This is the way things are,
and the Game has been so successful that, like everything, it will get more and
more successful until it stops being successful.
George Goodman, aka Adam Smith, The Money
Game. 1968.
With North Korean
developments well covered by mainstream media, we will pass on covering the
unfolding development, but obviously the world is a far safer place the fewer nations
that have nuclear weapons, and a safer place if they are held by stable,
responsible states.
With crude oil prices
firmly trading in the 70s, and metal prices soaring due to botched Russia
sanctions among other reasons, bond vigilantes are slowly returning, pushing up
yields in anticipation of a coming rise in the USA’s inflation figures. While
the interest rate rise is still only very modest by historic standards, its enough
in year 2018 to unsettle Uncle Scam’s stock markets. It’s very definitely not
2017 anymore, as evidenced by the hammering taking place in technology stocks.
Once the whole world’s favourites that could do no wrong, they are rapidly
becoming the sector that can do no right.
Below, yet another
stock market wobble as “sell in May, go away,” approaches. “Don’t return until
after Labor Day,” goes the rest of the Wall Street maxim, which looks pretty good
advice in 2018’s volatile, increasing uncertainty. Sentiment in 2018 has
changed.
Most accountants are honorable
men, trying to do a job. But they are hired by corporations, not by investors.
George
Goodman, aka Adam Smith, The Money Game. But What Do The
Numbers Mean?
Stocks end lower but eke out weekly gains
Published: Apr 20, 2018 4:43 p.m. ET
U.S. stocks extended losses in late trade to end lower on Friday, as
weakness in technology and consumer staples shares offset the latest batch of
corporate earnings, which largely continued to beat expectations.The selling pressure intensified as the yield on the 10-year Treasury note hit a more-than-four-year high. The main benchmarks still posted modest weekly gains, however.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.82% fell 201.95 points, or 0.8%, to 24,462.94 but ended the week 0.4% higher.
The S&P 500 SPX, -0.85% declined 22.99 points, or 0.9%, to 2,670.14 with ten of the 11 main indexes ending with losses. Consumer staples and technology sector were hit the most, falling 1.7% and 1.5%, respectively. The benchmark index still posted 0.4% gain over the week, however.
The Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, -1.27% dropped 91.93 points to 7,146.13, a decline of 1.3%. Over the week, the tech-heavy index rose 0.5%.
While earnings were the primary driver of sentiment earlier in the week, investors lately grew concerned about a jump in bond yields that reflect rising inflation expectations.
The 10- year Treasury note yield TMUBMUSD10Y, +1.67% rose 4.4 basis points to 2.956% on Friday, the highest since January 2014.
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Stock-market investors brace for months of political uncertainty as midterms approach
Published: Apr 20, 2018 4:27 p.m. ET
Investors should brace for even more political uncertainty as the November
midterm elections approach, say analysts at Goldman Sachs.The last several months have already seen markets driven in both directions by trade and tax policy, geopolitical tensions, and developments surrounding Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into whether Trump campaign officials colluded with Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
While there are plenty of fundamental issues that stocks have also traded on—including corporate profits and economic data—politics could become a more potent factor as the elections approach.
Goldman Sachs analysts on Friday wrote that the November midterms represented “yet another source of policy risk and volatility” for stocks, saying they were “one reason to expect that current elevated levels of uncertainty will persist in coming months.”
Volatility was atypically low in 2017, but returned in dramatic fashion earlier this year. Currently, the Cboe Volatility Index VIX, +5.76% is at 16.49. While this is below its long-term average near 20, it is up 50% so far this year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.82% is down 1% year-to-date while the S&P 500 SPX, -0.85% is off 0.1%. The Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, -1.27% remains up 3.8% for the year.
According to Goldman’s data, equity markets have averaged 15% volatility over the past 11 midterm years, compared with the median of 12% in all years. Uncertainty related to economic policy sees similar spikes in midterm years.
Based on recent polling, Democrats are expected to regain control of the House of Representatives, though Republicans are seen as having a good chance of maintaining a majority (albeit a slim one) in the Senate. Goldman, citing prediction markets, sees Democrats with a roughly 70% chance of retaking the House, but a less than 40% chance of regaining a majority in the Senate.
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This Isn’t the Earnings Season Stock Bulls Wanted
By Lu Wang and Elena PopinaWhile benchmark indexes eked out another week of gains, below the surface, frustration was the rule. Reactions to earnings results are muted -- the average stock is flat the day after reporting. Megacap tech companies are soaring, but makers of semiconductors and household goods have stumbled.
It’s not that companies aren’t beating estimates. Most are, by the widest margins in years. It’s that the market has been slow to reward them -- and quick to punish those that fall short.
“As we get further
into the bull market cycle, U.S. companies have to try harder and harder to
make investors happy, and that’s tough,” said Frank Ingarra, the head trader at
NorthCoast Asset Management LLC. “Investors set their bars really high.”
Earnings
season was supposed to clear the decks, be a respite from concerns that drove
stocks down in February and March. But now investors are noticing interest
rates again, with the 10-year Treasury yield again approaching 3 percent.
Surging prices in metals are reviving inflation anxiety.
----The lackluster
returns can’t help but buttress concern that much of the good news about tax
cuts and economic growth is already reflected in stock prices. Heading into
this earnings season, strategists from Goldman Sachs and Leuthold Group had warned that
counting on a big lift from earnings might not be realistic. At 17 times
forecast profit, the S&P 500 trades at a valuation that’s about 10 percent
higher than the 10-year average.
More
In EUSSR news, the EU
suspects that there might there be tax fraud taking place in Greece, involving
China and Italy? Wherever would they get such an outrageous idea? Brexit now!
April 20, 2018 / 6:01 PM
EU suspects tax fraud at China's new gateway to Europe
MADRID/ATHENS
(Reuters) - European Union and Italian authorities are investigating suspected
wide-scale tax fraud by Chinese criminal gangs importing goods via Greece’s
largest port of Piraeus, a trade gateway between China and Europe, officials
said.
“The VAT is
completely evaded, with enormous damage to the national tax authorities and to
the community,” Fabio Botto, of the Italian Central Anti-fraud Office’s special
investigative unit, said in an interview.
He said the
suspected scam at Piraeus, part of China’s vast Belt and Road infrastructure
project, had cost Italy tens of millions of euros in unpaid value-added taxes
(VAT), though the total could be far higher as the investigation was not over.
The European
Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) confirmed it was working with Italy on the
investigation but declined to give details, citing confidentiality.
Botto said
his agency had evidence that Chinese-owned firms run by the criminal groups
were fraudulently avoiding import duties and VAT on large shipments of goods
through Piraeus.
The groups
import goods, often counterfeit clothing and footwear, and massively understate
their value to EU customs to avoid import duties, he said. They also lie about
the firms that receive the goods, enabling them to avoid VAT.
Greece’s
Financial Crime Unit is conducting a separate investigation into a suspected tax
fraud case involving Chinese goods imported via Pireaus. The Greek unit has had
little contact with Italian and EU authorities and has not been informed about
the wider investigation, an official there said.
China’s state-owned COSCO Shipping (601919.SS)
(1919.HK)
has majority-owned Piraeus since 2016. China wants to transform the port into its “gateway to Europe” under the $126 billion Belt and Road initiative, which envisions a new “Silk Road” of land and sea routes with trading partners.
Botto and the Greek official said neither investigation had evidence of any wrongdoing by Piraeus port authorities. COSCO owns a majority stake in the Piraeus Port Authority (PPA) (OLPr.AT), which manages one container terminal, and a wholly-owned COSCO subsidiary owns and manages two other terminals.
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Finally motoring,
something too good not to share.
Who invented traffic lights and where were the first ones situated?
THE FIRST traffic signal was invented
by J P Knight, a railway signalling engineer. It was installed outside the
Houses of Parliament in 1868 and looked like any railway signal of the time,
with waving semaphore arms and red-green lamps, operated by gas, for night use.
Unfortunately it exploded, killing a policeman. The accident discouraged
further development until the era of the internal combustion engine. Modern
traffic lights are an American invention. Red-green systems were installed in
Cleveland in 1914.
---- Three-colour
signals, operated manually from a tower in the middle of the street, were
installed in New York in 1918. The first lights of this type to appear in
Britain were in London, on the junction between St James's Street and
Piccadilly, in 1925. They were operated manually by policemen using switches.
Automatic signals, working on a time interval, were installed in Wolverhampton,
in 1926. The first vehicle-actuated signals in Britain occurred on the junction
between Gracechurch Street and Cornhill on the City, in 1932. By some strange
quirk, these were also destroyed by a gas explosion
More
A Brief History of the Stoplight
How a bright idea shaped our cities and gave the go-ahead to our love affair with the car
Driving home from a dinner party on a March night in 1913, the oil magnate George Harbaugh turned on to Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue. It was one of the city’s busiest streets, jammed with automobiles, horse-drawn carriages, bicyclists, trolleys and pedestrians, all believing they had the right of way. Harbaugh did not see the streetcar until it smashed into his roadster. “It is remarkable,” the local newspaper reported, “that the passengers escaped with their lives.”
Many others wouldn’t. More
than 4,000 people died in car crashes in the United States in 1913, the same
year that Model T’s started to roll off Henry Ford’s assembly line. The
nation’s roads weren’t built for vehicles that could speed along at 40 miles an
hour, and when those unforgiving machines met at a crowded intersection, there
was confusion and, often, collision. Though police officers stood in the center
of many of the most dangerous crossroads blowing whistles and waving their
arms, few drivers paid attention.
A Cleveland engineer named
James Hoge had a solution for all this chaos. Borrowing the red and green
signals long used by railroads, and tapping into the electricity that ran
through the trolley lines, Hoge created the first “municipal traffic control
system.” Patented 100 years ago, Hoge’s invention was the forerunner of a
ubiquitous and uncelebrated device that has shaped American cities and daily
life ever since-—the stoplight.
Hoge’s light made its debut on
Euclid Avenue at 105th Street in Cleveland in 1914 (before the patent was
issued). Drivers approaching the intersection now saw two lights suspended
above it. A policeman sitting in a booth on the sidewalk controlled the signals
with a flip of a switch. “The public is pleased with its operation, as it makes
for greater safety, speeds up traffic, and largely controls pedestrians in
their movements across the street,” the city’s public safety director wrote
after a year of operation.
Others were already
experimenting with and improving upon Hoge’s concept, until various inventors
had refined the design to the one that controls traffic and raises blood
pressure today. We have
William Potts, a Detroit police officer who had studied electrical engineering, to thank for the yellow light, but as a municipal employee he could not patent his invention.
William Potts, a Detroit police officer who had studied electrical engineering, to thank for the yellow light, but as a municipal employee he could not patent his invention.
By 1930, all major American
cities and many small towns had at least one electric traffic signal, and the
innovation was spreading around the world. The simple device tamed the streets;
motor vehicle fatality rates in the United States fell by more than 50 percent
between 1914 and 1930. And the technology became a symbol of progress. To be a
“one stoplight town” was an embarrassment. “Because of the potent power of
suggestion, [or] a delusion of grandeur, almost every crossroad hamlet,
village, and town installed it where it was neither ornate nor useful,” the
Ohio Department of Highways grumbled.
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28 January 1896: The world’s first speeding ticket
Ben Judge
28/01/2015
We hear much these days, in
some of our more deranged newspapers, of the “War on the Motorist”, of how the
police, government, local councils and the like are concerned only with making
as much money as possible from the poor, put-upon drivers of England, via
parking charges, traffic calming measures, and most heinously of all, the hated
speed cameras.
All this whingeing can be
traced back to an event that took place on this day 119 years ago – when the
world’s first speeding ticket was issued to a motorist.
A reckless tearaway by the
name of Walter Arnold was spotted by a constable hurtling through the streets
of Paddock Wood, Kent, at four times the legal speed limit.
The limit at the time was
2mph. You could have walked faster. But in early 1896, the law said you could
only go 2mph, and you had to have a chap walking in front waving a red flag to
alert the nervous of your approach. But the crazed boy racer sped through the
town at 8mph, with no flag-bearer sprinting in front
The astonished police
constable mounted his pushbike and a five-mile chase ensued (presumably,
bicycles were slower too). Arnold was caught and sent before the beak, where he
was fined a shilling.
Mr Arnold may not have been
too unhappy with the publicity his case generated, however. He was one of the
country’s first car dealers, selling imported Benz cars from Germany. And
between 1896 and 1899 his company made its own cars, the ‘Arnold Motor
Carriage’, based on the Benz.
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NOT even a decade ago,
everybody believed. Events did seem under control. Inflation would creep, not
gallop; the New Economics would fine-tune the economy; productivity would
increase; wars would be fought, but not by us—we were the mediators,
understanding but tough; problems would be articulated, and that articulation
was half the solution; we would begin upon the solutions. Kennedy rhetoric: let
us begin; let the word go forth; let us never negotiate from fear, nor fear to
negotiate; let anybody call upon us. Confident, ambitious, optimistic, even
naïve—the very best of the American tradition. Hail Columbia, happy land.
Then, one thing and another,
the John Philip Sousa music faded a bit. Could rational men make events behave
rationally? Maybe they couldn’t.
George Goodman, aka Adam Smith, Supermoney, 1972.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished March.
DJIA: 24,103 +272 Down
10. NASDAQ: 7,063 +300 Down 13.
SP500: 2,641
+202 Down 10.
All
three slow indicators moved down. For some a new bear signal, for others a take
profits and get back to cash signal.
DJIA. Buy:
29/7/16 - 18,432. Sell: 29/3/18 –
24,103.
SP500. Buy: 29/7/16 –
2,174. Sell: 29/3/18 – 2,641.
NASDAQ. Buy: 29/7/16 –
5,762. Sell: 29/3/18 – 7,063.
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