Happy Times Are Here Again: Consumer Confidence Roars to Dot Com Era Levels

What does it all mean? How can consumer confidence register an astounding 125.6 reading when retail is in the pits? If people are confident, then what the fuck are they buying and where?

Aside from $AMZN, the only online destination that I hear people talking about is $W. I used to buy stuff from $OSTK and was always pleased with their service. Truth be told, I like to see things in person these days and do most of my shopping locally.

I think the consumer confidence numbers are indicative of an enthusiasm that had swept the country for the first time in nearly 20 years. Americans like nationalism. All true Americans love hearing about our greatness, even if it isn’t true.

Who doesn’t love a fairy tale? Beauty and the Beast is #1 in the box office for the past two weeks, bullish for $RGC.

“Consumer confidence increased sharply in March to its highest level since December 2000 (Index, 128.6),” said Lynn Franco, Director of Economic Indicators at The Conference Board. Consumers’ assessment of current business and labor market conditions improved considerably. Consumers’ also expressed much greater optimism regarding the short-term outlook for business, jobs and personal income prospects. Thus, consumers feel current economic conditions have improved over the recent period, and their renewed optimism suggests the possibility of some upside to the prospects for economic growth in the coming months.”

Chart stolen from Zerohedge

The whole premise behind so called ‘Trumpflation’ was inflation by way of robust economic growth via infrastructure spending and tax reform. Healthcare bill failure aside, the market has been pricing in doubt for the past 3 months, accelerated the past 4 weeks.

While the Federal Reserve has been menacing markets will promised of unnecessary rate hikes, the market says otherwise and has been bidding up bond prices, while tanking the dollar and crude.

This could mean one of two things.

1. Growth is slowing. We’re barreling towards recession and the Trump trade is dead.

2. Markets are merely digesting gains, feigning weakness, fueled by democratic hissy fits and Russian hysteria theories concocted by incompetents.

I’m betting on the latter — but will keep a watchful eye on those three charts. Nothing is more important now.

This is an aggressive call by the Morgan Stanley analyst, upgrading a sector that has been a deathknell to investors for nearly a decade. As someone who has invested in this sector for years and on several occasions made a small fortune, I can tell you that this upgrade is notable. The core issues with the shippers are growth in China and oversupply of available tonnage.

I once had a CEO of a major shipper tell me in a conference call that if I didn’t like China I shouldn’t invest in his company.

SB +13.8% (upgraded to Overweight from Equal-Weight at Morgan Stanley)
SBLK +8.4% (upgraded to Overweight from Underweight at Morgan Stanley)
GOGL +6.5% (upgraded to Overweight from Underweight at Morgan Stanley)

Here are some quick notes, courtesy of StreetInsider.

$SBLK
Market gradually improving driven by rising commodity prices, solid Chinese demand and muted fleet supply.

High operating and financial leverage provide meaningful upside upon anticipated 2018 recovery.

One of the largest companies in the dry bulk sector make it the preferred trading vehicle among investors.

Strong liquidity position and low cost structure allows it to further expand its fleet

$GNK
Low financial leverage with restructured debt and no fixed debt repayments until mid-2018.

Diverse fleet of dry bulk vessels spans all major vessel classes.

Dry bulk rates move above breakeven levels and GNK turns profitable.

$SB
Market gradually improving driven by rising commodity prices, solid Chinese demand and muted fleet supply.

High operating and financial leverage provide meaningful upside upon anticipated 2018 recovery.

Lowest cost breakeven in the sector, allows SB to be the first company to be in position to re-introduce a dividend.

Modern and high quality fleet of Japanese-built vessels provide significant operating advantage

According to Exodus, the following shippers are up more than 20% for the year.

And we segmented the tankers away from the shippers, thanks to an insightful member. Here are the top performing tankers.

Congratulations democrats! This is the moment in your life when you come to realize you’ve become one and the same as everything you’ve always hated about humanity. You and Dick Cheney, professional neocon war monger, are in agreement that Russia waged war against America this past election, by way of hacking into John Podesta’s email box and then providing that information to Wikileaks to publish and help humiliate an already beleaguered democratic party.

Bear in mind, the black hats in the CIA have yet to actually prove to the American people an actual connection between Wikileaks and the Russian government. The only evidence they’ve publicly provided us with is laughable circumstantial evidence — backed up and supported by a sundry of unnamed sources deep from within our intelligence apparatus. But we should strongly consider going to war with a super nuclear power — because strategically — that’s the best way to end this charade of humanity once and for all.

But here’s Dick Cheney, the man who started it all — war in the middle east — which has cost the lives of at least 1.3 million people (some estimate the total deathtoll could be as high as 4 million since the wars began after 9/11). Total treasury expenditure from the American pleb is in excess of $5 trillion — but it’s probably more. Some might say Dick Cheney is the single worst human to walk the face of the earth since Pol Pot.

Nevertheless, he’s in agreement that Russian’s actions against our ‘democratic process’, one that was overtly rigged against Bernie Sanders, proven in the Wikileaks, was ian act of war. Fall in line little ducks, poor fat little ducks, and sign up your kids to fight in the coming Moscow offensive —  to defend the honor of John “Pizza map” Podesta.

Everyone loves a good story, especially a tragic one. The “yes we can” attitude of both republicans and democrats to give Obamacare failure another chance has become a reality. The foreboding easterly winds are howling again and the market loves them.

“That’s fucking crazy”, ponders the gentleman clothed in a top hat and monocle reading this article right now.

“Precisely.”

We’re living in an era of bailouts, a livid time and place when only small people get to fail and be reduced to rubble, whereas the big and systematic businesses and organizations plod along — succored — by taxpayers money. Obamacare will get bailed out, because that’s what we do. Our integrity was traded away a long time ago, replaced with a subservience to faux free markets, Ronald Reagan, and anything or anyone who opposed Nazis.

Subsequently, as expected, healthcare stocks raged higher today — leading the overall market from the black abyss towards sea level. Some might call today’s 60 plus point turnaround in the Nasdaq ‘miraculous’, but readers here know it was nothing but a day’s light work for riggers who rig.

$HCA, $UHS and $SEM led hospital care higher, while about two dozen biotechs up more than 5% led the drugs towards elysian.

Healthcare information systems spiked too. More patients, more paperwork. $MDRX, $CPSI and $CERN impressed to the upside.

Both gold and silver led everything higher, leaving only commodities lower — which is a temporary condition that will be corrected during tomorrow’s ‘turn around Tuesday’ trade. As an example, $CLF reversed all of its losses and will be closing higher — like a nice, well mannered, stock.

I expect markets will move higher tomorrow, through the rest of the week. If I wasn’t already 100% invested in $WLK, I’d buy $X, $TECK and other commodity plays now.

The energetic enthusiasm that enthralled the masses to go long infrastructure stocks like $CLF, $X and $CAT has faded like a bright star being eclipsed by the rising sun. Weak traders are getting blown out of these stocks, pressing most oil stocks into bear market territory for the year.

As a point in fact, commodity related stocks are materially lower for 2017, something often ignored by the incompetents at CNBC.

Here’s my custom commodity index inside Exodus, buoyed only by the precious metal stocks in it.

Here’s the most popular commodity ETF, $DBC, sharply lower into 2017.

The interesting thing about all of this commodity weakness is that it’s happening as the dollar gets slammed. This is not a traditional correlation, lending to the idea that the stocks have overextended to the downside and are overdue a reversion to the upside.

You cannot have a true market scare without the banks heading lower. To start the morning, banks are stealing the show, thanks to outsized losses in a sundry of popular bank stocks. Most people are simply baffled by it. But I know precisely why they’re heading lower.

It’s the yield curve stupid. The 10-2 year treasury spread has shrunk from 135bps to 111 in the past few weeks. That trend is starting to worry investors that the great margins they were to enjoy under Trump are about to dissipate and vanish from the field of play.

Banksters have been drinking a lot as of late, celebrating a purported feckless regulations under Trump. A new era of trading greatness was supposed to commence with the revocation of Dodd-Frank. But that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon, does it? One truly gets to realize, in this anti establishment administration, the office of the Presidency is powerless against permanent government and an activist judiciary. If Trump goes along with their agenda, he’ll appear to get stuff done. If he wants to pursue his agenda, they’ll fight him tooth and nail.

Permanent government doesn’t want to ease up on the great extortion racket they have going with the banks just yet. As is the case with Fannie Mae and all of the fines they’ve extracted from Wall Street over the past 8 years, the government has profited handsomely by keeping the banks hostage and are very likely to continue doing so, in spite of what Trump wants.

Note the potential downside in bank ETF $XLF to where it was on election night.

Most of the post election dollar madness has been revoked. It makes perfect sense, actually. Trump want to spend money like a drunken sailor. To do that, he’ll need to borrow money. Hence, the perception is for easy monetary policy, in spite of what the Fed is saying.

Plus, there’s a lot of moving parts with European QE, perhaps coming to an end or maybe even a rate hike just around the bend. The dollar index now sports at 98 handle. Look for it to trade down to Trump election night scare lows at 96.

Over a longer time frame, you can clearly see the affect European QE has had on the dollar — pushing it higher on a continuous basis.

There’s a lot of potential downside to the dollar should policy start to go the other way.

Bullish for gold.

I learned a hard lesson when I waited for and invested in $SHAK upon coming public. If you recall, I had bought into $HABT first, bullish on the prospects for hamburger stocks. Truth is, their IPOs were just too damned high and the stock prices were doomed from the get go — just like $SNAP. I take nothing away from short term traders playing it for a post IPO run. But eventually, like all overpriced IPOs, it’ll die.

All of Wall Street started coverage on the social media giant today. Here is the quick rundown.

Outperform, tgt $26, Cowen
Outperform, Blair
Buy, tgt $27, Goldman
Overweight, tgt $28, Morgan Stanley
Neutral, tgt $25, BofA/Merrill
Neutral, tgt $24, JP Morgan
Neutral, tgt 24, UBS
Perform, Oppy
Sell, tgt $17, Summit Redstone
Mkt Outperform, tgt $28, JMP
Outperform, tgt $30, Credit Suisse
Hold, tgt $24, Stifel
Outperform, tgt $31, RBC
Buy, tgt $27, Citi
Buy, tgt $30, Jefferies

Snap’s underwriters were Morgan Stanley, Goldman, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Barclay’s, Allen and co.

Co managers include BTIG, Citi, Cowen, Evercore, Jefferies, JMP, Liontree Advisors, Oppy, RBC, Stifel, Suntrust, Williams Capital, Blair.

Mike Cernovich is a popular e-celeb on Twitter — keeping his handle replete with news and information regarding Trump, his agenda, and world events. He’s a major fucking pain in the ass for leftards who shill around all day displaying emotional instability — broken people unable to deal with actual truths and instead live in a fantasyland where unicorns horn them in the ass all day long, at their behest.

The segment that 60 minutes was doing during their ‘discussion’ with Cernovich covered FAKE NEWS — attempting to label him as such due to his belief that Hillary ‘God Damn’ Clinton secretly suffers from Parkinson’s.

Here’s the money exchange.

.@Cernovich rebuffs @60Minutes ambush attempt, reducing shill to stuttering. pic.twitter.com/LrmtBqJVQ1

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) March 27, 2017

Mike periscoped the airing of the segment, live on his periscope account, which was later uploaded to Youtube.

This whole ordeal was rather embarrassing for 60 minutes, further demonstrating, even by their own attestation, that their reach is infinitesimal compared to his Twitter account.

When @60Minutes Admits @Cernovich Gets Way More Twitter Impressions Than They Do! Heck! Even I Get More Than #60Minutes ?? pic.twitter.com/FfEsYAbtBI

— Immigrants?4?Trump (@immigrant4trump) March 27, 2017

And then they tried to posit some cock-eyed theory that Mike was getting impressions using bots, or at least insinuating such — only to get BTFO shortly thereafter.

#60Minutes @CBS reporting on fake news outlets using fake bots to circulate #fakenews ?Twitter audit proves @Cernovich has legit following pic.twitter.com/CE8Tofnnob

— No One (@tweettruth2me) March 27, 2017

#60Minutes claimed @Cernovich uses fake acct bots to get impressions but… pic.twitter.com/xCSXyf6BHc

— Jack Posobiec ?? (@JackPosobiec) March 27, 2017