Singapore CPI Drops for 17th Straight Month, NEW RECORD!!!

How wonderful. I hope Jim ‘Bow’d Tie’ Rogers is enjoying the deflationary vortex he moved himself and his family into. The decadent state of Singapore just reported a record 17th consecutive month of consumer price drops, indicative of an economy under significant deflation pressures.

The record price slump is the latest sign of a sputtering economy. Gross domestic product growth was flat on an annualized basis in the first quarter compared with the previous three months, the trade ministry said earlier this month, just as the Monetary Authority of Singapore unexpectedly eased its policy stance, adopting an approach last used during the 2008 global financial crisis.

“The slump in oil prices is certainly one of the key factors for the negative inflation,” DBS Group Holdings Ltd. said in a research note before the data release. “But the slowdown in growth momentum and the impact of earlier macro-prudential measures on housing and car purchases are also having a significant impact on the headline number.”

Everything I read says “THIS IS THE WORST DISASTER SINCE 2008”, yet markets are straddling new highs. The argument for that is “well, this news is priced in. The markets are merely forecasting future growth, future inflation, future economic boom.”

Or, another theory would suggest you’re all dodo birds, ostriches with heads firmly placed in the sand, waiting around for an anvil to drop on your heads.

Look at these two guys. It’s like a piece of sandpaper talking to a face with just eyebrows. Geez.

Richard Tetherington, CIO for JP Morgan’s EM asset management horseshit, wants you to broaden your EM exposure up here, sans Philippines. Those fucking Filipinos are meddlers, I tell ya. Condescendingly, he reminds you how ‘dangerous’ it is to be bearish on EM, pointing towards the gorilla raping run Brazil just went on.

Later on in the video, he started ranting and raving about how impressed he was with Saudi Arabia’s economic diversification efforts, at which point I turned off the video–thinking he was just pulling a prank.

Farage is the UK’s version of Trump, minus the $10 billion in net worth. He doesn’t give a shit what you think. He has his beliefs and they are very pro-Britain.

“I think Obama has been the most anti-British President there’s ever been. His Grandfather grew up in the empire, in Kenya, and I suspect he has a bit of a grudge against us for that.”

–Nigel Farage

There is a ton of footage out there, echoing the same stuff. Obama is meddling and should not interfere in British affairs, etc.

Oligarchy.

Give doom a chance.

Some people believe I’ve gone mad, having transformed from 200 trades per month to a handful. My prognosis for the stock’d market for the year of 2016 is one of inexorable doom. Dare I say, markets will plunge and take a decade to recover. But before that happens, we can all revel in the absurdity that you believe to be ‘bullish’ for stocks, such as 1.5% growth, mountainous amounts of sovereign debt and financial engineering like we haven’t seen since 1929.

The NIKKEI and China are both lower by 0.60-1%.

S&P futures are down, plunging, by 0.03%.

And crude oil is lower by 1.3%.

I’ll be providing some news stories throughout the night, as I deem fit. I intend to post 100 bloggeries this week, most of which will make you laugh so hard it’ll make you depressed.

In most weekly updates you will bear witness to Le Fly bragging about his almighty Exodus, laying waste to the minions of low-leveled, low-brow’d, cocaine addled stock traders. On this occasion, you get to behold Le Fly, as he’s formally addressed in France, devour some humble’d pie.

The XLE trade that I’ve partaken in has been an unmitigated disaster. I wouldn’t declare it to be of the first magnitude, or even the second, but definitely of the third magnitude.

For the record, I was only supposed to partake in systemwide oversold signals this year. The last one being a month ago.

I am going to use this occasion to show you how the system adjusts and learns new levels from which it can potentially provide profit off from.

Notice how the tech OS score for XLE has been adjusting during this gorilla run to the upside?

The technical scores are produced by ranking acceleration/dist, price performance, relative strength, volatility and volume. In addition to that, the scores are greatly influenced by real time movements in the price of crude. The oversold/overbought status of XLE is based upon a moving average that is adjusted over time, which is why we have 3,6,12mo and historical all-time algorithms. As the price of XLE moved higher, unabated, the technical score OB threshold was raised and raised and raised some more. Eventually, the score will reach a point in which it will represent a true level to pivot off from. In the future, this score will represent an albatross for the ETF and it can be readily shorted upon seeing it.

In the meantime, crude continued to short squeeze higher. My risk is mitigated by the holding period designated to each trade of just 10 days. Here is my schedule, as posted inside of Exodus.

For the week, crude was higher by 8%. Crude stocks were higher by 8.6%. However, judging by using 35 years of seasonality data for the energy sector, I strongly believe the rally in crude is very long in the tooth.

Due to Abenomics and Japan’s QE program that includes the explicit purchase of ETFs, the Bank of Japan now owns nearly 2% of all Japanese stocks and is #2 in net holdings next to Japanese pension funds.

This is manipulation of a wanton varietal.

To critics already wary of the central bank’s outsized impact on the Japanese bond market, the BOJ’s growing influence in stocks risks distorting valuations and undermining efforts to improve corporate governance. Proponents, meanwhile, say the purchases provide a much-needed boost to investor confidence. With the Nikkei 225 down 7.7 percent this year and inflation well below official targets, a majority of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg predict the BOJ will boost its ETF buying — a move that could come as soon as Thursday.

“For those who want shares to go up at any cost, it’s absolutely fantastic that the BOJ is buying so much,” said Shingo Ide, chief equity strategist at NLI Research Institute in Tokyo. “But this is clearly distorting the sanity of the stock market.”

How does this end? Does the BOJ, eventually, own 10,15 or 20% of all Japanese stocks? Every time you take note of the NIKKEI gapping higher, just know, it’s a facade.

I’m a big Ty Cobb fan. Growing up, small Fly was a yuge baseball fanatic. In the neighborhood I grew up in, we’d play ball from dusk till dawn. I was never home, always out in the streets trying to get hit by trucks. We’d play hardball surrounded by glass, in a parking lot. It taught me to hit the ball straight; otherwise, I’d break a windshield or two.

This is one of my favorite biopics. It’s a true story, based off Al Stump’s legendary book that was written during Cobb’s final days.

Truth be told, I haven’t seen this movie since I was a kid. Sometimes the stuff you watch when young doesn’t translate very well as a mature adult. The reviews on this movie are dreadful and it was a monumental flop in theatres.

Nevertheless, if you’re interested in the life and times of Cobb, this movie will certainly entertain you, if anything.

Cobb was a super crazy asshole.

Good news for Japanese exporters: your currency is in shambles.

This is the biggest story never told, the experiment of negative interest rates that must work, otherwise, the very fabric of western finance will unravel. The 2% drop in the yen is the largest decline in 17 months. The working theory is for the Bank of Japan to take action next week, in light of the plunging sovereign yields that aren’t supposed to be happening.

“The market is seeing more scope for the BOJ to do something next week,” said Daniel Katzive, head of foreign-exchange strategy for North America at BNP Paribas SA in New York. He cited recent news reports “suggesting there are discussions underway about pulling the trigger on further measures — that’s why the yen is weakening.”

Perhaps MOAR QE, or maybe a little economic stimulus spending is in order. Either way, the Bank of Japan must do something to stem the tide of deflation that is washing over its banking system. Some have even floated the idea of negative interest rate bearing loans. Could you imagine getting paid to borrow money to buy a home?

This is the upside down world we are entering in now. We are in the first inning of this new economic reality. Thus far, everything is going swimmingly.

Just one day after the stock collapsed on rumors that the FDA hated them and was going to decline their application to have their muscular dystrophy drug approved, shares are, seemingly, effervescent today–fully and without requital, offering up primordial treatment to all those saddled in a large short position.

Commiserate with the traditions of biotech hazards, the charade of equanimity within the healthcare field has once again been shattered. As such, traders have been upbraided in a Banana Republic like condition–one wrought with rusticate milk sops running in and out of bankruptcy courts–finaglers left in ruins from the theatricalities of an industry bereft of decency and decorum.

RBA notes on the SRPT spike:

RBC noes the FDA has just posted 5 voting questions and explanatory discussion points ahead of Monday’s eteplirsen panel. They view the fact that panel members will have to vote on Monday as an incremental positive for SRPT, simply because of the understandable pressure committee members will be under, in the presence of the DMD community and families. However, the questions should leave little room for interpretation: Despite that view, when they read through the actual questions and the language of the accompanying discussion, they see a document with the exact same tone and tenor as the January and April briefing documents. The questions and the discussion ask the panelists to focus on the trial conduct, the evidence for dystrophin and clinical efficacy. They expect the answer to all of these to be No.

Shares of SRPT are higher by 40%.

I don’t even know where to start with this. The Federal Reserve is supposed to be an apolitical organization, whose sole purpose is to create chicanery within the economy to ferment opportunities for the banks to acquire valuable assets cheaply. In what could only be described as a brazen statement by Fed’s Brainard in showing her allegiance to the Hillary Clinton campaign, one has to imagine what a Donald Trump candidacy will do to the Fed and their cozy relationship with the democratic elite.

Trump is on record saying he wants to audit the Fed. He’s on record saying he doesn’t like what the Fed is doing. Therefore, and it goes without saying, the Fed is actively campaigning for the Clinton campaign, a bold step that has ruined the impartiality they’ve worked so hard to maintain.

What in the hell is going on here?