Th3 Core

Early in the week, the markets were underpinned by optimism over potential production cuts by OPEC. Today, it’s better than expected U.S. retail sales data supporting prices. On Thursday, the U.S. reported that retail sales rose 0.7% in July as consumers bought a range of goods

Value stocks have already priced in a recession: the SCHV (Schwab Large Cap Value ETF) sports a dividend yield of 2.96%, nearly double the 10-year Treasury yield of 1.64%. Meanwhile, the QQQ (Invesco QQQ Trust), the tech-heavy talisman of growth investors, pays only 0.78%. It's normal for growth stocks to pay a lower dividend than value stocks, but the size of the current gap is historically huge. The disparity can no longer be ignored.

A stock like Amazon (AMZN), trading at 73 times trailing earnings, can lose half its value in a Nasdaq minute as soon as a recession becomes visible. The sky-high multiple depends on continued high rates of growth, and even companies like AMZN lose momentum in a recession. Most readers of this article are too young to remember, but AMZN lost more than 90% of its value in the recession of 2001. It barely shows up in the chart today, but AMZN declined from a late-nineties high of over $100 to less than $6 by September, 2001.

Civil liberties groups are warning of a major threat to online freedoms and First Amendment rights if a leaked draft of a Trump administration edict—dubbed by critics as a "Censor the Internet" executive order that would give powerful federal agencies far-reaching powers to pick and choose which kind of Internet material is and is not acceptable—is allowed to go into effect.