A slew of misses among economic US data just passed unobserved yesterday. US retail sales -the all-mighty US consumer representing 2/3 of the economy- missed for the 6th time out of the last 8 releases, showing a +0.2% increase. After adjusting for inflation, US retail sales volumes fell 2.5% over the last year, the 8th consecutive YoY decline. That’s the longest down streak since 2009. Industrial production, capacity utilization both missed and decreased too but we all know manufacturing is the big ill of the economy and only a fool would have put his 5 cents on that losing horse. Instead, the company’s earnings are doing great: of the 38 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported results, 82% have exceeded expectations, according to FactSet data. Leave it apart that the median expectation is for an average 7.3% decrease this quarter: set the bar low and just pass it.
That was enough for the DJ to notch its 7th straight positive session on Tuesday for its longest string of gains since MAR 2021, finally clearly exploding above its 2023 highs. And it’s that Consumer Cyclical (yes, despite of retail sales), Industrial, Financials have been the best performers during the last month. All 3 majors notched their highest closes since Apr 2022. The A.I. (maybe the LLM Machine Learning?) hype is everywhere and Microsoft has hit new all-time highs after revealing pricing for its new A.I. subscription and giving access to the META’s models on Azure. In the late 90s I was at the university, and I remember a Macroeconomics professor arguing about the ”end of economic cycles” because of the technological achievements (back then was the birth of the Internet). Economic cycles are still there and he still writes for the main Italian business and non-business newspapers.
- FX – The USDIndex has gained some traction and is trading at 99.75 right now. EUR is trading in the 1.12 lows (1.1230) and Cable has been hit hard after the CPI data (-0.68% @ 1.2946). JPY is offered (139.275) as Yuan is (7.21).
- Stocks – US Futures are slightly positive (+0.10% on average) and sitting at 15 months highs). Japan and Australia bid, more cautious about China (-0.42%). Some regional banks were among the ”worst” results yesterday, still there have been strong gains in the regional banking ETF.
- Commodities – USOil benefit of the risk on environment and rebounded off $74, trading at $75.51 right now. On the other hand, Copper is still weak (-0.32% @ $381.80)
- Gold – inched higher up to $1984.5 on no news and no real usual correlations, probably benefiting from the risk on bid and the overall declining CPI perspective (it was CAD’s turn to surprise yesterday).
Today – UK CPI, EU HICP (Final), US Building Permits/Housing Starts, Speech from BoE’s Ramsden, Earnings from Netflix, Tesla, Goldman Sachs, ASML & IBM.
Biggest Mover (@06:30 GMT) XRP(+4.95% @ $0.8025) is targeting last Thursday close at $0.8125. RSI at 73.27, MACD strongly positive, MA200 40 cents lower ($0.43).
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Marco Turatti
Market Analyst
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