Shesa's Investment Blog

Weekend Updates  First of all, those who reside in California,  the IRS and California Franchise Tax Board extended the federal and state tax deadline to  Oct. 16, 2023  for most California counties. Please check the IRS site for your county. Last week, we saw many economic news and stock market as usual remained volatile. DOW was the only index that closed higher for the week and last four consecutive weeks. Consumer Price Index (CPI) 
: The headline CPI increased 5% year-over-year and 0.1% in March. Economists had anticipated CPI to rise 0.4% month-over-month and 6% year-over-year. Core CPI, which excludes food and energy, rose 5.6% year-over-year and 0.4% in March.  Producer Price Index (PPI) 
:   The March producer price index (a measure of prices paid by companies)  declined 0.5% from the prior month vs. Wall Street expectations to remain flat. This was a significant drop with annualized price increases of only 2.7% from an upwardly ...

  APRIL 2023 - INVESTMENT BLOG By Shesa Nayak U.S. Stock Market Commentary    The stock market remains volatile as it keeps confronting with various economic developments. The market experienced continued hike in interest rate and collapse of U.S banks within no time. On March 10, another disaster struck -  collapse of Silicon Vally Bank with an asset of $209 billion. This was the 2nd largest banking collapse after the collapse of Washington Mutual in September of 2008. We also saw collapse of Signature Bank and debacle of European Bank - Credit Suisse. Why did all these happen? Obviously, for Silicon Vally Bank it was primarily a management failure. However, the main reason of all these collapses possibly was “persistent and fastest rate increase by federal reserve”. Under all these circumstances, Fed had no choice but raise only 0.25% interest rate. Probably they are almost done raising rates. Possibly, we may see another 0.25% rate hikes in May. That may be th...