Archive - Aug 17, 2012 - Story

The retail sales figures from that perspective show a couple of very clear points: 1. Last year's Christmas season was not only weak and disappointing, it may have marked the inflection point in consumer spending (at least as far as retail sales measure); 2. The July "improvement" is far less impressive. June 2012 had an extra holiday shopping weekend, but registered only a 3.3% improvement over June 2011. Without an extra holiday weekend, July 2012 saw almost identical year-over-year growth; 3.4%. No matter what or how weekends were arranged within the calendar context, non-adjusted growth was not really all that inspiring in either month. If this inflection in consumption is indeed valid, it makes sense that the early part of 2012 would then experience economic “volatility” – revenue pressures at firms cause them to cut back on capex or re-investment in real projects, including a decrease in the pace of hiring new workers. Manufacturing falls off (seen in the ISM and regional Fed surveys) as reduced demand from businesses works its way back into this vicious cycle of employment malaise where job growth is consistently and vitally below population growth or labor force expansion. As government transfers drop off, the segment of the economy under the gun of stagnation rises in proportion and the bifurcated economy becomes more so – except that as the troubled half grows it inevitably pulls down the half doing relatively well. What looks like a muddle of weak growth is really the rot of monetary intrusions eating at what should be a free market-driven reset to the previous dislocation of failures from past monetary episodes. And it is all in the name of some ephemeral “wealth”.

"And yay verily it was written that as the moon passes thrice through the sky after providing your funds to the IPO-of-the-decade, thou shalt see said funds smite in two..." Faceberg just touched $19, that is a 50% haircut on its IPO launch price from exactly 3 months ago - but as CNBC's Simon Hobbs seems convinced...what about the short-interest? Ask JCP or GRPN! Well, easy come, easy go. Just ask Mark, who has lost half his net worth in 3 months. Do we feel bad for him and his $9.6 billion? No. But we will check back in another 3 months just in case.

While the Achilles heel to the endless "economic data" BS coming out of China may be its electric production and demand, both of which show a vastly different picture than what the Beijing politburo's very wide brush strokes paint, the US itself is not immune from indicators that confirm that anything the BEA dishes out should be taken with a grain of salt. One data set that we showed recently that paints a drastically different (read slowing) picture of the US economy which we noted recently is railcar loading of waste and scrap for the simple reason that "The more we demand, the more waste is generated by that production." Of course, the propaganda manipulation machinery only focuses on the "entrance" of production, and completely ignore the "exit." But an even far more important metric of the general health of the US economy may be none other than broad energy demand, in the form of petroleum deliveries and gasoline demand. If this is indeed the relevant metric to observe, then things are about to get far, far worse. As Dow Jones notes: "U.S. petroleum deliveries, a measure of demand, fell by 2.7% in July from a year earlier to the lowest level in any month since September 2008, the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, said Friday." It gets worse: "Demand in the world's biggest oil consumer, at 18.062 million barrels a day, was the weakest for the month of July since 1995, the API said. Year-to-date demand is down 2.3% from the same period in 2011."

Update: in the 20 or so minutes since uploading this article, AAPL added another OpenTable in market cap. It has in the course of a day added the same market cap as Linked In and just shy of Sony.

Moments ago Apple, long since the largest company in the world by market cap, just crossed $600 billion in capitalization, needless to say a record high, after adding the equivalent of 2.4 RIMMs in market cap in a few short hours. As of this moment, the company that makes a phone, a tablet, various computers (all of which now have an upgrade lifecycle inside of 1 year and ever shorter), has a product "ecosystem", retail stores and may be launching a cable box, is larger than the entire semiconductor sector, larger than the entire retail index, and at this rate of parabolic blow off top growth, will be larger than both combined in about 5-6 months. We can only hope that the company will soon use its $110+ billion cash hoard to launch a captive bank to finance the purchase of its products because unless consumers' disposable incomes are growing at the same rate (with penetration already quite high), and assuming of course it is still cool to have an AAPL product in a few years (just as it was the peak of coolness to have a Palm Tungsten a decade ago... or a RIM phone 5 years ago), the company that is now owned by about 250 hedge funds will certainly have growing pains in the future.

In a gold-based monetary system, every asset is ultimately backed by gold. This does not mean that every debtor (including banks) keeps the full amount of its liability in gold coin just lying around. Why would one bother to borrow if one did not need the money? It means that every asset generates a gold income and every asset could be liquidated for gold, if necessary. If a debtor declares bankruptcy, the creditor may take losses. But he can rely on the gold income stream for each asset or if need be he can sell the asset for gold. In a gold-based monetary system, money is gold and gold is money. Money cannot disappear; it does not go “poof”. Bad credit can be defaulted and must be written off. But money merely changes hands.

Measuring the 'contentedness' during this summer of total comfort is tricky. With equities at the year's highs in nominal prices in the US and breaking multi-month highs in Europe, how do we 'know' the relative richness or cheapness (or hope or despair) that is priced into stocks and what the 'fall' ahead looks like. We may have found a way. Europe's economic and implicitly market performance is very much based on the explicit belief that the EMU remains in tact and that Draghi's recent 'promise' will enable sovereigns to go about their economic business (austerity and growth) without the hindrance of those nasty speculating long-only fixed income managers repricing cost-of-funds and eating into the nation's growth. In the US, it's all about multiples - P/E expansion (in the face of lower 'E') has maintained the hope; and so it is in Europe. The following chart shows the extremely high correlation between European equity P/E (hope multiples) and European Sovereign risk. At the end of LTRO2, European stocks were exuberant only to fade away; currently, European stock multiples are once again back to those exuberant 'hope' heights. Trade accordingly.

When financialization fails, the consumerist economy dies. This is what is happening in Greece, and is starting to happen in Spain and Italy. The central banks and Central States are attempting resuscitation by issuing credit that is freed from the constraints of collateral. The basic idea here is that if credit based on collateral has failed, then let's replace it with credit backed by phantom assets, i.e. illusory collateral. In essence, the financialization system has shifted to the realm of fantasy, where we (taxpayers, people who took out student loans, homeowners continuing to make payments on underwater mortgages, etc.) are paying very real interest on illusory debt backed by nothing. Once this flimsy con unravels, the credibility of all institutions that participated in the con will be irrevocably destroyed. This includes the European Central Bank (ECB), the Federal Reserve, the E.U., "too big to fail" banks, and so on down the financialization line of dominoes. Once credit ceases to expand, asset bubbles pop and consumerism grinds to a halt

VIX is nothing more than the market's implied 'factor' that makes the supply-demand of options prices fit with model-based parameters. In simple terms it measures the market's expectations for volatility (up or down moves - not just down) going forward. Empirically it has a relationship with realized volatility - how much the market actually moved up or down relative to what VIX expected - and professionals will use various 'scalping' techniques to lock in day-to-day gains from the difference between the market's actual movement and what options prices expected. To wit: the current expectations of central bank action, just as it did in 11/2011 (global CB action) and 1/2012 (LTRO1), has caused a slow steady leak higher in stocks which crushes realized volatility - currently at record lows. This in turn drags implied vol lower as the 'scalpers' sell vol to capture the difference. With September 'events' around the corner, we suspect there are only a few more days before realized vol picks up and implicitly implied vol momentum scalpers are squeezed out again (and despite a low absolute VIX, the market IS pricing for a pick-up in risk).

The face of Yemeni deli clerk Mutahar Murshed Ali was slashed nearly in two for committing that most grievous of offenses: refusing to "sell" a Colt 45 to a drunk 20 year-old in exchange for foodstamps (whose usage Zero Hedge readers know, recently reverted back to all time highs). Of course, Ali was perfectly in his right to refuse to exchange booze for EBT: we reported recently that "New York would prohibit welfare recipients from spending their tax-funded benefits on cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, and strip clubs under a bill passed overwhelmingly by the state Senate." That however appears to not have bothered the assailant, who nearly cut off the deli vendor's face off in retaliation for not getting the "entitled" quid-pro-handout.

It's like Deja-Vu all over again. The last two days effluence exuberance in European stocks - most specifically Italian and Spanish broad indices - is extremely different from the lack-luster moves in corporate, financial, and sovereign credit markets. Yes, we know short-sale bans; we know fast-money; we know liquidity; but it is beginning to become a little farcical that equities are doing what they do with no follow-through from the actual underlying markets that 'should' benefit the most from whatever it is that the equity markets are rallying for. EURUSD ends the week perfectly unchanged from last Friday. Spain and Italy 10Y end the week down 60bps and 25bps respectively (but the gains were fading fast today - even as stocks accelerated). Europe's VIX collapsed 1.7 vols to around 21% today after being steady all week (as US VIX drops below 14%).

Bridgewater's Ray Dalio is quoted in a recent Barron’s interview, describing the current phase of the U.S. deleveraging experience as “beautiful”. He goes on to explain the three options for reducing debt: austerity, restructuring and printing money. “A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t produce too much deflation or too much depression. There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That’s a beautiful deleveraging.” That sounds pretty good and makes sense. Or does it?

We all make mistakes. In the investment world, some mistakes arise from having imperfect information, some from not anticipating the future correctly and some from sloppy analytics. Sloppy analytics includes everything from outright mathematical errors or misinterpretations, to poor assumptions, to overfocusing on unimportant variables or underfocusing on important ones. Analytics is the most critical and controllable part of the investment process, but even if done flawlessly does not ensure a favorable outcome by any means because the views/ behaviors/incentives of other investors – and indeed, the investment environment itself – change continually in ways that can’t be anticipated. But there is one more common mistake that is a consistent source of perplexity for active investors. Over the years, my experience has been that those who lose money more often (and in greater amounts) than they should, often do so because of overconfidence. Overconfidence can lead to the conviction that one is only buying investments that will be highly profitable and one is only selling investments that no longer have significant upside potential. This can lead to a lack of diversification and a heavy concentration of money in a single investment or asset class. Overconfidence, however, also leads to overtrading.

The reason the market is up today? Jefferies' Peter Misek hikes his price target on Apple from $800 tio $900 (the same AAPL which is now supposed to grow almost exclusively in China, and where as Apple Insider just reported "China's second-largest carrier may end contract sales of Apple's iPhone"). Yes, middle market, $100-$200MM high yield bond issuer Jefferies has an equity research group. And yes, after working at JPmorgan, Scotia, Orion, Alpcap, and Canaccord in the past decade, Misek finally has found a place he can call home (for more than 2 years), or at least until the next bonus renegotiation-cum-upgrade option time. And yes, Jefferies actually is moving the volumeless market for the first and only time ever courtesy of 1.000 implied correlation between the NASDAPPLEURUSD. Which is great. Maybe Misek will be right here.,, Unlike his calls on DragonWave for example, where he was buying all the way from $7 until $2, in the interim moving his Price Target from $9.00 to $3.50 to $10.00 to $3.00. Peter likes even numbers. He keeps it simple, except for his $699 PT on AAPL back in March- why $699? "It's one iPad." Sometimes he likes it complicated.