Wednesday's Markets Update (Jan 18, 2023)

18 Jan 2023 by rate3

Wednesday's markets have been set for the technical correction by the previous week's excessive growth. NASDAQ went down 1.9 percent (o: 11170, c: 10957) and BTC by 3.1 dropping from 21.4K to 20.7K during the day session. We can argue whether Jan 18th multiple macroeconomic releases contributed or not to this downwash.

For instance, PPI decreased by 0.5 percent in December exceeding by far analysts' expectation of 0.1. However, it might be almost fully credited to goods' prices contraction, specially to 13.4-percent decline in gasoline costs. Prices for services continue to edge up (by 0.1 percent in Dec compared to 0.2 in Nov).

Ironically, despite wholesale gasoline getting cheaper, the main contributor to that increase are prices charged to us at gas stations (+17.6 percent). Obviously, gigantic monopolies, shielded from competition by the excessive governments regulation of that sector, are not playing on the consumers side.

On the other hand, December's Retail Sales went down 1.1 percent to USD 677.1B as reported by Census Bureau (it showed 1.0 decline in Nov). Overall, Wed's sell-off was one of those take-the-profit events which is difficult to prevent by less that upbeat reports.