“The
nature of the game as it is played is such that the public should realize that
the truth cannot be told by the few who know.”
Jesse
Livermore, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Up first, good news
of a sort for President Trump. US GDP increased 4.1 percent (annualised as
America likes to report its figures,) as all last quarters tariff talk and
impositions generated significant tariff front running in the economy. We’ll
have to see if its offset by lower numbers in future quarters. In his trademark
modest fashion, President Trump claimed all the success.
Below, President
Trump ends his week on a roll.
“There
is only one side of the market and it is not the bull side or the bear side,
but the right side.”
Jesse
Livermore
July 27, 2018 / 1:40 PM
Trump hails growth as one-offs and consumers boost economy
WASHINGTON,
(Reuters) - The U.S. economy grew at its fastest pace in nearly four years in
the second quarter as consumers boosted spending and farmers rushed shipments
of soybeans to China to beat retaliatory trade tariffs before they took effect in
early July.
President
Donald Trump, who ahead of Friday’s release of the gross domestic product
report had promoted the notion that second-quarter growth would be robust,
declared victory.
“We have
accomplished an economic turnaround of historic proportions,” Trump told
reporters. “These numbers are very, very sustainable.”
Gross
domestic product increased at a 4.1 percent annualised rate also as government
spending picked up, the Commerce Department said in its snapshot of
second-quarter GDP. While that was the strongest performance since the third
quarter of 2014, it was not the best since the recession ended in mid-2009.
January-March
quarter GDP growth was revised up to a 2.2 percent pace from the previously
reported 2.0 percent rate to account for updated information and methodology
improvements.
More
July 27, 2018 / 1:40 PM
Consumers, soybeans fuel U.S. second-quarter growth
WASHINGTON,
(Reuters) - The U.S. economy grew at its fastest pace in nearly four years in
the second quarter as consumers boosted spending and farmers rushed shipments
of soybeans to China to beat retaliatory trade tariffs before they took effect
in early July.
Gross domestic product
increased at a 4.1 percent annualized rate also as government spending picked
up, the Commerce Department said in its snapshot of second-quarter GDP on
Friday. That was strongest performance since the third quarter of 2014.
January-March quarter GDP
growth was revised up to a 2.2 percent pace from the previously reported 2.0
percent rate to account for new source information and methodology
improvements.
Compared to the second quarter
of 2017, the economy grew 2.8 percent. Output expanded 3.1 percent in the first
half of 2018, putting the economy on track to achieve the Trump
administration’s target of 3 percent annual growth.
A measure of domestic demand surged at a
4.3 percent rate in the second quarter. Ahead of the release, President Donald
Trump and members of his economic team had been promoting the notion that
second-quarter growth would be robust.
Earlier in the week Trump tweeted that the
United States has “the best financial numbers on the planet.” The
second-quarter increase in GDP was in line with economists’ expectations.
More
Next, more good news
for President Trump, team Trump’s trade war tactics have split Germany from
France. Of course, it’s corporations that import soybeans and other grains, and
they import on price and quality, with a close eye on their bottom line. Unless
Germany is proposing tax breaks for US soybeans over South American soybeans,
US exports of soybeans to Europe will only rise if they’re competitive. What if
Brazil drops its price?
July 28, 2018 / 1:09 AM
Higher U.S. soy imports won't harm EU farmers: German minister
BERLIN
(Reuters) - An agreement by the European Union to increase soy imports from the
United States will not harm EU farmers, German Agriculture Minister Julia
Kloeckner said in an interview published on Saturday.
European
Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker agreed to increase soy imports in a
deal reached with U.S. President Donald Trump, under which Washington will
suspend the imposition of new tariffs on the EU.
Kloeckner
told the Passauer Neue Presse newspaper she saw “no disadvantages for European
farmers of any kind” as a result of the decision because Germany and the EU
were dependent on soy imports to meet demand for animal feed.
Europe had
previously relied on soy imports from South America, but would now shift its
demand to U.S. suppliers, she told the paper.
Wednesday’s
surprise deal suspends the imposition of a proposed U.S. 25 percent levy on
auto imports, with Washington and Brussels to hold talks over tariffs on
imports of European steel and aluminum. The agreement sent shares higher as
fears of a transatlantic trade war ebbed.
In other Trump news
during the week, President Putin asks “Russia’s man” to come visit him in
Moscow later in the year or more likely in the first half of 2019.
July 27, 2018 / 4:03 PM
Putin says Trump can 'be my guest' in Moscow, White House welcomes idea
WASHINGTON/JOHANNESBURG
(Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday he wanted U.S.
President Donald Trump to be his guest in Moscow, an idea that the White House
welcomed despite lingering criticism over the Helsinki summit.
The Russian
leader said on a visit to South Africa for an economic conference that
“appropriate conditions” were required in both countries for another summit to
take place, an apparent reference to a political uproar in the United States
last week after the two men met.
The White
House said Trump was enthusiastic about another summit. Trump has said he wants
to improve ties between the two nuclear powers, whose relations have dipped to
a post-Cold War low in recent years.
“President
Trump looks forward to having President Putin to Washington after the first of
the year, and he is open to visiting Moscow upon receiving a formal
invitation,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in a statement
In stock market news,
Marketwatch has cracked how to predict stock market crashes. Well maybe, maybe
not. In our new central bankster rigged stock markets, wouldn’t the central
bankster just rig the signals. Plus if this really worked, would thy tell you? Is it soon to be all over for the FANGS?
How to predict the next market downturn
By Tomi Kilgore
and Katie
Marriner
Published: July 27, 2018 5:37 p.m. ET
Track the market’s key vital signs with this real-time interactive graphic
Is the market going to crash? Many financial pros will tell you that a reckoning of some kind is inevitable -- it’s just a matter of when. Predicting the when is the hard part.Trying to make sense of the market’s random walk may be a fool’s errand. Financial markets are inherently finicky beasts, after all, prone to bouts of volatility even during periods when the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.30% and S&P 500 Index SPX, -0.66% are ringing up strings of all-time highs.
To help spot warning signs during stretches like this, MarketWatch has created an interactive tool intended to be a sort of financial canary in the coal mine. The charts give investors a way to keep tabs on market vital signs intended to spot the red flags before it’s too late. You can view (and bookmark!) the full graphic here, or see each chart embedded below in this article.
More
John Hussman On FAANGs: "This Movie Has Played Out So Many Times, We've Memorized The Lines"
by Tyler
Durden Fri, 07/27/2018 - 07:48
Excerpted from John Hussman's Weekly Market Comment,...Notes on exponential revenue growth
While we’re on the subject of extrapolation and speculative valuations, it may be useful to address the primary driver of market strength in recent weeks – the FAANG group comprised of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet (renamed from Google). From a near-term perspective, this advance has many of the features of a “short-squeeze” – in particular, the advances tend to be “jump” advances on rather light volume, as sellers back away at the same time that short investors attempt to cover by chasing the stocks higher. Still, it’s the long-term perspective that’s particularly interesting here.We’ve always emphasized that stocks are a claim on the very long-term stream of cash flows that they will deliver to investors over time. When companies are growing very quickly, investors tend to look backward, and as a result, they often apply very high rates of expected growth to already mature companies. When valuations are already elevated, this practice can be disastrous, as investors discovered in the 2000-2002 collapse that followed the tech bubble.
On this subject, it’s notable that Apple’s revenue growth rate has slowed to an average rate of less than 4% annually over the past three years. As I detailed a few years ago, “Despite great near-term prospects, within a small number of years, Apple will have to maintain an extraordinarily high rate of new adoption if replacement rates wane, simply to avoid becoming a no-growth company. That’s not a criticism of Apple, it’s just a standard feature of growth companies as their market share expands.”
The tendency for growth to slow as company size increases is sometimes called the “law of large numbers.” This is excruciating for anyone who knows statistics, because the law of large numbers actually describes the tendency of the sample average to approach the population average as sample size increases. What people really mean is “logistic growth” – which is the tendency of growth to slow as the size of a system approaches its mature “carrying capacity.” For any logistic process, the growth rate slows as size increases, steadily falling in proportion to the amount of remaining capacity in the system.
Leading companies in emerging industries can experience spectacular growth rates because of the compound effect of rising market share in a growing sector. Let an emerging industry start from a tiny base, and grow at 30% annually for a decade, while a leading company moves from a 10% market share to a 50% market share. The company will enjoy a 10-year growth rate of 52.7% annually. But as companies become dominant players in mature sectors, their growth slows enormously. Let that mature industry double over a decade, while the company’s market share slips from 50% to 40%, and the 10-year growth rate of the company slows to just 4.8% annually.
Investors should, but rarely do, anticipate the enormous growth deceleration that occurs once tiny companies in emerging industries become behemoths in mature industries. You can’t just look backward and extrapolate. In the coming years, investors should expect the revenue growth of the FAANG group to deteriorate toward a nominal growth rate of less than 10%, and gradually toward 4%.
The chart below shows the general process at work, reflecting the relationship between market saturation and subsequent revenue growth. Here, the points are plotted based on revenue at each date as a percentage of 2018 trailing 12-month revenues. The vertical axis shows annual revenue growth over the subsequent 2-year period. Clearly, Apple is the furthest along in terms of saturation.
Growth rates are always a declining function of market penetration.
More
Finally, in cryptocurrency
news, most unicorns have no value. No kidding.
Up to two-thirds of Bitcoin transactions have no economic value
By
Thu., July 26, 2018
PORTLAND, ORE.—On any given day, as much as two-thirds of the transaction
activity registered on the Bitcoin network has
nothing to do with buying goods and services or trading the virtual currency.Volume figures are being influenced by a range of other factors such as so-called mixers reshuffling balances between their own accounts, mining pools disbursing coins to members, and outright scams such as spoofing and market manipulation, according to analytics provider Coinmetrics.
Read more: Bitcoin’s bubble under pressure as other cryptocurrencies go to zero
Bitcoin miners generate backlash after spiking electricity rates for cities
Bitcoin’s price was artificially inflated last year, researchers say
While the anonymity of the blockchain is one of the key founding principles of Bitcoin, the lack of transparency on the distributed ledger technology is seen by some industry participants as a hindrance to greater acceptance by both institutional and individual investors, as well as regulators.
“If this space is not a joke but serious, then people need to know more,” said Charlie Morris, who manages $300 million for London-based Newscape Capital Group, which has a small investment in Bitcoin and in Overstock.com Inc., which has been active in crypto. “You’d want to know the facts. If institutional money is going to come into Bitcoin, they’ve got to understand what they are buying.”
More
“The
sucker has always tried to get something for nothing, and the appeal in all
booms is always frankly to the gambling instinct aroused by cupidity and
spurred by a pervasive prosperity. People who look for easy money invariably
pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this
sordid earth.”
Jesse
Livermore, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished June.
DJIA: 24,271 +221 Down. NASDAQ:
7,610 +267 Down. SP500: 2,718 +169 Down.
All
three slow indicators moved down in March and April and May and continued down
in June. For some a new bear signal, for others a take profits and get back to
cash signal.
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