Yesterday could not have gone better!
I titled the morning post “Confidence is Key” and decided that, since my targets were dead on Monday, that we should stick to our bear plan into the Consumer Confidend report which was, as we expected, a huge disappointment. My 9:50 Alert to members suggested the DIA 9/30 $99 puts for $1 into the report and then we got a nice 100-point drop for the rest of the day that ran those puts up to $1.60 (up 60%). Also, in that same alert, we went back into SRS (now dubbed “The Widow-Maker”) at $9 and those finished the day at $9.50 (up 5.5%) and the Nov $8 puts we sold for .75 dropped to .60 (up 20%). These are not bad trades to make while we wait around for the market to pick a real direction.
In addition to a poor Consumer Confidence report (53.1 vs 57 expected), we also got a very poor Investor Confidence reading at 118.1, down from 122.8 in August, which was a 5-year high. “There is a recognition that a portion of the recent rise in global equity prices can be attributed to liquidity expansion rather than fundamental opportunities. Institutional investors are pausing to assess this balance,” study says.
Speaking of investors who are not confident, GE’s own Jeff Immelt, unlike his army of pump-jocks on CNBC, isn’t willing to sully his own reputation by mindlessly cheerleading the economy. He was in Singapore yesterday and said that: “high unemployment and slower lending will drag on U.S. economic growth, likely resulting in the weakest recovery in decades… Easing up money has always been the elixir to keep the economy in recovery mode,” Immelt said. “But once you get interest rates to zero percent, you can’t go much below that, which is kind of where we are right now. A lot of the jobs lost in financial services and construction are never coming back.”
If you don’t think Immelt is in touch with the economy despite GE’s Global footprint and $180Bn in sales, perhaps we can listen to WMT CEO Robson Walton (yes, nepotism), who oversees $400Bn in annual sales and he said at yesterday’s CEO conference: “The World recovery is going to be led by Asia although it’s going to be very challenging. I think this recovery is going to be a slow one – sales have been tough.”
As noted in David Fry’s Daily S&P chart, volume the last two days fell off a cliff…
