I hope it's going to be a Thursday thump…
At least when you hear the "thump" you know you've hit something! The market encountered virtually no resistance on the way down back to our mid-points and we could not be more thrilled as we went bearish at the top and we've been lining up our buys all week, expecting to hold 8,650 here but frankly happy to see us go back to 8,200 since we are a little bearish and looking for bargains.
We're selling our short plays like SKF and FXP (a cover if you are in yesterday's spread leg) into the initial excitement this morning as we've had great runs and we're either going to be shifting long if we hold Dow 8,650, S&P 888, Nas 1,550, NYSE 5,750 and Russell 490 (the latter 2 being well above the 50 dmas as I look for leadership there). I called a drop back to our midpoints in yesterday's member chat, 7 minutes after the market opened and it does not look like we will be disappointed this morning with some poor retail results, even from WMT, who shocked people with a profit warning. We already grabbed ISRG on the dip and I urge members to check out the plays laid out in last night's comments as this is a great opportunity to get in cheap!
This is going to be fun because the crappy American economy will send investors scurrying back to our crappy American currency so we can expect the dollar to pop and that will put more pressure on oil with already (ROFL) dropped 12.5% yesterday – something I mentioned may happen in the morning post. We'll see how oil handles $40 but, as I keep saying, we're going to have a very hard time sustaining any sort of rally until we get real capitulation in the energy sector (off 5% yesterday) and investors stop putting money back into it and rotate into other things.
We saw the same thing happen with the builders as it took an agonizing amount of time for the sheeple to stop trying to call a bottom and move on but those same sheeple are now into energy stocks and looking for the next bubble to blow their money on. Sadly, we have had no clear leadership for them to jump on top of and we have a parade of pundits on CNBC telling people how the smart money is parking oil in tankers and other ridiculous things to keep people invested while the big money dumps out (see "The Roach Motel Theory for Oil").
I read an article yesterday where FRO alone has 70M barrels worth of tankers rented out for storage so who knows how much oil is parked out there in addition to the 4Bn barrels of global storage (SPRs plus commercial) that we're already counting. Yesterday's 11.8M barrel BUILD in inventories and we sent 9.7M barrels of product OUT of the country last week. Imports surged by 1.6Mb per day as at least some of those tankers full of oil took the money and ran as oil ran up from $35 to $50 in the past two weeks. That inventory report only covered through 1/2 so who knows how many more barrels were dumped this week – we'll find out next Wednesday but another massive build in product will be catastrophic for those poor tanker speculators…
I said yesterday, at only half a joke, that we needed to keep up our 30% monthly gain from December's picks into the rest of 2009 to keep up with inflation but, looking at the Deficit figures for 2009, maybe that's right in line! Between the stimulus, the tax cuts, the war and existing unfunded TARP money – we are crossing the $2Tn mark for 2009 projected debt and that DOES NOT take into account the fact that tax revenues may be down considerably. That means the US needs to auction off $150Bn a month in notes and MUST find buyers. The auctions work by adding interest to the notes until the sale is filled and $150Bn a month is 3 TIMES more than we normally auction off in a mere $600Bn average Bush deficit. THIS COULD BE A PROBLEM PEOPLE! Have I mentioned I like gold lately?
Still, stocks are commodities too – there are only a limited amount of shares of ownerships in these little money making machines (well, the few that do make money) to go around and that means inflation will inflate stocks too, as well as the meager earnings they do manage to scratch out. We have our list of 38 key positions we like and we have our daily gambles but let's not be idiots and think that tucking our money away in 10-year notes at 2% is "safe." A few years of 9% inflation can chop those notes in half on you and by the time you cash you $100,000 note you may be lucky to be able to get a Prius with it. Money MUST be put to work in this market. Germany and Japan are already having trouble raising cash so it is not just us with our hands out for whatever change the global market can spare.
Asia is a mess with the Shanghai falling 2.3% and they were the stars of the day. The Hang Seng dropped 3.8% and the Nikkei gave up 3.9% (Bombay, who fell 7.25% yesterday, wisely took a holiday today). European markets are off another 1.5% this morning but the global Dow is still hanging tough at 1,555 and we can maintain hope as long as they can maintain 1,500 so we'll be watching that closely in our next Big Chart Review. As expected, the BOE cut rates to 1.5%, the lowest level since the bank was founded in 1694 so when we say these are once in a lifetime rates – we are NOT kidding! The ECB meets next week and has rates on the continent at 2.5%, already down from October's 4.25% but the markets still want MORE (or less as the case may be).
So the world banks will be lending money at 0% and borrowing money at 2%, then 3%, 4%, 6%, 8%, 10%, 14%, 18%… at which point I think we'll flip our position but, for now, we are firmly bullish on interest rates over the long term. We'll hear from Obama at 11 and we're hoping his speech on the economy firms up a floor at our mid-point so we can at least move back to a 5% test of the upside.
Jobless claims for last week were way better than expected at 467,000 (540K expected) so that's good news and we get a report on Consumer Credit at 2pm, which almost certainly grew in November by about $2Bn vs a $3.5Bn decline in October as holiday shopping trumped recession. Earnings are off to a rotten start with big misses by GAP, HELE and TXI this morning but BBBY, BLUD and RT were good last night so we have to give it some time before we draw conclusions. Volume is still very low, hopefully today we'll have some decent action and, of course, next week earnings season starts in earnest so it's going to be a wild ride.
As long as every man, woman and child on earth can scrape together 3,333 dimes for the US collection plate – everything will be fine!
