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US Economic Recovery update

NOTE : All the charts displayed below are updated daily/weekly and available for subscribers from the various chart menus. Since the peak daily infection rate of over 75,000 achieved on 17 July 2020, daily infections fell consistently to a trough of just over 20,000 on 8 September 2020. During this period, US national economic mobility (Google workplace less residential mobility indices) climbed slowly as the economy attempted to get back to work. Since just after Labor Day however, the daily […]

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Global Business Mobility remains in decline

Global Business Mobility, defined as GDP-weighted Google geolocation data of workplace less residential mobility for the 24 largest economies in the world, representing over two-thirds of global GDP, remains in decline despite a recent uptick: When excluding USA from the data, the situation appears even worse, as depicted by the second chart above showing steeper decline of business mobility as well as a daily Covid19 infection rate that appears on the rise. This is due to the fact that the […]

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Global V-shaped recovery stopped in its tracks

The US State and G8 Mobility Charts have just been updated in the Covid menu. The U.S has seen a whopping increase in infections across a broad swathe of states since emerging from lockdown : As a result, US and state economic mobility has taken a huge hit. Although the US is only about 49% of the G8 GDP, there are enough G8 members also taking strain to stall the entire G8 group recovery. Since the G8 represent almost 49% […]

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Headwinds increasing for the stock market

NOTE : All images and charts displayed below are regularly updated and available to subscribers from the CHARTS menu. The SP-500 has enjoyed an incredible 40% rally since the 23 March lows. This was mostly fueled by an unprecedented FED stimulus program, which is now coming to an end within the next few weeks: Unless more stimulus is unleashed (and a further $1.5-$2 trillion seems likely) the risks of a stock market selloff are high, especially given that the market […]

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US enters 2nd wave of Covid19 infections

Note : Most charts shown below are available to subscribers in the COVID19 analytics section. Summary Economic mobility in US increasing at a slower pace than Covid-19 infections, contrary to rest of G7. At a state level, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts & Michigan are leading economic mobility recovery vs infections. US has moved from a peaked scenario to join a host of second-wave countries struggling to contain infections after lockdowns. Stock market is going to struggle to post new […]

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NBER declares 2020 recession dates

The National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) has announced official start dates for the 2020 US recession. It is very rare for such quick pronouncements (they are normally made 9-12 months after the fact) but the fact that 90% of the economy came to a sudden halt, has led to such deep declines in their metrics that they could make an early pronunciation without risk of being proven wrong later. The monthly economic peak was declared as February 2020 (first […]

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Some updates & market observations

The STM Seasonality Model is a unique composite that looks at average monthly gains, gain-to-loss ratios and percentage of winning months for 1,2,3 and 4 year cycles to arrive at a composite seasonality score for each month. For the last 18 months, the model has been running at 80% directional accuracy on calls on the SP500 future direction which is rather remarkable given the strange times we are living in. Even though May month was forecast as a non-leveraged long […]

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SP-500 and Recessions

We examined SP-500 behavior in the lead to and during US recessions a few years ago in an old research note (Recession – Just how much warning is useful anyway?) to conclude that more than 5-months warning before a recession was not constructive, and that you should focus on recession warning models that stuck to a 4-6 month historical lead time as close as possible. Given the “voluntary” sudden-stop of the U.S economy due to Coronavirus lock-downs, we are faced […]

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COVID19 Recession Warning

Businesses are going to be shuttered in massive numbers as the U.S has to deal with the unavoidable nationwide lock-down that will be required to contain the highly contagious Coronavirus. From our Covid19 Dashboard we maintain for our subscribers, we can see that the number of cases is rising according to a quadratic equation that will yield over 100,000 cases by the end of this week and over 500,000 cases by 7th April (assuming trends hold.) Hospitalizations are running at […]

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COVID-19 Global Pandemic is here

Further to our March 5th 2020 warning on a looming Coronavirus (COVID19)  global pandemic, the WHO has finally recognized as such and declared the outbreak an official global pandemic. It is not hard to see why, when one looks at the chart below: Whilst China has managed to stabilize new infections (assuming their numbers are to be trusted) the rest of the world does not have the luxury of their socialist command-and-control government, hospital building productivity, general mobilization, hive-mind population […]

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COVID-19 starting to look like a global pandemic

The newly reported cases of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) in China appear to be tapering off, but it is the recent uptick of newly reported cases outside China that have reached alarming levels, resulting in total cases accelerating to just under 100,000: The secondary round of infections, most likely from travelers from China before the largest quarantine in human history, is evident when one looks at the progress in the number of countries reporting confirmed infections, with a marked jump since […]

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Massive rebound in US housing market

All 8 components of our comprehensive US Housing Market Index have posted solid and sustained gains in the last 6 months: Our detailed PDF report for Dec 2019 has been published to the REPORTS menu. According to many market watchers, there is no better barometer on the health of the U.S. economy than housing. It’s an industry that encompasses a myriad of vital sectors — banking, manufacturing, commodities, construction, durable goods, international trade, transportation and, of course, consumer spending. So […]

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We found some worrying signs in labor data

These days, its really hard to find worrying signs in US labor data. If one looks at the once famous Janet Yellen Labor Dashboard, apart from Job Openings, everything looks to be progressing fine, bar a small pullback here and there: Sure, the employment-to-population ratio (participation) has not come close to peak achieved in the last business cycle but everything else has.Even the equal-weighted 52-state US national average unemployment rate has been falling nicely to multi-decade lows. But dig a […]

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U.S economy likely dodged a bullet

For two years, our comprehensive U.S monthly Leading Index (USMLEI) has been deteriorating, more recently to worrisome levels, with exactly half of the 23 components now in recession territory: What was really alarming was that this was occurring against the background of elevated RAVI local stock market valuations, an inverted yield curve, a deteriorating Global LEI, a US housing market recession and a global trade recession. We think the worst is likely over however. Notwithstanding a likely de-escalation in the […]

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New intraday charts

Most of our breadth and liquidity indices are updated end-of-day with the exception of Great Trough Detector(GTR), Selling Pressure Diffusion (SPD) Zweig Breadth Thrust (ZBT) These 3 models above are updated every 15-min during the course of a trading day. PRO subscription clients will from now on also be able to see the following new models updated every 15-minutes: New improved Short-Term liquidity index (STL2) New improved Medium-Term liquidity index (MTL2) New improved Average Liquidity index (ALIX2) During the remainder […]

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Dramatic change in yield curve

The RecessionALERT yield-curve aggregate and diffusion has just made a dramatic reversal, with the percentage of 10 term-spreads that are inverted dropping from 70% to 40%: The 10YR less the 2YR narrowly averted an inversion 8 weeks ago and the 10YR-5YR and 10YR-3YR never came close to inversion. If one looks at the latest history and with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the yield spread aggregate and its 10 components seems to be on a  trend upwards. […]

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Are trade war concerns valid?

It appears U.S investors’ concerns with global trade wars are dominating U.S stock market direction for the last two years: This is with valid reason, as prior research of ours (Global Economy affects U.S stock market returns) has pointed out that whilst a global recession does not necessarily result in a U.S recession, it can certainly lead to one if the U.S economy is vulnerable. Additionally that research pointed out  much bigger than expected correlations between U.S stock market returns […]

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About the new TRENDEX SP-500 model

There have been numerous queries about the new TRENDEX chart in the PRO Charts section. This model supersedes the Demark and the Demark+ trend counting models as it is a far superior methodology focusing on support and resistance levels as opposed to closes 4 days ago and moving averages. The methodology was a by-product of the research done on the SP500 Probability Model when initially using DEM+ as one of the six model components and realizing there was a better […]

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Yield Curve inversion suggests mild recession

There has been acute interest in the inversions currently taking place on the term-spreads around the world: And this comes as no surprise, since more than half of the world’s sovereign yield curves have now inverted… Right now, 70% of the U.S yield-curve cluster comprising the 10/5/3/2/1 year bond yields are inverted as shown below. In prior research we have advocated using greater than the 60% threshold to have a “guaranteed lock-in” of the inversion: A closer inspection shows that […]

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We likely avoided a full yield-curve inversion

In our early June post “Is the U.S Yield Curve Inversion locked in?” we mused that only portions of the term-spread complex had inverted and most likely would remain that way, allowing us to avoid a full scale term-spread inversion. As the chart below shows, this is indeed the case – with only 50% of the term-spread complex having inverted as of 26 July 2019 and a maximum of only 60% of the term-spreads having inverted so far: Literally all […]

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  All charts are now zoomable by clicking on them. Once you click on them they will resize to the maximum size to fit onto your screen. The chart image qualities are refined to allow for minimal image quality degradation from resizing.