Dow Jones Industrial Average

"Some people are never too old to find new ways to lose money."

After getting hammered on the first trading day of 2016, what can we expect from the stock market?

A lot of people were expecting some really great things to happen in 2015, but most of them did not happen.  But what did happen? A global financial crisis began during the second half of 2015 threatens to greatly accelerate as we enter 2016. This is what the early stages of a financial crisis look like, and the worst is yet to come.

My overriding theme and the central drama for the coming year is that unexpected events can take on greater importance as the Federal Reserve ends its near-decade-long Zero Interest Rate Policy. Consensus premises and forecasts will likely fall flat, in a rather spectacular manner. The low-conviction and directionless market that we saw in 2015 could become a no-conviction and very-much-directed market (i.e. one that's directed lower) in 2016. There will be no peace on earth in 2016, and our markets could lose a cushion of protection as valuations contract. (Just as "malinvestment" represented a key theme this year, we expect a compression of price-to-earnings ratios to serve as a big market driver in 2016.) In other words, we don't think 2016 will be fun.

Now, slave, get back to work, if you have a job, and make sure you save some energy for your other part time employment as you will be going to those jobs later today. 

"When the Fed moves next will depend importantly on how inflation evolves. The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation has run below its 2% objective for more than three years. The central bank focused extra attention on the inflation outlook in its statement, saying it would “carefully monitor” actual and expected progress toward the goal. This point implied the Fed will be reluctant to raise rates again unless it sees inflation actually moving up. For now, officials said they were “reasonably confident” inflation would rise."

While the major indexes remain within arm’s length of their 52-week high, the number of stocks hitting new lows is piling up.

Can an economy thrive if it doesn’t make or move physical things? Intuitively the answer is no, because most of the services either maintain the status quo (like healthcare and restaurants) or (like houses) consume rather than build capital. The US, in short, is engaged in an experiment to see how long an economy can function with services growing and manufacturing contracting. As with so many of today’s monetary and fiscal experiments, no one knows when definitive results will come in. But the data so far aren’t encouraging.

With enough monetary deception anything’s possible. But, nonetheless, gravity still exists.

Liquidity in the junk (and all other markets) is evaporating, and according to Citi the spread between an illiquid and liquid junk bond portfolio just hit 100 bps, the most in the history of the series. Meanwhile according to Mohamed El-Erian "The market is comfortable that whenever we hit a hiccup, the Fed is going to come back in," he said. "It's very deeply embedded that central banks are our best friends forever."

Sure, the stock market had a great October with the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumping by 8.5%, but the disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street is too stark to ignore, and the Federal Reserve is about to pop the easy-money financial bubble.

The "unexpected" weakness among US consumption, that segment accountable for 70% of US GDP, continues this morning when moments ago Macy's reported a trifecta of weak data, reporting a miss on Q3 sales which came at $5.87 billion below the $6.1 billion expected, and down from the $6.2 billion a year ago, but also a plunge in comparable store sales which tumbled by 3.9%, far worse than the expected drop of -0.4%, and nearly three times as bad as the 1.4% drop a year ago.

This is the fifth time in the past three years that the VIX rose 2% of more on a day the S&P 500 also rose, and short-term volatility expectations were at least 10% below longer-term volatility expectations. Those dates were: September 14, 2012, January 21, 2014, August 25, 2014, and May 18, 2015. Over the next month, the S&P 500 was not able to gain more than +1% at its best point, and suffered a loss averaging -3.2% at its worst point. Quite a negative reward-to-risk ratio.