Baltic Dry Index. 1582 +16 Brent Crude 57.34
When
calling market tops or bottoms, give them a price or a date never both.
Wall
Street adage.
Breaking with Wall
Street tradition today this old dinosaur market watcher/trader thinks we’re at
a top in the Dow 23,000s and we’re at that top virtually now. Buy the rumour sell the fact, goes another
well tried Wall Street adage, and I think any US tax cuts are already fully
priced in. Happily for all, unlike the late Joe Granville, no one pays the
slightest attention to my calls.
Below, bubble on like
it’s 1987 and 2007, but on steroids. I think the Fed “punch drunk” party going
computers are now ignoring too much going wrong in the real world.
We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible
at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
October 20, 2017 / 2:14 AM /
Updated 2 hours ago
Asian shares perk up after U.S. Senate passes budget plan
TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian shares shrugged off early sluggishness and
gained on Friday, and the dollar rose after the U.S. Senate approved a budget
blueprint for the 2018 fiscal year that will pave the way for Republicans to
pursue a tax-cut package without Democratic support.
By a 51-to-49 vote, the Republican-controlled Senate voted for the
budget measure late on Thursday, which would add up to $1.5 trillion to the
federal deficit over the next decade in order to pay for proposed tax cuts.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan
.MIAPJ0000PUS, which scaled a 10-year peak on Tuesday, was up 0.3 percent, but
still down slightly for the week.
U.S. stock futures SPc1 were up 0.4 percent, and the benchmark 10-year
Treasury yield US10YT=RR rose to 2.346 percent from its U.S. close of 2.321
percent on Thursday.
Shares in New Zealand .NZ50 were flat after 13 gaining sessions, after the nationalist New Zealand First Party agreed to form a new government with the center-left Labour Party following weeks of political negotiations, ending the center-right National Party's decade in power.
The New Zealand dollar NZD=D4 skidded 0.7 percent to $0.6980 after a 1.7 percent fall on Thursday, its largest daily fall since June 2016.
Japan's Nikkei .N225 erased its earlier losses and inched 0.1 percent higher, on track for a robust weekly gain of 1.5 percent. The Nikkei logged its 13th winning session on Thursday, its longest such streak since 1988. A 14th gaining day would give it its longest string of rises since 1961.
U.S. stocks were almost flat on Thursday, with Apple Inc (AAPL.O)
falling 2.4 percent on signs of weak demand for the iPhone 8 that caused
analysts and investors to question the company’s staggered release strategy for
its latest phones. [.N]
More
Three money managers who lived through the 1987 stock-market crash warn of danger today
Published: Oct 19, 2017 3:18 p.m. ET
When the stock market crashed on Oct. 19, 1987, investors panicked. It was
an unfamiliar event — the previous decline of a similar magnitude occurred 58
years earlier, in 1929. Now, 30 years after Black Monday in 1987, there are professional investors still at work who lived through that fateful day. In interviews, three of them talked about their experiences, offered insights into warning signs and gave advice on how to handle major downturns.
They are:
• Lewis Altfest, president of Altfest Personal Wealth Management, which manages about $1.3 billion for private clients. Altfest founded the firm in 1983 after working as a general partner and director of research at Lord, Abbett & Co.
• Brian McMahon, chief investment officer of Thornburg Investment Management, co-manages the $2.5 billion Thornburg Global Opportunities Fund THOAX, -0.69% and the $16.1 billion Thornburg Investment Income Builder Fund TIBAX, +0.00% In October 1987, McMahon was managing Thornburg’s laddered maturity bond portfolios.
• Lawrence Haverty, associate portfolio manager of the $231 million Gabelli Multi-Media Trust GGT, -0.64% In October 1987, Haverty co-managed the Putnam Growth Fund and the Putnam Convertible Fund, which had combined assets of about $2 billion.
More
Why Does the Stock Market Keep Going Up?
A great mystery of our time
Two things have been true so far in 2017: The news cycle keeps spiraling
downward, and the stock market keeps going up.Consider a brief review of the year’s chaos. In domestic news, Washington’s legislative machine is even more broken than normal, and President Donald Trump—tweeting furiously, while under investigation for possible collusion and obstruction—has oscillated between sympathy for white nationalists and recklessness toward North Korea. A series of historic natural disasters have ravaged Houston, Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and northern California. Abroad, the U.K. is sleepwalking toward divorce with Europe, a crisis with a Middle East ally is brewing, and a missile flew over Japan.
But what observable effect has this cavalcade of chaos had on the stock market? None, really. The S&P 500 is in the middle of one of the strongest bull runs since World War II. The Dow passed 23,000 this week for the first time ever. “I cannot for the life of me understand why the market keeps going up,” Michael
So, what’s going on? Here are
three theories.
More
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/10/why-does-the-stock-market-keep-going-up/543249/
In
other ignored news in our latest bubbles, Japan’s latest corporate scandal now
goes back two decades. Spain sets out to wreck the dying EUSSR.
October 20, 2017 / 4:32 AM /
Updated an hour ago
Nissan's inappropriate inspections started at least 20 years ago - NHK
TOKYO (Reuters) - Inappropriate inspection
practices at Nissan Motor Co (7201.T) had been going for at least 20 years,
Japanese national broadcaster NHK reported on Friday, in a new revelation that
could further roil Japan’s second-biggest automaker.
Nissan said late on Thursday it was suspending domestic production of
vehicles for the Japanese market for at least two weeks to address misconduct
in its final inspection procedures, which it first revealed last month. The
scandal has led to a recall of all 1.2 million cars it sold in Japan over the
past three years.
A Nissan spokesman declined to directly confirm or deny the NHK report,
referring to CEO Hiroto Saikawa’s comments on Thursday, when he said Nissan’s
training system for certifying vehicle inspection staff had not changed for 20
years.
Saikawa added that that was a separate issue from how long the
misconduct had been going on.
October 20, 2017 / 5:34 AM /
Updated an hour ago
Kobe Steel data fabrication continued after misconduct discovered - Nikkei
TOKYO (Reuters) - Data fabrication at Kobe Steel Ltd (5406.T) continued at its aluminium and steel unit after an internal investigation discovered the misconduct, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Friday.
Japan’s No.3 steelmaker will hold a news conference on
Friday afternoon to announce details of its misconduct, Nikkei said, without
citing sources.
A Kobe Steel spokesman said the company is checking on the
Nikkei report and that the company may hold a news conference later on Friday.
On Thursday, several Japanese automakers announced there are
no safety problems with aluminium parts from Kobe Steel.
Checks are continuing at hundreds of companies involved in
complex supply chains spanning the globe.
Abe's Coalition May Lose Two-Thirds Majority, Poll Shows
By Andy SharpThe most likely scenario is the Liberal Democratic Party-Komeito bloc picking up 297 seats, shy of the 310 need for the so-called super-majority. The opposition populists Party of Hope and the Japan Innovation Party will likely get 65, while left-leaning parties led by the new Constitutional Democratic Party are set to win 73.
More
October 19, 2017 / 9:31 AM /
Updated 9 hours ago
Spain to suspend Catalonia's autonomy in response to independence threat
MADRID/BARCELONA (Reuters) -
Spain’s central government said on Thursday it would suspend Catalonia’s
autonomy and impose direct rule after the region’s leader threatened to go
ahead with a formal declaration of independence if Madrid refused to hold
talks.
In an act unprecedented since Spain returned to democracy in the late
1970s, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said he would hold a special cabinet
meeting on Saturday that could trigger the move. The Socialist opposition said
it backed the government but suggested the measures should be limited in scope
and time.
Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, ignoring a 10 a.m. deadline to drop
his secession campaign, wrote a letter to Rajoy threatening a formal
declaration of independence.
The war of words increased uncertainty over a standoff that has raised
fears of social unrest, cut growth prospects for the euro zone’s fourth-largest
economy and rattled the euro.
“If the government continues to impede dialogue and continues with the
repression, the Catalan parliament could proceed, if it is considered
opportune, to vote on a formal declaration of independence,” Puigdemont said.
Catalonia, which has a distinctive culture and language, triggered
Spain’s biggest political crisis for decades with a secession bid it put to a
referendum on Oct 1. Only 43 percent of voters participated but those who did
voted overwhelmingly to secede, while opponents of secession mostly stayed
home.
----Rajoy plans to invoke Article 155 of the 1978 constitution, which allows taking control of a region if it breaks the law.
A senior government source said the exact measures would be agreed on
Saturday and probably voted through the upper house Senate on Oct. 30, giving
the secessionists a few days of leeway to respond before Madrid takes control.
The regional authorities could use that time to split unilaterally, call
elections in the hope of strengthening their mandate, or back down, although
this is seen as highly unlikely.
More
Catalan Separatists Ask Supporters to Pull Money From Banks
By Esteban DuarteIn a video posted on twitter Thursday night, the Assembly asked Catalans to withdraw money from the top five banks, highlighting CaixaBank and Sabadell to protest at their decision to move their legal domiciles out of the region.
“If you are a client of Banco Sabadell or La Caixa express your disagreement with the shift of their domiciles outside of Catalonia,” the video said. It had been retweeted or liked more than 7,000 times by 00:15 a.m. Friday.
CaixaBank and Sabadell led a corporate exodus this month as executives looked to shield their businesses from the turmoil of a possible declaration of independence from Spain.
Why did I take up stealing? To live better, to own things I couldn't afford, to acquire this good taste that you now enjoy and which I should be very reluctant to give up.
Cary Grant. To Catch A Thief.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, are electric vehicles really the future? Is there a cobalt crisis
ahead?
The Truth About the Cobalt Crisis: It’s Not a Crisis, Yet
Cobalt supplies will not be a showstopper for electric vehicles, an expert says.
Jason
DeignOctober
18, 2017
Volkswagen’s failure to secure long-term cobalt supplies has highlighted
concerns over one of the most precarious elements in the lithium-ion battery
supply chain.There is sufficient cobalt worldwide to meet foreseeable demand for the mineral, according to Caspar Rawles, an analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. The real question “is whether we can access it quickly enough,” he said.
Volkswagen last month sought to secure a €50 billion ($59 billion) contract to supply enough cobalt for 150 gigawatt-hours of lithium-ion battery storage by 2025, which Rawles said could amount to roughly 30,000 tons of the metal a year.
“To put that into perspective, the refined material supply globally for cobalt last year was 93,000 tons,” he said. “It’s approximately a third of last year’s entire global supply. When you look at it like that, you start to think there are potentially problems going forward.”
The German carmaker failed to find a supplier that would guarantee even five years of cobalt at a fixed price, the Financial Times reported this week. But that possibly says more about market dynamics than the possibility of a supply-chain breakdown.
“Perhaps they underestimated the market,” said Rawles. “The big auto manufacturers have for years been able to put quite stringent terms [on] the material they need for traditional vehicles. But when demand is expected to grow, producers don’t want to sign those long-term deals.”
The current supply of cobalt is restricted not so much by the availability of the mineral, but by the cost of extracting and processing it, he said. Already, two major mining projects could help increase supply if the business case were strengthened by an uptick in demand.
One of them is Katanga, owned by the mining giant Glencore. The mine is currently undergoing upgrades to reduce costs, but has “the potential to become Africa’s largest copper producer and the world’s largest cobalt producer,” Glencore told Reuters in February.
Rawles estimated the mine might add 15,000 tons of cobalt a year to the market when it reopens, which could be next year.
A further 14,000 tons a year is expected to come from the first phase of the Metalkol Roan Tailings Reclamation project being developed by Eurasian Resources Group, which Rawles said is due to start production in 2019. Output from the project could ultimately top 21,000 tons a year, he said.
Both these projects are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which is already the source of 64 percent of global cobalt supplies and which is seeing mounting civil unrest over President Joseph Kabila’s delays in allowing a long-overdue general election.
Although any administration in the DRC would likely do its utmost to protect copper and cobalt mining because they account for almost 80 percent of the nation’s revenues, the country’s political situation is clearly a worry.
More
Technology Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC
energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards?
Novel Power-to-Gas Tech Begins Testing in the US
A new pilot combines hydrogen, microbes and biogas to perform energy
storage.
by Katie Fehrenbacher October 16, 2017
Last month, a team of researchers and engineers quietly installed a
first-of-its-kind energy reactor on the campus of a government lab just west of
Denver, Colorado. The device -- a 25-foot-tall, thin mass of industrial silver
pipes and tanks -- is a test of a rather unusual method to store energy using
microbes, hydrogen and clean electricity.
Similar technology is being tested in pilot projects across Europe, but
the reactor in Colorado is one of the only ones operating within the U.S. If
the process, known as “power-to-gas” by those in the industry, is able to be
deployed at a bigger scale and at a lower cost it could some day offer a
solution to store large amounts of electricity produced by wind and solar over
long periods of time.
For now, it’s a novel experiment, at least in the U.S. “It’s pretty
slick,” said Kevin Harrison, senior engineer for the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory, describing the new reactor. NREL worked on the project in tandem
with Southern California Gas Company and engineering firm Burns &
McDonnell.
The project works by taking electricity, which can come from excess wind
and solar, to power an electrolyzer that splits water to make hydrogen. The
hydrogen is then combined with carbon dioxide and fed into a reactor filled
with microbes.
On NREL’s campus, the gases are added to the bottom of the reactor, and
as they float to the top, paddles that are spinning slowly break them up. The
hardest part is breaking up the bubbles so that they’re small enough for the
bugs to eat them, explained Harrison.
The microbes, which aren’t genetically modified, wake up and start consuming
the gases at around 120 degrees Fahrenheit. After eating the gases, they spit
out methane, commonly called biogas. The team chose these microbes partly
because they can do the process over and over again. “They’re tough bugs,”
noted Harrison.
----The idea is that electricity for power-to-gas projects would come from a solar plant or a wind farm when they’re producing excess low cost energy -- during a windy night or a sunny afternoon, for example. Instead of wasting that electricity, it could be stored for weeks or even months and used at a later date in the form of hydrogen or biogas.
Other power-to-gas projects eschew the use of microbes. A demonstration project on the University of California, Irvine campus, also supported by SoCalGas, takes excess solar energy from solar panels and powers a 60-kilowatt electrolyzer to make hydrogen. The hydrogen can be piped into the existing natural gas infrastructure.
Jack Brouwer, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC-Irvine, said the demo project on the university campus suggests that power-to-gas tech can be used to provide very fast ramp rates, potentially helping out when a cloud passes over solar panels, for example.
It also suggests that storing energy as hydrogen could be cheaper than batteries on a large scale and can be used to store energy seasonally. “The energy could be produced in January and used in June,” said Brouwer. Batteries aren’t efficient enough to do that economically, he argued.
Another benefit of hydrogen is that hydrogen tanks can be moved around and used to power fuel cells to produce electricity or to power a vehicle. Projects in Europe are focused on using power-to-gas tech to couple power generation infrastructure and the transportation sector.
There are already 70 projects operating in Europe, many of them in Germany, according to the industry group the European Power to Gas Platform. Europe has an interest in hydrogen as a natural-gas substitute, as well as to balance the grid and make it more flexible, said Claire Curry, head of applied research at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
More
Another weekend and in
the EUSSR we all wait upon events in Catalonia and Spain. Both seem to ne
sleepwalking to mutual assured destruction. But will it be enough to bring the
whole EUSSR crashing down? Elsewhere politics from Japan, to New Zealand, to
the Czech Republic, are about to intrude in our over complacent markets, I think. Have a great weekend everyone.
"All safe deposit boxes in banks
or financial institutions have been sealed... and may only be opened in the
presence of an agent of the I.R.S."
President F.D. Roosevelt, 1933
Greenwich Mansion Listings Pulled to Wait for a Better Day
By Oshrat CarmielLuxury-home listings in the Connecticut town plunged 31 percent from a year earlier, according to a report Thursday by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. That’s largely because sellers who failed to get their hoped-for price quit trying to find buyers and took their properties off the market to wait for a better day.
“Inventory is declining but sales aren’t rising,” Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, said in an interview. “It’s mostly listings being pulled off the market.”
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished September
DJIA: 22,405 +223 Up. NASDAQ: 6,496 +274 Up. SP500: 2,519 +179 Up.
Hey man,
ReplyDeleteIn Asia, the share price has fallen and sold on Friday, and after the US Senate approved the budget for fiscal year 2015, the dollar has increased, which will create ways for Republicans to start tax-cutting packages without Democratic support.
New Zealand shares were flat after the 13th session. After the political debate on the weekend after the nationalist New Zealand agreed to form a new government with the central Left Front Labor Party, the government will end the decade of National Party in the center of power.I agree with this post for these news articles that took me very much....
---http://onedaytop.com/mars-study-gives-clues-origins-life/