Now THIS is a panic!
Ordinarily, I would be very enthusiastic about buying but we were in an overbought market so we need to be very selective about what we buy. Once again we had a lot of discussion of the Global situation in Member chat and a special 12:21am Alert went out to Members and there was a follow-up at 6:52 this morning and, frankly, we don’t really have better information at 7am than we did at midnight, which seems kind of crazy with all these 24-hour news channels and the web and all. Instead of getting the facts instantly, it seems what we get is information overload where it’s almost impossible to separate facts from rumors.
I want to thank both Zeroxzero and Pentaxon for their excellent analysis of the nuclear situation in Japan yesterday – without their now-obviously accurate observations, we would have probably gone more bullish. We did do some dip buying but generally with well-hedged positions except for the $25KP, where we did take a risk on FAS that will bite us in the ass.
Once again, I apologize that it’s my job to get analytical when talking about a massive human tragedy but we need to step back and assess the situation. I have been suggesting that people, in the very least, text REDCROSS to 90999 on your cell phones to donate $10 to help with the relief efforts in Japan – 250,000 people read me each morning and that’s $2.5M and if you pass this along to 10 friends and so on and so on we can really have some impact so please, Please, PLEASE – when you are about to buy something today – think of something you can do without and instead send $10 so a child in Japan can get fresh water to drink and a blanket to sleep on. Thanks!
What an interesting day for a Fed statement (2:15)! We also have the normal Tuesday Retail Sales Reports, the Empire State Manufacturing Survey, Import/Export Prices, TIC Flows and the NAHB Housing Market Index – all important stuff but all overshadowed by events in Japan. So, what is REAL over there? In the morning alerts we discussed the status of the disaster and we have Members who are clearly better than I am at discerning the facts so we’ll deal with that during market hours.
My expertise is in assessing the macro and I figure, as we discussed in yesterday’s post, that the markets are a forward-looking mechanism and the Tokyo traders, who have knocked their market down 16% in 2 days, have likely determined that this disaster WILL knock 10% off Japan’s GDP this year – so that accounts for that much of the drop. They are also thinking that it MIGHT get worse and mirror the 25% drop that occurred after the 1995 Kobe Earthquake (see chart yesterday) so a percentage of that is being priced in as well.
The Nikkei closed at 8,605 which is the lowest it’s been since March of 2009. As I said last week – Happy Crashiversary! As you can see from David Fry’s chart(this morning not updated) Japan blew right through support and fell another 10%. Think about that, though – support was based on the situation as it was prior to the earthquake and 10% is how much of a set-back we currently believe the earthquake will cause to Japan’s economy so that makes 8,600 “just right” for the pullback – assuming things do not get worse at Fukushima.
IN PROGRESS
