PDSNET CONFIDENTIAL REPORTS
The Confidential Report - December 2025
America At the time of last month's Confidential Report on the 29th of October 2025, the S&P500 index was at an all-time record high of 6890. We had already warned of the possibility of a correction in our article “Bubble” published the week before on the 27th of October. Over the following month that correction has played out with Wall Street falling 5% and the S&P making a cycle low of 6538 on 20th Novemb...
The Confidential Report - November 2025
America Amazon’s strong results caused the share to rise 9.6% on Friday and lifted the S&P500 index as investors celebrated the announcement that its cloud computing unit's revenue grew by 20% in the third quarter. CEO, Andy Jassy said that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is "growing at a pace we haven't seen since 2022" and that there was strong demand for core infrastructure and AI. The company has announced plans to cut...
The Confidential Report - October 2025
Background and Context Before we get into the detail of this month’s Confidential Report, I thought it would be useful to spend a few minutes considering the big picture of exactly where world markets are generally today, including the JSE. Like all major stock markets around the world, the JSE roughly follows Wall Street and Wall Street is most accurately represented by the S&P500 index, which is an average of the 5...
The Confidential Report - September 2025
America Looking at the American economy at the end of August 2025, we see that it is certainly slowing down. Core inflation at 3% remains stubbornly above the Fed’s target of 2% and the shock adjustment to jobs numbers shows that job creation is much lower than expected. Core inflation is affected by housing where inflation remains high at 3,7% for the year or 0,2% month over month. The gains in retail sales have been ea...
The Confidential Report - August 2025
America The July jobs report shows that only 73 000 jobs were created – well below the average of economists’ predictions of 100 000. But more shocking were the downward revisions made to the job creation figures from earlier months. June 2025 was revised down to just 14 000 from 147 000 and May’s figure was revised down to 19 000 from 125 000. This indicates that the job market ...
The Confidential Report - July 2025
America The S&P500 index closed at a new record high on Friday the 27th of June 2025, marking the end of the Trump tariff correction. Consider the chart: As we expected and predicted the correction turned out to be a classical “V-bottom” formation – which is typical of corrections which come about as a result of extraneous influences which are abnormal for the market and are not a result of normal economi...
The Confidential Report - June 2025
America Over the past month, as expected, Trump has vacillated on his tariff policies and Wall Street has recovered. In fact, investors have become so sceptical about Trump’s actions and statements that a new term “The TACO Trade” has been coined. This term refers to those trades which seek to exploit the fact that Trump inevitably backs down on the radical policies which he has proposed. TACO is an acronym o...
The Confidential Report - May 2025
America When Trump took over on the 20th of January 2025, he took over an economy that was booming and a stock market that was breaking new record highs. He derailed that with his tariffs and caused a 19% correction. The correction was totally a result of his interference in an otherwise strong upward trend – and so when he, predictably, began to back-pedal on his tariffs, the market began to recover. And that is where w...
The Confidential Report - April 2025
America The S&P500 is being hammered by Trump’s continued insistence on introducing new tariffs. The latest tariff to rock the markets is 25% on all imported vehicles. To investors, it seems that every week brings new tariffs, and the future is very uncertain. The market combined that uncertainty with the relatively bad news on core inflation to take the S&P500 back down to 10% below its all-time record closing h...
The Confidential Report - March 2025
America The chart shows how volatile the market has become since Trump won the election on the 5th of November last year. The S&P500 has been ranging between a low of 5827 on the 10th of January 2025 and a high of 6144, on the 19th of February this year. Consider the chart: We have tried to keep you up to date with our thinking by publishing tweets, especially at critical turning points. Thus, we tweeted on the 2nd of Janu...
The Confidential Report - February 2025
America As Wall Street moves higher in this long-standing bull market, it becomes more vulnerable to the news flow and so more volatile. This can be seen by Monday’s (27/1/25) overreaction to the news about the Chinese AI chip maker, DeepSeek and then again at end of the week to the market’s overreaction to the White House’s announcement concerning tariffs. As shares move higher overreactions tend to become m...
The Confidential Report - Dec 2024
America At the time of the last Confidential Report on 6th November 2024 the news of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election had just broken. This news together with the Republican win in both the House and the Senate was not what we were expecting or predicting. So, like many analysts around the world, we got it wrong. We did however correctly predict that as soon as the election was over the S&P500 index...
The Confidential Report - November 2024
America It is no exaggeration to say that the US elections currently taking place are the most critical in that country’s history from a political perspective. The outcome will determine the long-term future and policy direction of America and the world for years to come. Speaking from experience, one major factor in determining voting trends is likely to be the progress of the S&P500 index in the three months ...
The Confidential Report - October 2024
America The Federal Reserve Bank’s decision to cut interest rates by half a percent at its September 2024 meeting shows some concern that they might be “behind the curve”. In other words, they have kept rates too high for too long pushing the economy towards a recession. Chair, Jerome Powell, denies this, but it is a real concern voiced by several prominent economists. Eleven of the twelve members of the mone...
The Confidential Report - September 2024
At the beginning of 2024 private investors in South Africa faced three major areas of uncertainty: The outcome of the election here in South Africa. The outcome of the Ukraine war. The outcome of the US presidential elections. In January 2024, all three of these were difficult to assess and could have been either positive or negative for investments. Since January, all three have either been decided or become far easier to ass...
The Confidential Report - August 2024
America Joe Biden’s statesman-like decision to step down and make way for Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee is having a major impact on American politics and radically changes the prospects for the November elections. Harris is now leading in most of the polls and has raised over $310m for her campaign, in the first three weeks of her candidacy. Trump has already stated that he will not accept the result of the ele...
The Confidential Report - July 2024
America After a 5,5% correction, the S&P500 has entered a strong new upward trend. We anticipated this in our tweet of the 3rd of June 2024 where we said, “We now expect the index to rise off that base to further new record highs.” It has broken above the resistance at the previous cycle high of 5254, and then returned to test that level, as a support. At that point there were three consecutive hammer formation...
The Confidential Report - June 2024
America As Wall Steet moves to new record highs and the greatest bull trend on record is extended, you can expect a parade of “experts” to pop up predicting an impending severe recession and/or the collapse of the stock market. These “bears” are saying the problems in the economy will begin to become visible before the end of this year. Some base their prediction on the yield curve which remains inverte...
The Confidential Report - May 2024
America In general, politics does not usually have a major impact on equity markets. Politicians come and go – some good and some bad – but mostly their impact is far less than the ideas of the Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank. Sometimes they have a short-term impact on one particular industry, but that seldom results in major stock market trends. 2024 is extraordinary from a political perspective. The outcome ...
The Confidential Report - April 2024
America Core inflation and the consumer price index (CPI) in the United States were higher than expected in February 2024 on month-to-month basis and from the previous year. The CPI rose 0,4% in the month and 3,2% from February 2023. Core inflation was also up 0,4% on the month and 3,8% over the year. The monetary policy committee (MPC) is mostly concerned with core inflation (which excludes food and fuel) and it has proved to...