Yesterday we talked about the Draghi remarks (head of the European Central Bank) that were intended to set expectations that the ECB might be moving toward the exit doors on QE and zero interest rate policy. That bottomed out global rates — which popped U.S. rates further today. The Bank of England piled on today, talking about rate normalization soon.
We’ve gone from 2.12% in the U.S. ten year yield to 2.25% in about 24 hours. These are big swings in the interest rate market – a big bounce and, as I’ve said, the bottom appears to be in for rates.
As importantly, this prepared speech by Draghi could very well cement the top in the dollar. It begins to tighten a very wide interest rate spread between the U.S. and global rates. We entered the year with the Fed going one way (tightening) while the rest of the world was going the other way (easing). That’s a recipe for capital to storm into U.S. assets — into the dollar. And now that may be over.
I’ve been researching long-term cycles in the dollar for a very long time and throughout the global financial crisis period, it these cycles in the world’s reserve currency have been my guidepost for drawing a lot of conclusions on markets and the outlook for capital flows over the past several years.
Despite the choppiness in the dollar for much of the crisis, if we look back at the cycles following the failure of the Bretton Woods system, we were able, very early on, to determine the dollar was in a bull cycle.
This view came in the face of all of the negative global sentiment toward the dollar in 2010. Foreign leaders were taking shots at the Fed, accusing the Fed of trying to destroy the dollar. People were calling for the end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. All the while, the dollar held firm and ultimately made an aggressive climb.
Take a look below at my chart on the long term dollar cycles…
I’ve watched this chart for quite some time, defining the five complete dollar cycles over the past nearly 40 years, and the most recent bull cycle.
If we mark the top of the most recent cycle in early January, this bull cycle has matched the longest cycle in duration (at 8.8 years) and comes in just shy of the long-term average performance of the five complete cycles. The most recent bull cycle added 47%. The average change over a long term cycle has been 56%. This all argues that the dollar bull cycle is over. And a weaker dollar is ahead. That should go over very well with the Trump administration.
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Healthcare was the story of the day today. With the Senate having had its go at the house healthcare bill, it goes back to the house, then back through Senate before it gets to the President’s desk.
Still, policy progression is very positive in this environment. Healthcare stocks were up big today — the IHF healthcare ETF was up over 2%. This is the ETF that tracks insurers, diagnotic and specialized treatment companies.
And despite all of the debate around healthcare, it has been the hottest sector to invest in since the election.Since election day, the IHF is up 35% since the lows of November 9th, the day after the election. Here’s a look at S&P sector performance over the past sixmonths.
Most interesting, the healthcare sector has been beaten up badly since the cracks in Obamacare became clear back in 2014. But as of the past week, the healthcare sector trackers have finally broken back above those 2014 Obamacare–optimism–driven highs. With that, the divergence in this next chart of one of the biggest hospital companies in the country becomes quite an intriguing trade.
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The Nasdaq trade unwound some today. From the peak this morning in the futures of 5898 the tumble started around 11am, falling to as low as 5660. That’s 238 Nasdaq futures points or 4% – quite a sharp move.
Remember, it seems like an overdone trade (driven by the big tech stocks). But as we discussed last week, the tech heavy Nasdaq has simply been a catch up trade — something that has lagged the strength in the broader market.
Here’s the chart we looked at last week.
This chart goes back to the lows driven by the oil price crash that bottomed out earlier last year.
Still, with the Nasdaq at +18% ytd and S&P 500 +9% ytd, as of this morning, as we’ve seen many times in this post-crisis era, the air pockets of illiquidity in stocks can give back gains very, very quickly. As they say, stocks go up on an escalator and down in an elevator.
The Trump trend, in the chart above, was nearly tested today — the same day a new all-time high was marked!
If we get another few days of sharp downside, it will be a tremendous buying opportunity – get your shopping list ready. And if that downside slide does indeed come, it could come at a very interesting time. It would add another (but very signficant) reason the Fed may balk on a rate hike next week. The other reasons? We discussed them yesterday (here).
Have a great weekend.
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Join the Billionaire’s Portfolio to hear more of my big picture analysis and get my hand-selected, diverse stock portfolio following the lead of the best activist investors in the world.As we end the week, we have some remarkable market and economic conditions. U.S. stocks printing new record highs by the day. Yields today broke down. The 10 year yield now trades 2.15%. Oil is under $50.We’re set up to massively stimulative fiscal policies launch into an economic environment that is about as primed as it can possibly get.The stock market is at record highs. The unemployment rate is 4.3%. Inflation is low. Gas is cheap ($2.38), and stable. Mortgage rates are under 4%, and stable. You can borrow money at 2% (or less) to buy a car.
This has all put consumers in as healthy a position as they’ve been in a long time.
As I’ve said, the two key tools the Fed used to engineer a recovery was housing and stocks. That restores wealth, which restores confidence, which gets people spending, hiring and investing again. So stocks are at record highs. And housing (as you can see in the chart below) continues to climb back toward pre-crisis levels.
As a result, we have well recovered and surpassed pre-crisis levels in household net worth, and sit at record highs …
What is the key long-term driver of economic growth over time? Credit creation. In the next chart, you can see the sharp recovery in consumer credit (in orange) since the depths of the economic crisis. This excludes mortgages. And you can see how closely GDP (the purple line, economic output) tracks credit growth.
So credit is back on track. Meanwhile, consumers have never been so credit worthy. FICO scores in the U.S. have reached all-time highs.
With all of this said, the consumer looks strong, but the big missing link and structural drag on the economy in this story has been wage growth. What’s the solution? A corporate tax cut. The biggest winners in a corporate tax cut are workers. The Tax Foundation thinks a cut in the corporate tax rate would double the current annual change in wages.
So think about this backdrop. If I told you at any point in history that these were the conditions, you would probably tell me that the economy was already in, or will be in, an economic boom period. I think it’s coming. And it will drive earnings significantly, which will make the valuation on stocks cheap.
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Stocks continue to bounce back today. But the technical breakdown of the Trump Trend on Wednesday
still looks intact. As I said on Wednesday, this looks like a technical correction in stocks (even considering today’s bounce), not a fundamental crisis-driven sell-off.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the charts on key markets as we head into the weekend.
Here’s a look at the S&P 500 chart….
For technicians, this is a classic “break-comeback” … where the previous trendline support becomes resistance. That means today’s highs were a great spot to sell against, as it bumped up against this trendline.
Very much like the chart above, the dollar had a big trend break on Wednesday, and then aggressively reversed Thursday, only to follow through on the trend break to end the week, closing on the lows.
On that note, the biggest contributor to the weakness in the dollar index, is the strength in the euro (next chart).
The euro had everything including the kitchen sink thrown at it and it still could muster a run toward parity. If it can’t go lower with an onslaught of events that kept threatening the existence of the euro, then any sign of that clearing, it will go higher. With the French elections past, and optimism that U.S. growth initiatives will spur global growth (namely recovery in Europe), then the European Central Bank’s next move will likely be toward exit of QE and extraordinary monetary policies, not going deeper. With that, the euro looks like it can go much higher. That means a lower dollar. And it means, European stocks look like, maybe, the best buy in global stocks.
A lower dollar should be good for gold. As I’ve said, if Trump policies come to fruition, inflation could get a pop. And that’s bullish for gold. If Trump policies don’t come to fruition, the U.S. and global growth looks grim, as does the post-financial crisis recovery in general. That’s bullish for gold.
This big trendline in gold continues to look like a break is coming and higher gold prices are coming.
With all of the above, the most important chart of the week is probably this one …
The 10 year yield has come all the way back to 2.20%. The best reason to wish for a technical correction in stocks, is not to buy the dip (which is a good one), but so that the pressure comes out of the interest rate market (and off of the Fed). The run in the stock market has clearly had an effect on Fed policy. And the Fed has been walking rates up to a point that could choke off the existing economic recovery momentum and, worse, neutralize the impact of any fiscal stimulus to come. Stable, low rates are key to get the full punch out of pro-growth policies, given the 10 year economic malaise we’re coming out of.Invitation to my daily readers: Join my premium service members at Billionaire’s Portfolio to hear more of my big picture analysis and get my hand-selected, diverse portfolio of the most high potential stocks.
Yesterday we talked about the disconnect between the daily drama from the media in Washington (doom and gloom), and what the markets have been communicating (an economic expansion is underway). Today, you might think that connection is happening — the doom and gloom scenario is finally being realized in markets. Probably not.
For perspective: As of the close yesterday, the Nasdaq was up 18% year to date (just five months in). Gold was in the middle of a three year range. Market interest rates (the U.S. 10-year government bond yield) was just above the middle of the range of the past four years. The dollar was not far off its strongest levels in 15 years.
Today the media has explicitly printed the headline of impeachment for Trump (actually, they’ve run those headlines a various times over the past several months). Nonetheless, stocks (the S&P 500) today are off by 1.6%.
This gets the bears very excited. I saw the story about consumer debt, surpassing 2008 levels, floating all over the internet today. People tried to make the bubble connection — implying another debt crisis was coming.
The real story: Total household indebtedness finally surpassed the previous peak from 2008. That’s precisely what the Fed was attempting to do with zero interest rates. Make existing debt cheaper to manage, and at some point, break the psychology of the debt burden and get people borrowing (at ultra-cheap rates), investing and spending again. Otherwise, our economy and the world economy would have gone into a deflationary spiral.
That said, as I’ve found in my 20 years in this business, people tend to find a story to fit the price. The story hadn’t been fitting the price for much of the past six months. Today, it seems pretty easy. See the chart below of stocks ….
We had the first breakdown of the Trump trend in March, but all it could muster was about a 3% correction. This looks much more like a technical correction (a double top, and trend break today) – than a Trump impeachment trade. I suspect with the earnings catalyst behind us, this is the start of a deeper technical correction, which is healthy in a bull market. And it may take significant progress made in tax reform to see new highs in the broad stock indicies. We shall see.This next chart is the dollar index. This too had a significant trend break today. This translates into a higher euro, which would spell out a story where Europe is improving and the ECB is able in start discussing exit from QE.
What about the Trump/Comey saga? Aren’t people dumping dollars because of that? Not likely. If that were potentially destabilizing to the U.S., it would be destabilizing to the global economy, and people would buy dollars not sell them.
With that in mind, here’s gold. Gold sits on the brink of a big trend break (higher). When looking at gold and the dollar, it’s important to remember this: back in the heat of the crisis, gold and the dollar moved together, higher! That’s opposite of the traditional correlation. They moved higher together because people bought gold and they bought dollars (and dollar denominated assets, like Treasuries) as they viewed it the safest alternative in the world to park money – with the chance of getting it back.
With a break higher in gold looking imminent, and the dollar looking lower, it looks like a more traditional relationship. It’s not communicating crisis.
Follow This Billionaire To A 172% Winner
In our Billionaire’s Portfolio, we have a stock in our portfolio that is controlled by one of the top billion dollar activist hedge funds on the planet. The hedge fund manager has a board seat and has publicly stated that this stock is worth 172% higher than where it trades today. And this is an S&P 500 stock!
Even better, the company has been constantly rumored to be a takeover candidate. We think an acquisition could happen soon as the billionaire investor who runs this activist hedge fund has purchased almost $157 million worth of this stock over the past year at levels just above where the stock is trading now.
So we have a billionaire hedge fund manager, who is on the board of a company that has been rumored to be a takeover candidate, who has adding aggressively over the past year, on a dip.
Last week we discussed the building support for a next leg higher in commodities prices. China is clearly a very important determinant in where commodities go. And with the news last week about cooperation between the Trump team and China, on trade, we may have the catalyst to get commodities moving higher again.It just so happens that oil (the most traded commodity in the world) is rebounding too, on the catalyst of prospects of an OPEC extension to the production cuts they announced last November.In fact, overnight, Saudi Arabia and Russia said they would do “whatever it takes” to cut supply (i.e. whatever it takes to get oil prices higher). Oil was up big today on that news.When you hear these words spoken from policy-makers (those that can dictate outcomes), it should get everyone’s attention. Those are the exact words uttered by ECB head Mario Draghi, that ended the bond market assault in Spain and Italy that were threatening the existence of the euro and euro zone. The Spanish 10-year yield collapsed from 7.8% (unsustainable borrowing rate for the Spanish government, and threatening imminent default) to 1% over the next three years — and the ECB, while threatening to buy an unlimited amount of bonds to push those yields lower, didn’t have to buy a single bond. It was the mere threat of ‘whatever it takes’ that did the trick.
As for oil: From the depths of the oil price crash last year, remember, we discussed the prospects for a huge bounce. Oil prices at $26 were threatening to undo the trillions of dollars of work central banks and governments had done to stabilize the global economy. Central banks couldn’t let it happen. After a series of coordinated responses (from the BOJ, China, ECB and the Fed), oil bottomed and quickly doubled.
Also at that time, two of the best oil traders in the world were calling the bottom and calling for $70-$80 oil by this year (Pierre Andurand and Andy Hall). Another commodities king that called the bottom: Leigh Goehring.
Goehring, one of the best commodities investors on the planet, has also laid out the case for $100 oil by next year. He says he’s “wildly bullish” oil in his recent quarterly investor letter at his new fund, Goehring & Rozencwajg.
Goehring argues that the IEA inventory numbers are flawed. He thinks oil the market is already over-supplied and is in a draw, as of May of last year. With that, he thinks the OPEC cuts will ultimately exacerbate the deficit and send prices aggressively higher. He says “we remain ‘wildly’ bullish and believe that there is a very high probability of oil prices reaching triple digits in the first half of 2018.”
Follow This Billionaire To A 172% WinnerIn our Billionaire’s Portfolio, we have a stock in our portfolio that is controlled by one of the top billion dollar activist hedge funds on the planet. The hedge fund manager has a board seat and has publicly stated that this stock is worth 172% higher than where it trades today. And this is an S&P 500 stock!Even better, the company has been constantly rumored to be a takeover candidate. We think an acquisition could happen soon as the billionaire investor who runs this activist hedge fund has purchased almost $157 million worth of this stock over the past year at levels just above where the stock is trading now.So we have a billionaire hedge fund manager, who is on the board of a company that has been rumored to be a takeover candidate, who has adding aggressively over the past year, on a dip.
Oil has been on the move the past few days. Was this recent dip a gift to buy?The oil inventory report yesterday showed a big drawdown on oil inventories. The market expectation was for about a drawdown of 1.5 million barrels. It came in at 5 million.
That has oil on a big bounce for the week. It’s trading about 8% higher than it was at the lows of last Friday. But we still sit below the 200 day moving average and below the key $50 level (the comfort zone for those producers, namely the shale industry, to fire back up idle capacity).
The weakness in oil has a lot to do with weakness across broader commodities. And broader commodities typically correlates well with what Chinese stocks are doing.
You can see in the chart above, how closely the two track. This bottom in commodities has/had everything to do with the outlook for a big infrastructure spend out of the Trump administration. It’s yet to bubble up toward the top of the action list. With that, the momentum has either stalled on this trade, or it’s a pause before another leg higher in this early stage multi-year rebound. My bet is on the latter. Follow This Billionaire To A 172% Winner
In our Billionaire’s Portfolio, we have a stock in our portfolio that is controlled by one of the top billion dollar activist hedge funds on the planet. The hedge fund manager has a board seat and has publicly stated that this stock is worth 172% higher than where it trades today. And this is an S&P 500 stock!
Even better, the company has been constantly rumored to be a takeover candidate. We think an acquisition could happen soon as the billionaire investor who runs this activist hedge fund has purchased almost $157 million worth of this stock over the past year at levels just above where the stock is trading now.
So we have a billionaire hedge fund manager, who is on the board of a company that has been rumored to be a takeover candidate, who has adding aggressively over the past year, on a dip.
Over the past few days, some of the most influential investors in the world have publicly shared views on some of their best ideas.First, over the weekend, it was Buffett at his annual shareholders meeting. The take away, as I said yesterday, “stocks are dirt cheap” if you think rates will stay low for longer (i.e. below long term averages). His assumption in that statement is that the Fed’s benchmark rate goes to 3ish% and done – well below the long run average neutral rate of 5%.
In addition, he was quite vocal on Apple, a stake he picked up as others were selling in fear in the first half of last year (i.e. being greedy when others are fearful). And he doubled his stake earlier this year, now holding north of $20 billion worth of the stock. The analyst community thinks Apple is a juggling act, with balls that will drop if they don’t come up with another revolutionary product every quarter. Buffett thinks Apple is cheap even if they don’t have another single new invention in the future. Why? Because they’ve developed a services business around their hardware that has quickly become one of the biggest and fastest growing businesses in the world.
Remember, back on February 1, I made the case for why Apple could double. You can see that here. It’s gone from a $560 billion company to an $800 billion company since we added it in our Billionaire’s Portfolio early last year. Even at $154 a share (today’s levels) if we strip out the quarter of a trillion dollars in cash, we get the existing business for 12 times earnings.
Now, let’s talk about one of the big ideas presented yesterday at the annual Sohn Conference in New York, where many of top billionaire investors and hedge fund managers give their outlook on the stock market, the economy and talk about their favorite long and/or short picks.
Billionaire investor Jeff Gundlach, who oversees the world’s largest bond fund likes selling the S&P 500 against emerging market stocks. He thinks value is distorted relative to global GDP. But it’s more a view on undervaluation of EM, rather than overvaluation of U.S. stocks. He took to Twitter to defend that view…
Assuming a stable to improving world economy, emerging market stocks have lagged and offer a great opportunity to catch up with the strength in the U.S. stock market. It also requires that emerging market currencies are a good bet against the dollar, if policy makers around the world are able to follow the lead of the Fed, where rising interest rate cycles follow. This is a very similar view to the one we discussed yesterday, where Spanish stocks (supported by a stronger euro) present a big catch up trade opportunity (to the tune of about 40% to revisit the 2007 highs), with the destabilization risk of the French elections in the rear-view mirror.
Follow This Billionaire To A 172% Winner
In our Billionaire’s Portfolio, we have a stock in our portfolio that is controlled by one of the top billion dollar activist hedge funds on the planet. The hedge fund manager has a board seat and has publicly stated that this stock is worth 172% higher than where it trades today. And this is an S&P 500 stock!
Even better, the company has been constantly rumored to be a takeover candidate. We think an acquisition could happen soon as the billionaire investor who runs this activist hedge fund has purchased almost $157 million worth of this stock over the past year at levels just above where the stock is trading now.
So we have a billionaire hedge fund manager, who is on the board of a company that has been rumored to be a takeover candidate, who has adding aggressively over the past year, on a dip.
For the skeptics on the bull market in stocks and the broader economy, the reasons to worry continue to get scratched off of the list.
Brexit. Russia. Trump’s protectionist threats. Trump’s inability to get policies legislated. The French election.
The bears, those looking for a recession around the corner and big slide in stocks, are losing ammunition for the story.
With the threat of instability from the French election now passed, these are two of the more intriguing catch-up trades.
In the chart above, the green line is Spanish stocks (the IBEX). U.S., German and UK stocks have not only recovered the 2007 pre-crisis highs but blown past them — sitting on or near (in the case of UK stocks) record highs. Not only does the French vote punctuate the break of this nine year downtrend, but it has about 45% left in it to revisit the 2007 highs. And the euro, in purple, could have a dramatic recovery with the cloud of French elections lifted, which was an imminent threat to the future of the single currency.Next … Japanese stocks. While the attention over the past five months has been diverted toward U.S. politics and policies, the Bank of Japan has continued with unlimited QE. As U.S. rates crawl higher, it pulls Japanese government bond yields with it, moving the Japanese market interest rate above and away from the zero line. Remember, that’s where the BOJ has pegged the target for it’s 10 year yield – zero. That means they buy unlimited bonds to push the yield back down. That means they print more and more yen, which buys more and more Japanese stocks.
The Nikkei has been one of the biggest movers over the past couple of weeks (up almost 10%) since it was evident that the high probability outcome in the French election was a Macron win.Again, German, U.S., and UK stocks are at or near record highs. The Nikkei has been trailing behind and looks to make another run now, with 25,000 in sight.If you need more convincing that stocks can go much higher, Warren Buffett reiterated over the weekend that this low interest rate environment and outlook makes stocks “dirt cheap.” Last year he made the point that when interest rates were 15% [in the early 1980s], there was enormous pull on all assets, not just stocks. Investors have a lot of choices at 15% rates. It’s very different when rates are zero (or still near zero). He said, in a world where investors knew interest rates would be zero “forever,” stocks would sell at 100 or 200 times earnings because there would be nowhere else to earn a return.
Buffett essentially said at zero interest rates into perpetuity, the upside on the stock market (and any alternative asset class with return) is essentially infinite, as people are forced to find return by taking risk. Why you would buy a treasury bond that has no growth, and little-to-no yield and the same or worse balance sheet than high quality dividend stock.
This “forcing of the hand” (pushing investors into return producing assets) is an explicit objective by the interest rate policies of the Fed and the other major central banks of the world. They need us to buy stocks. They need us to spend money. They need economic growth.
If you have an brokerage account, and can read a weekly note from me, you can position yourself with the smartest investors in the world. Join us in The Billionaire’s Portfolio.
Yesterday we talked about the Draghi remarks (head of the European Central Bank) that were intended to set expectations that the ECB might be moving toward the exit doors on QE and zero interest rate policy. That bottomed out global rates — which popped U.S. rates further today. The Bank of England piled on today, talking about rate normalization soon.
Join the 
Yesterday we talked about the disconnect between the daily drama from the media in Washington (doom and gloom), and what the markets have been communicating (an economic expansion is underway). Today, you might think that connection is happening — the doom and gloom scenario is finally being realized in markets. Probably not.
Last week we discussed the building support for a next leg higher in commodities prices. China is clearly a very important determinant in where commodities go. And with the news last week about cooperation between the Trump team and China, on trade, we may have the catalyst to get commodities moving higher again.It just so happens that oil (the most traded commodity in the world) is rebounding too, on the catalyst of prospects of an OPEC extension to the production cuts they announced last November.In fact, overnight, Saudi Arabia and Russia said they would do “whatever it takes” to cut supply (i.e. whatever it takes to get oil prices higher). Oil was up big today on that news.When you hear these words spoken from policy-makers (those that can dictate outcomes), it should get everyone’s attention. Those are the exact words uttered by ECB head Mario Draghi, that ended the bond market assault in Spain and Italy that were threatening the existence of the euro and euro zone. The Spanish 10-year yield collapsed from 7.8% (unsustainable borrowing rate for the Spanish government, and threatening imminent default) to 1% over the next three years — and the ECB, while threatening to buy an unlimited amount of bonds to push those yields lower, didn’t have to buy a single bond. It was the mere threat of ‘whatever it takes’ that did the trick.
Over the past few days, some of the most influential investors in the world have publicly shared views on some of their best ideas.First, over the weekend, it was Buffett at his annual shareholders meeting. The take away, as I said yesterday, “stocks are dirt cheap” if you think rates will stay low for longer (i.e. below long term averages). His assumption in that statement is that the Fed’s benchmark rate goes to 3ish% and done – well below the long run average neutral rate of 5%.
