Succinct Summation of Week’s Events 7.28.17 (plus The Best Investment Writing)

It's time for the weekly summation with Q2 GDP growing at 2.6% but existing home sales falling nearly 2 percent.  I sent everyone quite a pile of reading last night and I'm doing the same thing tonight for today's post on The Big Picture was our guru Meb Faber publishing a great new book which is a compilation of all the best books on investing.  The author of The Ivy Portfolio's new book should be well worth adding to our library and will be available on Amazon tomorrow.  Hope everyone had a great weekend.

Succinct Summation of Week’s Events 7.28.17

July 28, 2017 4:00pm by Barry Ritholtz

Succinct Summations for the week ending July 28th, 2017

Positives:

1. Second quarter GDP grew at a 2.6% annualized rate. Real consumer spending rose 2.8%.
2. New home sales came in at a 610,000 annualized rate. Sales in the west rose 12.5%.
3. Durable goods orders rose 6.5% m/o/m.
4. Consumer confidence rose from 118.9 to 121.1.
5. PMI composite came in at 54.2, up from 53 previously. New service orders hit a two-year high.

Negatives:

1. Existing home sales fell 1.8% m/o/m to a lower than expected annualized rate of 5.52 million.
2. Excluding the 13% surge in civilian aircraft, durable goods orders rose just 0.2%, below the 0.4% expected increase.
3. Initial jobless claims rose 10k to 244k.
4. The FHFA house price index rose 0.4% m/o/m, below the 0.7% previous reading and the lowest reading since January.
5. Case-Shiller home price index rose just 0.1% m/o/m.

The Best Investment Writing - The Big Picture

The Best Investment Writing

July 30, 2017 9:30am by Barry Ritholtz

I wanted to point you this morning towards an excellent compendium put together by Meb Faber, titled The Best Investment Writing.

The book is a collection, smartly selected and edited, of previously published works from dozens of serious financial writers (full list below). Some of my crew is in there (me and Josh and Ben); but objectively speaking, the full run of work is very impressive.

Its evergreen, not focused on what just happened or last quarter’s earnings or GDP or whatever noise came blaring out of your TV yesterday. Each and every post seems was selected to be eternal in its wisdom and insight. Its very easy to pick up, read a chapter, then put it down. It is really quite excellent, and I am angry at myself for not thinking of the idea – its that good.

I am pleased (and proud) to participate in this project; you can argue whether this post or that writer should have been included, it just means that a Volume 2 will be well anticipated.

Published by Harriman House, it goes on sale tomorrow (July 31) at Amazon and wherever; Meb notes that all profits will be donated to charity — making it a feel good purchase as well.

Jason Zweig, Gary Antonacci, Morgan Housel, Ben Hunt, Todd Tresidder, Patrick O’Shaughnessy, Meb Faber, David Merkel, Norbert Keimling, Adam Butler, Stan Altshuller, Tom McClellan, Jared Dillian, Raoul Pal, Barry Ritholtz, Ken Fisher, Chris Meredith, Aswath Damodaran, Ben Carlson, Dave Nadig, Josh Brown, Corey Hoffstein, Jason Hsu, Wes Gray, John Reese, Larry Swedroe, Cullen Roche, Jonathan Clements, Michael Kitces, Charlie Bilello, John Mauldin