While the superstitious among us may have been braced for bad news today (happy Friday the 13th!) the headlines—and market reactions—were largely positive. Two major drags on economic outlook, the trade war and BREXIT, both made progress yesterday as the U.S. and China struck an “interim” trade deal and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Tory Party won the U.K.’s general election, allaying fears of a “no-deal” BREXIT.

The U.S. political landscape isn’t the only thing that grew more rocky in 2019; S&P 500 volatility and drawdown frequency have increased significantly in the last decade, with days spent with a 3%+ drawdown up almost fivefold over the early 2010’s. Could this be part of the “mini-cycle” phenomenon we wrote about last month?

Happy Monday, Fireside Charts readers! We mentioned the “rosy” outlook of Friday’s jobs report last week, but let’s take a minute today to stop and smell those roses. Private payrolls came in at more than double the expected figure and unemployment’s revisiting its 2019 low—the third lowest since the 1940’s—and wage growth has topped the mortgage rate for the first time in nearly 50 years.

The Labor Department’s jobs report was released this morning and it certainly paints a rosier picture than ADP’s grim analysis from earlier this week (re: only 67,000 private sector jobs added in November—less than half of what was expected).

Did you spend big this holiday weekend? While consumer sentiment and spending are still strong—Adobe Analytics estimates that sales topped $29 billion between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday—strong consumer demand does not look to be trickling through to the manufacturing sector.

We’re back! We hope you all made it home safely from holiday travels and are not stuck in an airport or shoveling snow like a many of our colleagues. There’s a lot to turn our attention to this week including today’s testimony from the newly appointed ECB President, Christine Lagarde, in which she promised an “overarching review of ECB business ranging from how it defines its inflation objective to whether it includes a fight against climate change among its responsibilities.”

Happy Thanksgiving Eve! We know you’re anxious to get to your vacations, so we’ll keep it to bullet points today

Happy Thanksgiving week, Fireside Charts readers! The 10-year treasury yield hit a three-year low in early September (and has been lingering below 2% ever since) but a look back through 2012 has us wondering if it could be poised to rise.

The U.S. Leading Economic Index dropped for the third straight month in October, driven largely by investor uncertainty around the trade war, but a long-term view makes us wonder: are occasional hits to economic sentiment—and the “mini-cycles” they spur—a key to understanding how the current expansion has become the longest on record?

Diversification has long been touted as a cornerstone of successful long-term investing, but do you know just how in-sync U.S. and international equities have become in the past 20 years?