Equities and the Economy:

• U.S. stocks eke out gain on Friday.
• Continue weekly gains.

U.S. equities closed barely in the green on Friday with the Dow up 3 points to 21,005, the S&P 500 gained a single point to 2,383 and the Nasdaq added 10 to 5,871. Although we saw a big pullback on Thursday, the largest single day decline in 2017, the three indexes all posted nice gains for the week thanks to Wednesday’s big gains. For the week the Dow rose 0.9%, its 4th consecutive weekly gain, the S&P 0.7%, its 6th straight weekly gain, and the Nasdaq gained 0.4% for the week. All three indexes are up between 6% and 9% for the year. That’s strong folks.

Our Fed Chairperson, Janet Yellen, spoke Friday and in unambiguous terms all but said an interest rate hike is coming this month. The FOMC committee meets next Tuesday and Wednesday and the interest rate hike will most likely be announced on Wednesday in Yellen’s post-meeting press conference. Interestingly, in the past when Fed-speak talked of interest rate hikes the equities market would get hammered, at least for a day or two. Not so now. Investors feel the economy is in good shape and can take an interest rate hike. Additionally, every time someone would sell, they were wrong. There’s a saying in trading, “The trend is your friend.”

This morning stocks are on the defensive with the Dow down 71 points being dragged lower by European equities.

Oil

• Oil prices rise on Friday.
• Still in low to mid $50’s.

WTI rose 72¢ closing at $53.33 and Brent added 82¢ settling at $55.90. WTI has been range bound for months. Baker Hughes released its closely watched rig count report on Friday. The oil rig count continues to rise with 7 rigs added last week. Total rigs are at 609, the highest since late 2015. There was a decline of 5 natural gas rigs. This morning oil is up 16¢. Complete chatter.

Courtesy of MDA Information Systems LLC

Natural Gas

• Natural gas closes flat to Thursday.
• Popping this morning.

Last Friday natural gas prices changed little. April gas closed up 2.3¢ at $2.827 but the calendar strips hardly moved. This morning natty is popping with the April contract up 9.7¢ with the weather forecast for the 6-10 day term coming in this morning much different from Friday showing some below normal temperatures in the east which has got the shorts scrambling to cover. Prices have rallied nearly 43¢, 17%, over the past couple of weeks from last month’s low of $2.522.

Elsewhere

As I mentioned last week, the “camera company” (that’s what they called themselves in their prospectus), Snap Chat went public making many people millionaires and at least two people, the co-owners, billionaires. Well the owners, bankers and super-rich investors weren’t the only ones to make a bunch of cash. So did a small private school in Mountain View, California. It all started back in 2012. At that time a father of two children who attended the school, Barry Eggers, noted how his kids were using a cool new app, and they were using it incessantly. After doing some research, that included discovering that his children’s friends were also obsessed with the app, he met with Snap Chat’s co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy who today are billionaires but at that time were working out of a dorm room at Stanford.

Subsequently, Mr. Eggers, who was a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a local investment firm, put together a $500,000 investment round, Snap Chat’s first. The firm invested $485,000, however Mr. Eggers also convinced Saint Francis High School to throw in $15,000 from a school development fund set up in the 1990’s. One of the goals of the school, a private Catholic school with a tuition cost of $17,000 annually, is to make education at St. Francis more affordable. Well that $15,000 investment has become a cool $24 million! I guess you could say the school has made material progress in meeting that goal.