Archive - Feb 2, 2015

"The S&P: This has the ominous look of what some of the Old Guard amongst the market technicians used to call “Three Peaks and a Domed House” pattern, which always gave way to substantive weakness. All we know is that Friday’s action was horrific and that the volume swells on the downside these days, and wanes on rallies!"

- Dennis Gartman

The Greek Elites and kleptocrats are terrified of the discipline that leaving the euro will impose, but the general public should welcome the transition to an economy and society that has been freed from the shackles of Imperial debt and the kleptocracy that has bled the nation dry.

The last time 41% of the ISM respondents, and rising, saw "lower" prices was in October 2008. We can't quite put our finger on what had just happened the month prior.

Well there's a surprise - plunging stock prices.. and the markety breaks:

*BATS OPTIONS DECLARED SELF-HELP VS BOSTON OPTIONS EXCHANGE
*NASDAQ OMX BX OPTIONS HAS DECLARED SELF HELP AGAINST BOX

And sure enough... the bounce begins...

From the post "home run" IPO highs of $52.50, SHAK is now trading $42.50 for a drop of 19% and nearing the dreaded "bear market" 20% drop... Unless you owned it at the IPO, you are a loser for now...

With liquidity increasingly negligible this morning's chaos in crude has now spilled over into stocks. A triple whammy of disappointing data this morning and re-tumbling crude hopes have sent the S&P down 25 points from overnight highs and will below 2000 in cash. The Dow is now down over 1000 points from its record highs. Treasury yields have given up all the AAPL rate-lock surge and are at new cycle lows.

Amid a plunge in new orders to Jan 2014 lows, the ISM Manufacturing index slid to 53.5 (missing expectations of 54.5) to its lowest since Jan 2014 - confirming Markit's US PMI. New export orders contracted. employment growth slumped to 7 month lows, and inventories surged. In addition, after December's tumble in construction spending, January's bounce was only half as much as expedcted (+0.4% MoM vs +0.7% expected) missing for the 6th month in the last 7.

Having fallen 4 months in a row in December to its lowest since last January, one could have been forgiuven for expecting the ubiquitous hope-driven bounce we so often see in soft-survey-based data and sure enough, Markit's US Manufacturing PMI eked out a very small (53.9 vs 53.7 previous) rise in January - hovering at practically one-year lows. On the heels of China's disappointment, it appears the cleanest dirty short of America is not decoupling too much (if at all). This is not the "crisis has passed", "economy is strong" narrative-confirming data that Obama and The Fed would have everyone believe and as markit notes, “Manufacturing remains in a lower gear compared to that seen last summer... adding to the suspicion that the pace of economic expansion in the first quarter could even fall below the 2.6% rate seen in the final quarter of last year."

The new Greek PM has a thing against ties; The new Greek finmin, on the other hand, has a thing for boots and barbour jackets as seen in this series of photos of him arriving from Paris (where he secured French support for the Greek debt "renegotiation") for a meeting with UK chancellor George Osborne.

GoD Save The Banks...

One word - Apple. Not only is Apple single-handedly moving S&P 500 earnings, it is now - thanks to the planned issuance of $5 billion of debt to fund moar buybacks - shifting the US Treasury market as rate-locks slam yields higher in an illiquid market...

It appears the new narrative for why oil prices surged Friday and this morning is that a record-breaking drop in the US Rig Count means production levels will drop (and thus Saudi Arabia wins). This was enough to spark a melt-up squeeze on Friday which extended this morning running stops above $50.50. However, since that stop-run was exhausted, prices have tumbled back lower - testing a $47 handle - as investors realize the link between production and rig count is spurious at best and anti-correlated at worst.

Simply atrocious income and spending numbers: if this data is even remotely correct, then the balance sheet of the US consumer is in horrible shape.

The world is running out of oil. Peak Oil is a reality, all that is open to debate is how fast production will drop off, and how quickly the world will simply run out of oil. The lack of certainty is due to the fact that (as with everything else) we can’t trust the “official” numbers fed to us, with respect to either global production or global reserves.

How can traders prepare for the rest of 2015 after a volatile January