MTS Insights

With Bitcoin (BTC) continuing its amazing run past $10,000, many will be wondering if the chaos will ever stop. In less than a month, BTC's value grew from around $6,000 to touch $11,000 on November 29th, 2017 to fall back below $10,000 in the same day. The gain has BTC's market capitalization rapidly approaching $200 billion, greater than most companies listed on the NYSE. In the span of a year, the cryptocurrency has established itself as one of the major financial markets in the world unifying interested investors behind a decentralized currency that has seen both support and opposition. Nevertheless, the media attention and allure of huge short-term capital gains has surely done its job in attracting new players.Volume over the past day is almost $6.5 billion on the massive BTC gains; this is up almost 10,000 percent from a year which saw a volume of just $65 million. With a volume of this magnitude fueling BTC market growth, one might wonder if the trend can continue w...

A fresh new set of auto sales data has come out in the beginning of August detailing the past month's activity in the buying and selling of motor vehicles. As expected, auto stocks traded lower when the disappointing results were revealed. According to Reuters , shares of General Motor (GM), Fiat Chrysler (FCHA), and Ford (F) traded more that 3 percent lower last week. Reports of March light vehicle sales at about 16.6 million where analyst expectations had drifted slightly above 17 million. Since the financial crisis, automakers have enjoyed a steep expansion in auto sales, but in the past couple of months, that expansion has stopped. Data from Quantopian and Bureau of Economic Analysis In 2011, a global auto industry exchange traded fund (CARZ) was created to follow the price movement of some of the largest automobile companies in the world. GM and Ford account for over 15 percent of the fund's holdings with Toyota and Honda (both of which rely on U.S. demand) making th...

In a press conference on April 5th, 2017, Federal Reserve officials announced their desire to start reducing the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet this year. Since the financial crisis in 2008, the size balance sheet has grown to $4.5 trillion worth of bonds and other assets bought up during the period of quantitative easing following the crash of the financial system. In the latest Fed minutes voiced this idea saying, "Provided that the economy continued to perform about as expected, most participants anticipated that gradual increases in the federal funds rate would continue and judged that a change to the Committee's reinvestment policy would likely be appropriate later this year." Since 2009, the members of the Federal Reserve have used various techniques to maintain loose policy as the economy reflated. Lately, though, these mouthpieces have been used to institute a "normalization" policy that will allow interest rates to rise while keeping in...

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released their cost estimates for the American Health Care Act. The piece of legislature is looking to be passed in the House of Representatives but is struggling to obtain the support to pass it. Speaker Paul Ryan recently said that his bill would need to change to secure the votes it needs to pass. The CBO report has done its part to affect the bill’s popularity and proven it deserves some review. The federal budget deficit continues to be one of the divisive issues in the two-party system with Republicans and Democrats blaming the opposition for its death of financial accountability. When the CBO mentions that the bill will reduce federal deficits by $337 billion, ears perk up. In a ten-year period, estimates predict that $1.2 trillion of spending would be erased with most that reduction coming from $880 billion in federal outlays for Medicaid. Much of the opposition to the bill comes at this point where the program that supports th...