Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
My energy bearishness has been oft-mentioned in the hallowed halls of Slope, and the way things are going, it seems like we should drag out the late 1990s terms of how the “new economy” (Netflix, Facebook, Google) is completely dwarfing the “old economy” (crude oil, gold, silver, and other assets you can actually hold in your hand).
Looking at crude’s slippery slide, one wonders if the mid-March lows will be taking out next week:
Going into 2016, the data points to a 9-11% increase in healthcare costs. Let’s not get bogged down into who will bear this cost, let’s just agree it will not be good for Employers, consumers, and State Budgets.
The GDP of the U.S. is approximately $17 trillion. Healthcare is 17% or approx $3 Trillion. This increase transfers $200 billion additional dollars out of consumers (as a tax, or employers as a cost, or States as an expenditure).
This is on top of an expected flat to 2% revenue growth expected next year. Consumers will stop spending on other things or take the tax and drop out, employers must grow $10 dollars of revenue for every dollar of the increase they will absorb, to simply keep EPS the same. At 8% of GDP for Employer portion of Health costs, that is $100 billion in new revenue. That is nearly a 6% growth in Revenue just to run in place.
I guess the whole Greek nonsense has been put on hold (again) until Saturday, just so the angst, tension, and uncertainty can persist. The situation has long passed the point of tragicomedy.
So let us turn our attention instead to crude oil, which ended its firm, steady push lower early this year. Since then, it has been sputtering into a tighter and tighter range. I am, naturally, wanting it to break lower, but there are two levels needed for that: first, the front month needs to slice below the $59.19 level, tinted below in yellow. If it can manage that, the failure of the symmetric triangle (approximately where that red circle is) would be just what the doctor ordered for the downfall to resume.
I follow four areas of the market very closely; volatility, miners, gold, and the SPY index, and everything smells of deflation. I trade on the 2 and 4 hour, but I took a step back and looked at the monthly, weekly, and daily charts and everywhere I look it smells of lack of oxygen.
The broad market has a decreasing positive slope (8% y-t-d), and why not, you cannot continue to have 10-14% (from 2014) annualized growth rates with no GDP, Income, or fixed income rates. The charade started with a relative yield trade, then a squeeze volatility trade, and now we are wrapping up the leverage the balance sheet trade. The Central Banks and politicians have done everything except the right thing, and maybe because the right thing is the hard thing.
