I couldn’t just sleep-in. Had something on my mind that we need to watch for in coming weeks That is, if “spider sense” means anything outside of Marvel-space.
I hope you’re having a dandy weekend and this will be mainly an expansion and continuation of the thinking that I outlined on the free side (Urban) Thursday morning.
Oh, and this being a holiday and all, no podcast. Instead, flip over here to a classic bit of jazz/blues that (to me) well-describe the “field position” America finds itself in from here forward.
Ladies and gents: Mose Allison. “Your Mind is On Vacation (and your mouth is working overtime…)”
One more (as long as I’ve taken a musical detour back to my time as a transmitter engineer in Seattle’s R&B/Jazz station? How about “Big Miller” and “Without a Song“?
More reflective, you say? Al Jarreau “Spain (I recall)” works.
Days like this – the big national holidays – I sit down in the studio and can become lost for hours. Ideas pass by – a song remembered…
We are – after how many years is it? 244! – still a country with a ton of potential, but at the same time, a ton of disappointment.
At 244, will we make 250 intact?
Always the philosophizer, eh? A bit more coffee and then we launch…
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George, you and your Lady enjoy the 4th. Interesting market comparisons, but wondering how China did.
Morning sir. Just stopping by. I’m about an hour out from doing an indian sweat this morning, Then participating first full moon of summer ceremony, at some hippy commune up on Mout Shasta. A bunch of hippies living off the grid up there. My Shaman friend invited me up. Then we gonna gobble down some Half Moon’s sit on on a drum circle, do a vision quest. I havent done an earth vision quest in 25 years on the green button. I’m sure it will one helluva good time. Got a cute little apprentice I’m bring with who has never been experienced. 38 and just gorgeous.
Happy Independence day everyone!
“I’m about an hour out from doing an indian sweat this morning,”
I once asked an old indian about doing an indian sweat.. his answer was.. its dam hot
Asked what he thought of mosquitos to..
His answer.. them dam bugs
Have fun Andy.Like I have always said theres nothing like a good hot muggy day with the mosquitos biting..
I attempted a post yesterday afternoon late using an Android device. When I punched the “go” button, the screen scrolled wildly, and the post didn’t show as waiting moderation. If the post is on the site, I haven’t found it. Not sure what happened.
I can’t help but observing that the big news of the week for Texas, that the governor decreed that everyone in populated counties must wear masks in public, hasn’t gotten much notice on Ure site. I haven’t decided if that is a shock reaction, or if all of you are too busy Covid slam dancing on the boardwalk.
Things have changed on the street overnight in Texas. Yesterday, the only place I saw people not wearing masks in any large numbers yesterday was at a national hardware big box store. It looked like male foreign national contractors hadn’t got the message. I don’t think I saw a single child or a single woman without a mask yesterday, and I did a lot of errands. Stores were not very crowded for a holiday Friday. Restaurants looked empty. The brisket plate at a local barbecue house was priced 1.5X over everything else. Ham chicken & turkey barbecue for the 4th may be a new tradition in the making.
I’m figuring that if the runaway infection rates in Texas don’t decrease in two weeks, the governor will be forced to walk back a big chunk of the reopening. Shutting down the bars and large meetings looked politically painless, until 1500 restaurants got closed by the order. The restaurant owners and workers are not happy in the extreme. I got a pre-lockdown short haircut yesterday while the pruning is good.
The lifestyle weather forecast for this coming winter is now scattered grim, with intermittent urban storms.
Sorry,I have to ask what are the covid death stats? Infection rates are high according to a validated effective and reliable test? In an era of Fasb 56, who do believe, what do you believe, and why do you believe it?
Show me or Snow me.
Our last covid reported death in Alaska,#19, was from May, an 80 yr. old gentleman in which covid was ruled a factor. ???
Our minds are being stretched, bent, but will they be broken?
covid stats: Just as homicide (actual bodies) and car theft (insurance claims) are the only crime statistics I accept at face value, with covid stats I mainly look at one thing: body count. Even the body counts are suspect in some jurisdictions because of confusion about covid being the primary or contributing cause of death and untold numbers of people who die at home without being tested. Percentage positive, numbers tested, hospital cases, ICU use percentages etc. are all subject to sloppy definitions as well as accidental and purposeful errors. The problem with body counts is, of course, they tell you what the risk was (typically) three plus weeks ago. So, just wear the mask, wash hands, and avoid people.
The stats are all tainted. The reason..money.. the average to working man or woman just doesnt have a few disposable grand to pay for the test. So they will avoid being tested until its absolutely necessary.
So.. my guess is ten percent as the acceleration curve with ten.percent being the ones tested.
I listened to one researcher saying that even though you get well a significant amount of damage is done..that way when round two hits it has a chance to do even more damage breaking the body down even more..
My guess is ten months from now we will have a whole new perspective. JMHO
Correction to prior post,sorry, the last and 16th death in Alaska. Not 19th.
Are we just going to line up to get “Vaxxed” too?
Hi George, Happy Fifth!
Yesterday(Independence Day), I was working outside in the bloody heat! That, and resting/recovering, so I just got to this report. Today I need to do the same thing – if I have the energy left for it. I don’t know about “Global Warming”, but I’m sure experiencing more heat than I’ve seen for a year.
I’m seriously wondering if you can put China in your Aggregate Chart! It’s the elephant in the room and without it, all we’re doing is comparing western countries. Perhaps the data is not available or comparable – I just don’t know.
A good point on China Mike. Except, I use Hong Kong as a proxy because I trust the Chinese to be “honest” about their stock prices about the same way I expect them to be candid about…oh, mobile crematoria, for example…
Meh…
You’re old enough. Think back 10 years. We are experiencing a run of 90 degree days right now, but that’s just normal and typical for July. We got spoiled by seven years of unseasonably cool summers, and this is simply a normal year (so far.) My August highs from 2012 through last year were 12-21 degrees below normal — I didn’t monitor July or June, other than to count our total number of 90 degree days for the summer (which averaged “4” per year and should have averaged “46.”) When it should be 104° and it’s 83°, folks who work outside, notice…
George,
While I’m enjoying your chartpacks, I always feel they are missing significant dimension – volume of trade. Am I wrong or it is too difficult for you to make charts with volume*price vs usual price only?
That is a wonderful question! However, while there was a time that price X volume was a meaningful calculation, that began to fade in a meaningful way with the advent of FT (high frequency trading).
While it is reported that program trading made up only 26% of NYSE trading in 2012, which is both true – and absurd – at the same time.
Here’s why:
When an exchange is trying to entice “retail traders” into the market, the last thing they want is people figuring out that the game is more controlled than “ration judgment” would suggest.
The reason is (and this will sound odd): There is program trading and there is high frequency trading.
In terms of market price action, both are relevant, but only the former is even partially understood. The last time I asked a retail broker about such low “program trading” percentages, he explained that program trades (as he understood it_) were reported as one number. However, there is a buy trade and there is a corresponding sell trade (or visa versa going short). When the numbers were not reported granularly, I gave up on volume.
The problem only gets worse when you look at HFT.
For you and me, it’s a trade if we make a buy and then sell 10-minutes later. On the program trading side, it may be a 10-second move in – and back out. And in HFT, the volume is humongous – down in the millisecond duration range!
Where do you draw the line – and in a meaningful way where the data can be “consistentized” over large (macro economic) timeframes?
Here’s more of the whackedpedia
“In 2017, Aldridge and Krawciw[9] estimated that in 2016 HFT on average initiated 10–40% of trading volume in equities, and 10–15% of volume in foreign exchange and commodities. Intraday, however, proportion of HFT may vary from 0% to 100% of short-term trading volume. Previous estimates reporting that HFT accounted for 60–73% of all US equity trading volume, with that number falling to approximately 50% in 2012 were highly inaccurate speculative guesses.[10][11] High-frequency traders move in and out of short-term positions at high volumes and high speeds aiming to capture sometimes a fraction of a cent in profit on every trade.[6] HFT firms do not consume significant amounts of capital, accumulate positions or hold their portfolios overnight.[12] As a result, HFT has a potential Sharpe ratio (a measure of reward to risk) tens of times higher than traditional buy-and-hold strategies.[13] High-frequency traders typically compete against other HFTs, rather than long-term investors.[12][14][15] HFT firms make up the low margins with incredibly high volumes of trades, frequently numbering in the millions.”
So your question is a DANDY one. (There’s an old early 2000’s Peoplenomics article somewhere in the index and it goes over what I describe as the “power theory of markets.” Which, essentially argues that rules of electricity have their analogs in Finance with financial instruments behaving in “electrical terms” (like resistant, power, and so forth – this latter is important because the Voltage analog is Price and the Current analog if Volume and the resultant (Power in electronics) is what gets work done, and so it is that price times volume is very useful, after Joseph Granville’s work and so forth.
(Getting to be like a free Peoplenomics report, isn’t it?)
The real bottom line is that in order to encapsulate impact of HFT, we simply don’t have deep enough data to be order to meaningfully turn that into useful information. For those of use who don’t own an eTrade of AmeriTrade sized brokerage which likely makes more money HFT’ing customer trades than anything – which explains why they don’t mess with commissions. You still pay them, but they are buried in the HFT programming.
I’ve always thought of this as “speed robbery” because if a slow (manual) retail broker front-ran the customer trade, it was a firing event. But if the same things is done with a computer and millisecond speeds, the regulatory agencies have a childish (but really crooked) “look the other way”…
Thanks for asking! Dandy question
https://youtu.be/QfUtIFZS-PY
Lies lies lies
She needs to stay in the pharmaceutical field and keep us updated. She’s on a tough road with no one else, no family to lean on.
Gee, the narcos didn’t even own it long enough to do over the old Detroit-area fractional ownership livery paint scheme.
https://www.milenio.com/politica/asi-fue-la-caceria-de-la-avioneta-con-droga-que-se-estrello-en-qroo