Reminder for Peoplenomics subscribers: Charts-only tomorrow due to the Holiday.
I bet you don’t even remember what day of the week the Fourth fell on last year. I’ll give you a hint: Tuesday.
For serious students of the market – also known as the art of making money with money while sitting on your ass – such questions are far from trivial. While they may not provide precise guidance, they at least give us some ideas about how equally crazy people acted a year ago.
Which gets us back to last year’s performance of the Dow – since we keep detailed daily notes on things like this in our personal trading journal.
Last year, the Friday before Fourth week was June 30th. The Dow, at least in my journal, closed the day at 21349.63. The day before the holiday, July 3, the Dow closed at 21479.27.
This little bit of market history would suggest that we would rally today around 140 points. Sure enough, looking at the futures, and hour and a half ahead of the open, we see them indicating the Dow will open up 114.
All of which is interesting, but far from useful since those days are behind us. What is ahead, however is the Fourth and the days after.
Last year, the day after the Fourth, the market was down, but only one point. It was the next day (Thursday of last year) that the market’s downside moment picked up a bit, dropping to 21320.01. We get the idea that between today’s close and Friday’s. we could drop 170 points, or so.
No, this not advice. Rather. it’s just one way to look at things. By the way, if a person (last year) had bought at the low-after the Fourth and held until the middle of August, they would have gained almost 3.3 percent. This is when occasional summer rallies come along.
We shall see…
Trade May Decide This Year
NY Times “Dealbook” newsletter this morning leads to a Financial Times piece “A $1 trillion trade war? Don’t bet against it.”
The key things to watch – because it is very revelatory about our “information future” – is to watch how China is deftly using its Great Firewall of China to manage it’s markets and public expectations.
To keep it simple, the Great Firewall allows China to have the information equivalent of a two-currency system. Internal and external.
So on the Internal side (Beijing side of their Fire Wall) Business Insider reports “China is trying to downplay a brewing trade war with the US by censoring comments from Trump and US authorities.”
In addition to the Fire Wall, China is now warning its citizens about the dangers of traveling to the USA…That Reuters story says the Chinese are warning of “…including expensive medical bills, the threats of public shootings and robberies, searches and seizures by customs agents, telecommunications fraud and natural disasters.” In other words, real-world life in America which is getting scary….
Outside their Fire Wall, on the Wild-Wild-Web, we see the Wall St. Journal offering ’em pointers in “Here’s How China Can Escalate a Trade War With the U.S..”
To keep your thinking straight in today’s world, change your wetware’s lookup from thinking www means worldwide web to www means world’s weaponized web. It will fix Ure thinking up.
Social Weaponized Further
Here we go again: The NY Post reports how EPA Director Scott Pruitt has become the latest Trump official to be harassed at a public eating establishment. All of which would be a nothing-burger EXCEPT for the next two things that happened: The teacher posted this to Facebook and then the Anti-Trump media got hold of it and off it goes,. snowballing.
Meantime, Dennis Schumer is being urged by the lefties to throw in with the radical socialist wing of the (imploding) party. You go, Dennis.
Gore: Weaponizing Summer
What happens in the summer? Besides the fireworks tomorrow?
Gee…uh…hot weather? Forest fires like that 60,000 acre blaze in California that’s threatening 700 structures?
Here comes Mr. Climate – former Veep Al Gore – warning of “ominous heat.”
Don’t mid us…we view it as weaponizing summer, though it all underscores the danger of too much hot air…
By the way, In Norway, forest fires are causing train scheduling issues and Sweden has an outbreak – this all in addition to the Lancashire fire in the UK. Hot times in the summer. Of course, they’ve all had fires in the past, it’s just that fire spreads well as video…like wildfire one might say.
Lies on ICE
No, 19 DHS/ICE types did not call for ICE to be abolished, says the Weekly Standard.
What happened was the 19 called for an internal restructuring – but the leftists media lied that into “abolish. ” Mind-numbing bullshit, but that’s how the world’s weaponized web works.
It’s not just in the USA that social has weaponized: Five Killed in Latest Mob Attack After Rumors on Social Media. Here’s What to Know About India’s WhatsApp Murders.
Laser Guns Get Real
China has a new kind of small manpack laser that can set someone’s hair afire at 1 km. range. Presumably, it cooks what’s holding the hair up, too.
Better living through technology, huh?
Surveying the Wreckage…
Facebook bug unblocks people on 800K+ accounts and this comes on top of other tech issues. Like what? Oh, try The FBI, SEC and Justice Department Now Want to Know What Facebook Knew About Cambridge Analytica for example.
Hope they ask about Hillary getting access to the same and more per her campaign officials bragging back when, too. Guess that would be asking too much, huh?
Glencore gets U.S. subpoena on compliance with money-laundering laws.
Numbers Mean Something…
CoreLogic Reports May Home Prices Increased by 7.1 Percent, Consumers Express Desire to Buy Despite High Prices.
ISM numbers later this morning.
ADP employment when you get back from partying – Thursday morning.
Bond market closes early today…
That’s it – breakfast is on and I need to send an email to my friends Elliott and the Millennial Caller…getting behind on my correspondence. See you Thursday!
There is no trade war if you see your friends, family and others compelled to light up Chinese made fireworks this week…. using Chinese made lighters while their guests sit on Chinese made lawn furniture set atop decks assembled with Chinese made power tools…. drinking from Chinese made glasses… All the while cheering “Independence”.
Bic lighters are made in France…George, on more than one occasion you have gotten Senator Schumer’s first name incorrect.
Sorry. I should colorectal that:
Dick Schumer.
(Happy?)
I thought his first name was “Crybaby”.
But the Chinese have to come to the USA for Hollywood, Las Vegas, Disney World, KFC, Big Macs, iPhone, Facebook, YouTube, Wall Street, etc.
(And for the dividends that pay for the PLA…)
Not quite fair. The Chinese make the best fireworks. They also make the best china and the best LEDs (but most Chinese flashlights suck, because their manufacturers crank out some of the world’s worst switches.)
BTW, my lighter is a Zippo, my lawn furniture is handcrafted (by me) using my American tools, and my tumblers are from Missouri. I do like my Chinese Makita drill, though…
And my plateware is made in America and England.
Can anyone, preferably American, tweak the chinese laser gun to mow lawns and thick brush. Go American.
Ya and we gave Indians beads for gold
That is THE quintessential case of asymmetry of information in markets!
The left has started something that they really do not have the ability to control. Going after the current administration the way they are, will open up every political foe doing the same things to them in the future. They want a “UnCivil War”. They want us going after each other for political reasons. They want their followers to do their dirty work. Thats one of the reasons you didn’t see much of the shooter last year who went after Republican Congressemen playing baseball. He was one of theirs, specifically a Bernie Socialist nut. Now you have radical mothers with their children showing them how they are rude, obnoxious, and completely out of line. Raising another generation of radical morons. But you wait when the shoe is on the other foot. You will see howling and handwringing as if the social fabric of ‘Merica is coming undone when people start confronting the liberal, socialist side and their people in public! But thats what they want an “Uncivil War”, and now we have it!
Yeah, no…
The MSM covers that which they wish to cover. If an errant nuke hits Omaha or a mega-tsunami erases Japan from the planet, should they choose not to cover it, it didn’t happen. No matter the occasion or incident, it’ll not receive air unless the Left can make hay out of it.
Before Andrew Breitbart created Breitbart News, he teamed up with Arianna to create the Huffington Post. His goal, and Breitbart’s mandate, was not to create a conservative news service, but to create news outlets which covered newsworthy items that the mainstream press ignored.
There are lots.
When the Liberals return to power, unless Breitbart and other such services acquire recognition, any “opposition voices” to the Liberal line will simply be ignored out of existence…
Yes sir George All ran by machines no Truth but lies abound
I noticed something here in Michigan.
Lower tier companies have stopped offering 401K matches as part of their benefits packages. “Take it or leave it…”.
Weird considering unemployment really hasn’t been lower since 1970.
Non-citizen replacements don’t need 301 k for tax purposes, now, do they”?
Dunno how many non-citizen replacements there are in Michigan. ‘Spect a lot, temporarily, in the onion belt (Grand Haven to past Battle Creek and the Michiana Line up to 50 miles north of Kzoo — it’s like one ginormous peat bog, with impossibly black, and totally insane natural onion/potato soil), since that’s a natural progression for the Indiana ‘mater pickers (world’s finest, although the New Joisey folks might disagree, the people at Red Gold, Hunt/Wesson, Brooks, and Heinz don’t.)*
I’m expecting to hit both the blueberry and cherry belts before long (Michigan grows the best cherries and domestihooted blueberries on the planet, although the best wild blueberries come from Maine, and from Canada), but I don’t know if the folks up the Michigami Coast use migrants. There’s a few hundred thou displaced Iranians in the Detroit ‘burbs, but they’re waiting for an American President to actually locate his or her testicles and back a revolt against the ruling theocracy, so’s they can return home without dying in vain (I still strongly suggest that people seek out the writings of Reza Pahlavi…)
* An aside: I’m longtime friends with the police chief in Orestes, Indiana. Orestes is a tiny little town about 40 miles NNE of Indianapolis. It has a population of a couple hundred, but has dorms, which can accommodate about 6000 migrant workers, and which DO house them, during tomato season in Indiana. Those migrants pick from Mississippi to the Canadian border, migrating north as specialty crops which require hand-picking, like melons, tomatoes, berries, and various tree-fruits, mature. They hit International Falls and Mizzoula, then are bused back to the border, and make a lot of money compared to the stay-at-home Mexicans.
I haven’t really been “on the ground” anywhere in Michigan since last year, so I don’t know what this year’s climate is like (I mean, I’ve been to and through Ann Arbor and Detroit, up to St. Mary’s, and to Lansing a few times, but haven’t really stopped and jawed with the locals…) When I get there, I expect to be everywhere from GRR to Traverse City, to Detroit and Huron, and across the Bridge to the Soo Locks and up to Copper Harbor so, we’ll see. I’ll be sure to pump the locals to see whether this is a local thing, or Statewide…
Mel of the famous “Mel’s Hole” threw a refrigerator into the hole & never heard a sound. If the hole was 15 miles deep, would it be too far for the sound to travel back to the top of the hole? Lighting can be heard up to 15 miles away, but a frig crashing would not be that loud. Maybe it would if it dropped 15 miles.
I’ve got the sound gear – but no one has ever had Mel contact me…
Just read that NASDAQ is in hot pursuit of nano tech.
“Computer scientists at Stanford and Google have created technology that can track time down to 100-billionths of a second. It could be just what Wall Street is looking for.
System engineers at Nasdaq recently began testing an algorithm and software they hope can synchronize a giant network of computers with that nanosecond precision. They say they have built a prototype and are in the process of deploying a bigger version.
For an exchange like Nasdaq, such refinement is essential to accurately order the millions of stock trades that are placed on their computer systems every second.
With stock trading now dominated by computers that make buying and selling decisions and execute them with blazing speed, keeping that order also means protecting profits. So-called high-frequency trading firms place trades in a fraction of a second, sometimes in a bet that they can move faster than bigger competitors.”
So, why can’t we take this nano technology and apply it to real time government income, spending and accountability. Once a department runs ahead of it’s budget, or spends unwisely, the account is temporarily suspended until a totally transparent reason is given to the taxpayers on a web site we all can see in nano time!
It’s like a truth machine for government…it also is the type of public flogging I think Trump would enjoy. If Trump really wants to drain the swamp, this would be a way to trim our deficit, limit boondoggle expenses, and reign in corruption…