Home » Posts tagged 'bulls'
Tag Archives: bulls
Here’s Why Magazine Covers Reveal the “Market Zeitgeist”… What Investors Should Do Instead..
Here’s Why Magazine Covers Reveal the “Market Zeitgeist”… What Investors Should Do Instead..
Too many times in the past have I seen covers like this… and a few years later it didn’t turn out too bullish!
We covered magazine covers before as a great way to gauge “market zeitgeist.” It will be a while before we see offshore oil and gas, coal, or uranium hailed as a worthwhile investment on these covers. And when it happens, that’s when you’ll know it might be a good time to offload our positions. In other words, there’s still a lot of upside available in the hated sectors we focus on here at Insider.
Offshore Juice
Coming back to the offshore oil and gas theme…
Oil Majors Set To Sanction $125 Billion Upstream Projects in 2024
International oil and gas majors and the Middle East’s national oil companies are expected to give the green light this year to up to 30 projects, worth a total investment of $125 billion and holding an estimated 14 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) of resources.
That’s the estimate in Wood Mackenzie’s latest analysis of upstream oil and gas projects expected to reach final investment decisions (FIDs) in 2024.
And who stands to gain by all this spend? Oil and gas service companies — still the world’s worst performing sector over the last 10 years and still down some 80% from the start of 2012.
Philadelphia Oil and Gas Equipment and Services Index relative to S&P 500 indexed
Australia: Lights Out or Diesel?
This is Hegelian dialectic (an interpretive method in which the contradiction between a proposition and its antithesis is resolved at a higher level of truth) at play in the land down under.
Let the lights go out (let our standard of living go backwards) or burn diesel (maintain our standard of living)? You guessed it…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What if
What if
What if bears were right all along? What if it’s not different this time?
What if this Fed liquidity inspired rally produced precisely the kind of exuberant final thrust we often see at the end of business cycles? After all, people were really bullish in 2007, people were really bullish in 2000, both final rallies inspired by easy Fed liquidity. In 2000, the Y2k bug, in 2007 giving us the subprime mortgage crisis.
What if this latest rally has produced exactly the same conditions we’ve seen during prior tops?
Be clear: I’m not calling for a top here, that’s a fool’s errand. After all so far all we’ve seen is a minor pullback off of very overbought conditions. Heck, tech hasn’t even begun to correct yet.
But yields keep dropping like a brick, as does the Baltic Dry index, small caps, transports, the banking sector never confirmed new highs, equal weight indicators suggest a major negative divergence inside a market that appears entirely held up by tech, and perhaps by only 5-10 highly valued stocks that are massively technically extended and control more market cap in a few stocks than ever before. At the same time we have a market more extended above underlying GDP than ever and now suddenly a potential trigger nobody saw coming: The coronavirus.
Look, the track record on viruses and diseases over the past 20 years has been clear: Any market impact is temporary and/or minimal at best. Look at SARS in 2003, $SPX rallied over 20% in 2003. But the backdrop was different. The US just came out of a recession and markets had bottomed in 2002. Markets in 2003 were at the beginning of a new business cycle.
This cycle here is old, and one could argue was merely saved again by a Fed going into full easing mode in 2019.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Bubble Fortunes
Wynn Bullock Child on a Forest Road 1958
A few days ago, former Reagan Budget Director and -apparently- permabear (aka perennial bear) David Stockman did an interview (see below) with Stuart Varney at Fox -a permabull?!-, who started off with ‘the stock rally goes on’ despite a London terror attack and the North Korea missile situation. His first statement to Stockman was something in the vein of “if I had listened to you at any time after the past 2-3 years, I’d have lost a fortune..” Stockman shot back with (paraphrased): “if you’d have listened to me in 2000, 2004, you’d have dodged a bullet”, and at some point later “get out of bonds, get out of stocks, it’s a dangerous casino.” Familiar territory for most of you.
I happen to think Stockman is right, and if anything, he doesn’t go far enough, strong enough. What that makes me I don’t know, what’s deeper and longer than perennial or perma? But it’s Varney’s assumption that he would have lost a fortune that triggered me this time around. Because it’s an assumption built on an assumption, and pretty soon it’s assumptions all the way down.
First, that fortune is not real, unless and until he sells the stocks and bonds he made it with. If he has, that would indicate that he doesn’t believe in the market anymore, which is not very likely for a permabull to do. So Varney probably still has his paper ‘fortune’. I’m using him as an example, of course, of all the permabulls and others who hold such paper.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Worse Things Get For You, The Better They Get For Wall Street
The Worse Things Get For You, The Better They Get For Wall Street
On October 2 the BLS reported absolutely atrocious employment data, with virtually no job growth other than the phantom jobs added by the fantastically wrong Birth/Death adjustment for all those new businesses springing up around the country. The MSM couldn’t even spin it in a positive manner, as the previous two months of lies were adjusted significantly downward. What a shocker. At the beginning of that day the Dow stood at 16,250 and had been in a downward trend for a couple months as the global economy has been clearly weakening. The immediate rational reaction to the horrible news was a 250 point plunge down to the 16,000 level. But by the end of the day the market had finished up over 200 points, as this terrible news was immediately interpreted as good news for the market, because the Federal Reserve will never ever increase interest rates again.
Over the next three weeks, the economic data has continued to deteriorate, corporate earnings have been crashing, and both Europe and China are experiencing continuing and deepening economic declines. The big swinging dicks on Wall Street have programmed their HFT computers to buy, buy, buy. The worse the data, the bigger the gains. The market has soared by 1,600 points since the low on October 2. A 10% surge based upon lousy economic info, as the economy is either in recession or headed into recession, is irrational, ridiculous, and warped, just like our financial system. This is what happens when crony capitalism takes root like a foul weed and is bankrolled by a central bank that cares only for Wall Street, while throwing Main Street under the bus.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
