tirsdag den 29. september 2009

Chasing the end consumer....where is he? Have you seen him?

Todays investment meeting was short, but productive:

We ended up chasing the end consumer of all the "good" and goods that this fiscal stimulus has and will produce.

It is all well and good to analyse things getting better - it's even correct, from the stand-point of corporate earnings, but.... who is this end user? Where does he/she live?

Clearly the US consumer no longer wants to be part of the game of chicken, as their "balance sheet" is in such a bad state: lower house prices, eroded pension funds, and outlook to lower real earnings & potential unemployment

The money is on China and Japan to create more domestic demand - and I am sure it will produce more final demand, but the problem being... their saving rate is 40% or more, so it takes a lot of Chinese to replace just one US consumer.

Chart China - getting bigger GDP but spend less as percentage of GDP (source: David Rosenberg, Gluskin Sheff)

(Click on chart for larger version)


Fortunately China is factor rich on people, but I doubt the local peasants, celebrating the 60th year Anniversary of PROC (http://tinyurl.com/ycorzmo) this week is too concerned about these matters, but the cheerleaders of the world keeps talking about the amazing Chinese story....but may I ask again? Who is buying their stuff.

Looking at the incoming data it is becoming clear that the velocity of improvement is at best stagnant and at worst falling - the past two weeks has not done much good on the upside, except maybe for the 20K better jobless claims last week. The worst being the renewed slow homes sales...

It is also very interesting to note that the main benchmarks of bubble/euphoria/China: Copper, Gold and Crude are all "correcting" their up-move - this could be merely a small correction inside major cycle, but being the concerned chap I'm - I got feeling market is long, very long.....all of the above assets.

Chart 2: Copper, Crude & Shanghai


Our main conclusion remains this:


  • Market trades on momentum (nothing wrong with that per se..... although it is EXTREMELY tiresome for old man like me.....)

  • It's impossible to define top in place presently (You can do all sorts of analysis, but from technical and valuation perspective it remains a two sided story)

  • We note data & commodities does not like last two weeks(see chart)

In the equity space, our resident equity guy, Mr. Carsten Høgh, claims: Nothing is cheap any longer, and that caused some tactical talks on whether stock managers would move to "defend" their positions as we enter Q4?

The fact that most of their "profit" this year has come from low quality stocks with no or small earnings - and from increases in multiples (S&P has moved from P/E of 10 to 18 today.....) would indicate some willingness to scale-down their holdings based on Carsten premise: If it's not cheap, it's close to being expensive - We have expectation that there will be move away from cyclicals and into Big Cap again (Tesco, Wal-Mart, Colgate, Coke, H&M, Diago etc.).


The overriding strong argument for buying stocks remains: cheap funding (read: liquidity), cheap US Dollar and cheap talk in Washington (Obama promises alto - but have much of the items on the G-20 can he ACTUALLY get through Congress?).....which are all good arguments, we have some idea, still, that the next two weeks will be the peak (Read old blog: http://steenjakobsen.blogspot.com/2009/09/next-big-trend-shift-comes-in-october.html)

We are getting close to this END DATE.... and our cyclical model indicated going in to Monday that the markets was slightly oversold, but the key for the next two weeks becomes how much further we can move up before the market finally puts in medium-term top........ We look at Fridays number as as a potential "game breaker" - but as always... it's not a science but more of guess.

STRATEGY:

We remain light in risk and we will be looking to increase negative play as Non.farm is out........for now... the momentum rules..

Safe trading,

Steen Jakobsen

1 kommentarer:

__ sagde ...

Todays investment meeting was short, but productive:

We ended up chasing the end consumer of all the "good" and goods that this fiscal stimulus has and will produce.

It is all well and good to analyse things getting better - it's even correct, from the stand-point of corporate earnings, but.... who is this end user? Where does he/she live?

Clearly the US consumer no longer wants to be part of the game of chicken, as their "balance sheet" is in such a bad state: lower house prices, eroded pension funds, and outlook to lower real earnings & potential unemployment

The money is on China and Japan to create more domestic demand - and I am sure it will produce more final demand, but the problem being... their saving rate is 40% or more, so it takes a lot of Chinese to replace just one US consumer.

Chart China - getting bigger GDP but spend less as percentage of GDP (source: David Rosenberg, Gluskin Sheff)

(Click on chart for larger version)


Fortunately China is factor rich on people, but I doubt the local peasants, celebrating the 60th year Anniversary of PROC (http://tinyurl.com/ycorzmo) this week is too concerned about these matters, but the cheerleaders of the world keeps talking about the amazing Chinese story....but may I ask again? Who is buying their stuff.

Looking at the incoming data it is becoming clear that the velocity of improvement is at best stagnant and at worst falling - the past two weeks has not done much good on the upside, except maybe for the 20K better jobless claims last week. The worst being the renewed slow homes sales...

It is also very interesting to note that the main benchmarks of bubble/euphoria/China: Copper, Gold and Crude are all "correcting" their up-move - this could be merely a small correction inside major cycle, but being the concerned chap I'm - I got feeling market is long, very long.....all of the above assets.

Chart 2: Copper, Crude & Shanghai


Our main conclusion remains this:


  • Market trades on momentum (nothing wrong with that per se..... although it is EXTREMELY tiresome for old man like me.....)

  • It's impossible to define top in place presently (You can do all sorts of analysis, but from technical and valuation perspective it remains a two sided story)

  • We note data & commodities does not like last two weeks(see chart)

In the equity space, our resident equity guy, Mr. Carsten Høgh, claims: Nothing is cheap any longer, and that caused some tactical talks on whether stock managers would move to "defend" their positions as we enter Q4?

The fact that most of their "profit" this year has come from low quality stocks with no or small earnings - and from increases in multiples (S&P has moved from P/E of 10 to 18 today.....) would indicate some willingness to scale-down their holdings based on Carsten premise: If it's not cheap, it's close to being expensive - We have expectation that there will be move away from cyclicals and into Big Cap again (Tesco, Wal-Mart, Colgate, Coke, H&M, Diago etc.).


The overriding strong argument for buying stocks remains: cheap funding (read: liquidity), cheap US Dollar and cheap talk in Washington (Obama promises alto - but have much of the items on the G-20 can he ACTUALLY get through Congress?).....which are all good arguments, we have some idea, still, that the next two weeks will be the peak (Read old blog: http://steenjakobsen.blogspot.com/2009/09/next-big-trend-shift-comes-in-october.html)

We are getting close to this END DATE.... and our cyclical model indicated going in to Monday that the markets was slightly oversold, but the key for the next two weeks becomes how much further we can move up before the market finally puts in medium-term top........ We look at Fridays number as as a potential "game breaker" - but as always... it's not a science but more of guess.

STRATEGY:

We remain light in risk and we will be looking to increase negative play as Non.farm is out........for now... the momentum rules..

Safe trading,

Steen Jakobsen