knowable?
Test: Is the information already known or is there evidence that people can accurately predict it?
The most obvious piece of information that is in some way knowable is the valuation of an asset. For example, when bond yields were close to zero we didn’t need to make predictions about future returns being low – we knew this. Unfortunately, most financial market relevant activity isn’t knowable, it is instead reliant on making bold predictions about the future, which in complex adaptive systems is quite the ask.
Bringing these aspects together creates a simple framework for addressing the issue of noise in financial markets and the many problems it causes investors:
| Does it matter? | Is it knowable? | What to do about it? |
| Yes | Yes | Use the information |
| Yes | No | Diversify |
| No | No | Ignore |
https://behaviouralinvestment.com/2024/10/08/the-noise-factory/ Found at Abnormal Returns Blog https://abnormalreturns.com/2024/10/08/tuesday-links-a-collective-mistake/