Tag Archives: bear market rally

Don’t count on a big rally in commodities.

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Yes, the “inflation/risk trade” is moderately oversold, but when oil, copper and the like start to fall, they can just slide straight down for months. I believe that the commodity rally of the past 15 months was just a dead cat bounce correcting the crash after the massive 2007-2008 bubble.

Now that we’ve had that correction (and then some when it comes to the metals), there is little reason for prices to remain elevated. The supply/demand situation today certainly doesn’t justify $3.00 copper or $1.00 nickel or zinc, and demand will be even weaker in a year when the construction bubbles in China, Australia and Canada are over.

Here’s a pattern I see in crude. Now that the uptrend (higher highs, higher lows) is busted (we made a lower low), all rallies may be short and weak:

TD Ameritrade

Copper’s uptrend is still technically intact but very weak(see RSI), and it could play out the same way:

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Of course, if a large rally does develop, it will just be more fodder for the bears. I’ve entered a short on copper at $3.13 today, and am prepared to add to the position. I’ve also just picked up some July puts on crude futures (expiry June 17). I don’t like near-term options, but these got cheap today and will pay off 25:1 if oil is $55 three weeks from now.

If another broad-based rally in risk assets develops, I’m covered with longs on stock futures. However, I would not be surprised to see stocks (and the Euro) rally for a while here while commodities decline. When trends start to exhaust correlations can break apart.

Rosenberg concurs: 400 point rallies are bearish

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From Tea with Dave (free sign-up here):

The obvious question is: how can the bull market possibly be over considering that we enjoyed that amazing 405-point rally on the Dow just three days ago (Monday, May 10)? Wasn’t that an exclamation mark that the bull is alive and well?

Far from it. There have been no fewer than 16 such rallies of 400 points or more in the past, and 12 of them occurred during the brutal burst of the credit bubble and the other four took place around the tech wreck a decade ago. See Chart 2 below.

Rally mode?

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We got our new low this morning, tested it at Fed time, then reversed strongly upwards. This could be the start of the much-anticipated countertrend rally.

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I’m all hedged up, maybe even a tad long stocks, but I’ll start to reload on shorts if we push a couple hundred points higher. If we break hard lower, the hedges come off.

Valuation still matters

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Many great traders could care less, but investors need value, and there has been none in the US stock market as a whole since about the early 1990s, and no great value since about 1984. Value means getting a lot for your money, and in stocks that means of course earnings, dividends and (honestly priced) assets.

David Rosenberg is about the only bearish mainstream economist left, all the others having drunk too much Keynesian cool-aid and succumbed to the fallacy that Fed printing and government spending is stimulative (is is the opposite). In this morning’s Breakfast with Dave he warns again that fundamental or long-term investors have business touching the stock market at these prices:

WAY TOO MUCH RISK IN THE EQUITY MARKET

Never before has the S&P 500 rallied 60% from a low in such a short time frame as six months. And never before have we seen the S&P 500 rally 60% over an interval in which there were 2.5 million job losses. What is normal is that we see more than two million jobs being created during a rally as large as this.

In fact, what is normal is for the market to rally 20% from the trough to the time the recession ends. By the time we are up 60%, the economy is typically well into the third year of recovery; we are not usually engaged in a debate as to what month the recession ended. In other words, we are witnessing a market event that is outside the distribution curve.

While some pundits will boil it down to abundant liquidity, a term they can seldom adequately defined. If it’s a case of an endless stream of cheap money, we are reminded of Japan where rates were microscopic for years and the Nikkei certainly did enjoy no fewer than four 50% rallies and over 420,000 rally points in a market that is still more than 70% lower today than it was two decades ago. Liquidity and technicals can certainly touch off whippy tradable rallies, but they don’t take you all the way to a sustainable bull market. Only positive economic and balance sheet fundamentals can do that.

Another way to look at the situation is that when you hear and read about “liquidity” driving the market, it is usually a catch-all phrase for “we have no clue” but it sounds good. When we don’t have a reasonable explanation for what is driving prices our strategy is to watch from the sidelines and express whatever positive views we have in the credit market and our other income and hedge fund strategies.

I wholeheartedly agree with his take on the word liquidity as it is thrown about these days. All it really seems to mean is that people are bullish and in the mood to take on risk — most assets were perfectly liquid throughout the crash (that is, there were plenty of buyers), packaged mortgage debt included. The banks only pretended their assets were unsaleable because they didn’t like the bids, which, as it turns out, were perfectly reasonable given the reality of default rates and shrinking collateral values.

Rosenberg goes on to discuss exactly how ridiculous the valuations are, even given the extremely rosy earnings forecasts, which seem to imply that Goldilocks was only taking a little nap and that it is not true that she was torn to shreds by the bears:

As for valuation, well let’s consider that from our lens, the S&P 500 is now priced for $83 in operating EPS (we come to that conclusion by backing out the earnings yield that would match the current inflation-adjusted Baa corporate bond yield). That would be nearly double from the most recent four-quarter trend. Not only that, but the top-down estimates on operating EPS, for 2009 are $48.00 for 2009; $52.60 for 2010; $62.50 for 2011; and $81.00 for 2012. The bottom-up consensus forecasts only go to 2010 and even for this usually bullish bunch, operating EPS is seen at $73.00 for 2010, which means that $83.00 is likely a 2011 story. Either way, the market is basically discounting an earnings stream that even the consensus does not see for another two to three years. In other words, this is more than just a fully priced market at this point.

It is, in fact, deeply overvalued at this juncture. Imagine that six months after the depressed lows we have a situation where:

The trailing price-earnings ratio on operating EPS is 26.5x. At the October 2007 highs, it was 18.8x. In addition, when the S&P 500 is trading north of a 26x P/E multiple on trailing operating earnings, history shows that at these high valuation levels, the market declines in the coming year 60% of the time.

The trailing price-earnings ratio on reported EPS is 184.2x. At the October 2007 highs, it was 23.4x. In fact, just prior to the October 1987 crash, the P/E ratio was 20.3x (not intended to scare anyone).

The price-to-dividend ratio is 53x, where it was at the 2007 highs. Again, the market is trading as it if were at a peak for the cycle, not any longer near a trough. Once again, and we don’t intend to sound alarmist, the price-to-dividend ratio just prior to the 1987 crash was 12x, and at the time, the S&P 500 was viewed in many circles to be at an extended extreme.
Bullish analysts like to dismiss the actual earnings because they are “depressed” and include too many writeoffs, which of course will never occur again. Fine, on one-year forward (operating) earning estimates, the P/E ratio is now 15.7x, the highest it has been in nearly five years. At the peak of the S&P 500 in the last cycle — October 2007 — the forward P/E was 14.3x, and the highest it ever got in the last cycle was 15.4x. So hello? In just six short months, we have managed to take the multiple above the peak of the last cycle when the economic expansion was five years old, not five weeks old (and we may be a tad charitable on that assessment). As an aside, the forward multiple on the eve of the 1987 stock market collapse was 14x and one of the explanations for the steep correction was that equities were so overvalued and overbought that it was vulnerable to any shock (in that case, it came out of the U.S. dollar market). It certainly was not the economy because that sharp 30% slide took place even with an economy that was humming along at a 4.5% clip.

The entire article (sign up for emails) is worth a read. There is much more good stuff in there on housing, manufacturing, commodities and household net worth. Savvy contrarian that he is, he also had these kind words to say about the US dollar:

We do not like the U.S. dollar at all, but at the same time, from a purely tactical standpoint, we have to recognize that there are no U.S. dollar bulls out there right now, the bearish dollar trade is the crowded consensus trade, and that the greenback is massively oversold. It could snap back near-term — be aware of that, please.

Tour des charts

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All the world’s a short…

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Charts below are 5-year views.

NASDAQ biotech index:

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[email protected] WK Internet Index:

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Value Line Arithmetic (where’s the value?):

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Philadelphia Gold and SIlver Index (XAU), back at ’06-’08 commodities bubble levels:

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Mexico Bolsa:

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Venezuela:

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Argentina’s Merval Index:

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Pakistan’s Karachi 100 (look at the flat line where the govt suspended trading last fall — worked wonders, didn’t it? This market is up a lot less than most others — maybe people don’t trust it as much anymore, since they can’t be sure they’ll be able to sell when they want):

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Bet you didn’t know Mongolia had a stock market. Looks like a one hit wonder:

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Singapore Straits Times:

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Indonesia’s Jakarta Composite:

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Taiwan Taiex:

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All images above from Bloomberg’s stock index pages

Some thoughts on the bear market.

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This post started as an email that got way too long. I added some charts and put it up here:

The rally has not surprised me (on March 31 I expressed the opinion that we would hit 900 or higher by summer:

…more likely in my mind is a protracted rally extending to 900 or higher by summer, then rolling over to meet a date with 400 next winter. Look at last year’s rallies from March to May and July to August for an idea of what this might look like, though on a larger percentage and time scale because we are correcting a larger sell-off. The case for such a move is bolstered when you hear major investment banks’ strategists calling this a dead cat bounce. Too many people are still afraid to call a bottom, and they need to be suckered into long positions before this is over (along the same lines, too many traders are embracing the dead cat bounce and need to be shaken out before it can get back to leading the buy-and-holders to slaughter).

That said, I was leaning closer towards 900 than 1050:

I am highly skeptical, though respectful, of calls for a the mother of all bear market rallies. Robert Prechter and some other Elliott Wavers, as well as Tim Knight (slopeofhope.com) seem to be anticipating a 6-month or longer rally to as high as 1050. I simply don’t see why that is necessary in this environment. This is a depression, and the last one was accompanied by bear market that, after the first 6 months, maintained the momentum of a cruising supertanker. Rallies of 20 percent and 2 months were about all you got from April 1930 to July 1932 as the Dow dropped from about 295 to 41. That deflation-driven event was a much more orderly bear market than the jagged trajectory of the dot-com crash, which occured while the credit bubble continued to expand. Interestingly, the 1966-1982 secular bear (a brutal 75% loss in real terms) also traced out such a series of steep plunges and rallies as the bubble kept inflating thanks to a compliant Fed and the abandonment of the last trace of the gold standard. Employment was down, but animal spirits were still running high with the computing boom, the advent of securitization, and new innovations in consumer credit.

Though I saw this rally coming a mile away, I have traded it very poorly. First, I put too much emphasis on picking the absolute bottom for a buy-in.  Back in Feb and March I got out of most of my shorts by the time we were under 700, and I entered a bunch of limit orders to put over 1/2 of my net worth in SPY on the long side. Unfortunately, those orders started at 620, and we bottomed at 666. So I missed the bounce, and not only that, starting in April I began to short the junk stocks that were flying the highest and have been the real driver of this market. That was way too soon, and they kept on going, to the surprise of many a long-short fund as well. The outperformance of junk was a surprise, but the overall bounce has not been. When you have mood as compressed as it was back in March and you reach an exhaustion point after 18 months of a strong bear trend, you get a big reversal, which can then generate the extremes of optimism needed to set up the next plunge.

I’ve been buying long-term puts on the S&P and Nasdaq again since late March (way too soon, considering that I expected the rally to continue). I bought a bunch more yesterday, by the way. I view it as extremely unlikely that this market doesn’t decline to the point where solid value offers support — that would be a sub-10 PE and dividend yield of over 5% on dividends that have to fall by 50% or more from here to around $12 for the S&P. That would be the 240 level, but it should take at least a couple more years to get there (or below), if not four or five.

What has always worried me as a short in this market is not a 5-8 month rally, but a 12-18 month affair  like some of those that Japan has experienced in its long bear market since 1989:

Source: Yahoo! finance

That said, Japan’s financial sector was deflating while exports were improving, families had savings and the rest of the world was growing. Today’s situation is much, much more severe of course, and we can only find a parallel in the Great Depression for so many of the economic trends we are seeing. The longest bounce in that bear market was 5 months, and it was of similar magnitude (48% from Nov. ’29 to April ’30; we’re up 47% in the 4.5 months since March 6).

This is the Dow from 1928 to 1931:

Source: Yahoo! finance

And here’s how that bounce looked from 1933:

Source: Yahoo! finance

The S&P500 is now the most overvalued in history by PE (infinite as of this quarter’s running 12 month total, or a dot-com-esque 32 times current annualized earnings levels, about $7.50 per quarter). The dividend yield is about 2.5%, but dividends are nearly as high as earnings right now, which is completely unsustainable (they should be less than half of earnings). On a sustainable basis, the yield is 1.0 – 1.25%.

Here is the S&P PE ratio (TTM data through 12.31.08) going back to 1936. (the dates read right to left, since I can’t figure out how to reverse them in Excel). Data through 6.30.09 would be off the chart:

Real (U-6) unemployment is approaching 17% and climbing, and that is if you exclude the likely 6 million illegal immigrants who are out of work now (who used to take home $100 per day as construction cleanup boys or dishwashers). Throw them in, as we would have in the 1930s, and you get a solidly depressionary 20%.


Credit is still being withdrawn everywhere you look, whether in home equity, credit cards or small business loans. There has been a bounce in the corporate bond market, but that is due to the same technical forces that are driving the stock market, and the big bankruptcies are just beginning. Only the very weakest have gone under so far, like the car companies.

So with this backdrop, I don’t expect this summer’s good feelings to last into the holidays. The markets should start to roll over again soon, since the big-money value investors needed for a sustained advance can find no reason to buy in, and the little guy has been burned too many times to chase this market very far. Volume is very thin, and an unusually large fraction of trading is taking place between automated programs.

When the data to back up the green shoots theory fails to show up after another few weeks or months, and even official unemployment is solidly into the double digits and climbing, while another huge wave of mortgage resets hits the middle class, there will be no hope at all left to support this market, and it will slide to levels not seen since George Bush Sr. was in office.

It will then still not be a safe long-term buy. For that, considering all of the obstacles that the government has created to profit-making, we need to get back to Reagan-era levels, somewhere under the bottom of the 1987 crash.

S&P500:

Source: Google finance

A toppy-looking week

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Well, the reflation trade has managed to hold on for a few more days and even reached new heights, but the case for a pullback is looking that much better. Precious metals, non-dollar and non-yen currencies, oil and treasury yields have all benefited from what looks like a fairly extreme fear of inflation.

At 3.83%, the 10-year note, and certainly the 5-year at 2.83%, are even approaching levels at which they may be attractive buy-and-hold instruments. In a couple of years, we may look back at this sell-off as a great chance to lock in some respectable yields for a long bout of deflation. These bonds will at the very least vastly outperform the stock market or real estate.

I would be surprised if today’s sell-off in the mid-range of the yield curve doesn’t start to lure people back into longer maturity notes.

Source: Bloomberg.com

Today’s “gap and crap” in the stock market can also be taken as a sign of a top, which would coincide perfectly with a bottom in bonds and turnaround in the dollar. Euro and pound bullishness had been holding at well over 90% by early this week, as had that for precious metals. Silver’s two strong pullbacks from the $16 level were encouraging, as were the nosedives in the euro and pound.

From this juncture, I am still more enthusiastic about the prospects for the dollar, bonds and related commodity shorts than I am about stock market shorts, since the sentiment in the later has not reached the same levels of broad consensus. That said, it would be surprising if we don’t at least stop making new highs for a few weeks, if not fall well under 900 in the S&P.

Still a deflationist, huh?

Why am I so sure that we are stuck in deflation? Simple: the inflation we have experienced for the last 40+ years in the US and most of the world is less related to money printing, digital or otherwise, than credit issuance. This was a great credit bubble, during which families and corporations forgot all the lessons of irresponsible borrowing thanks to compromised central banks that provided cheap money and the promise of bailouts to the bankers who would otherwise be on the hook for extending worse and worse loans.

As credit got cheaper and easier to obtain, people relied more and more on it for everything from houses to cars to clothing purchases and even vacations. With easy credit, prices levitated across the economy until we reached the point where we could just not make debt any easier to get. After 105% loan-to-value, neg-am, teaser rate, no-doc loans, what else could be possibly be done to lure more people to borrow?

Debt is now a burden without a reward

Without the continued expansion of credit, there was no reason for prices to keep going up, but after 2005, without prices going up, there was no reason to borrow. Just like a light switch, in 2006-2007, debt became a burden without a reward, and ever since then the magic of leverage has been working in reverse to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars in lost equity.

Creating a few trillion dollars and simply giving it to banks with (still!) massively upside-down balance sheets does nothing to get the inflation ball rolling again. If the money were dropped from helicopters or spent into circulation by the government hiring tens of millions of people (as in the highly-socialist Weimar Republic, where the government owned factories) or, as is more likely here, in a truly massive war effort like the inflationary WW1 and WW2, we would soon have inflation. But nothing that we have seen so far is remotely capable of spurring inflation until asset prices and incomes have so collapsed that most of the bad debt (tens of trillions) is liquidated through bankruptcy.

Without the bailouts, we would already be most of the way through this recession, as in the short depression in the US after WW1, in which the government did very little except lower taxes. Assets like bank deposits and car factories would be finding their way into responsible hands, where they could be put to productive use. The surviving prudent banks would be lending to the surviving prudent manufacturers and prudent families, who would be acquiring assets from the foolish, who henceforth would be much less foolish. This natural process is exactly how the west achieved such fantastic real growth in incomes, technology and quality of life in the period from the 19th century to WW1.

At the rate we are going, prepare for many years of high unemployment (we’re at 16.4% now) and weak corporate earnings, as the prudent are taxed to prop up the foolish and cynical. This is not a formula for rising prices or a better standard of living. This is a formula for political, moral and economic decline.

This is not the kind of process that societies just can just stop on a dime. Nations can’t be expected to just have epiphanies, throw the bums out and install better governments. The baddies are so in control of the nation’s press, schools and political apparatus that events must run their course, over many generations, unto total collapse. Just ask the French of the 18th century or the Russians and Chinese of the mid-20th. The west has been on this course for nearly 100 years now, since a great civilization was dashed to pieces in the fields and forests of Europe and collectivism gained a foothold.

Most of the way there.

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The bounce has been faster and more comprehensive than I expected. I was thinking that we would top around these levels, but by summer or fall, not early May. I have continued to scale into distant-expiry SPY and QQQQ puts, favoring ITM and ATM, and have now deployed about 1/3 of the money I am willing to allocate to shorts. I also have a smidgen of shorter-term positions in certain ridiculously high-flying restaurant and other consumer stocks.

The bond sell-off and commodities rally indicate that inflation fears now have the upper hand, as most people still believe deflation will be a short-lived phenomenon. The aforementioned movements are setting up nicely for long and short replays, respectively.

Notwithstanding a long-overdue correction, I suspect that stocks have further to run, and am no longer such a skeptic of certain Elliott wavers’ target of S&P 1050. Bullishness is now at 80%, up from 2% in March, but judging from attitudes on TV, there is still a great deal of skepticism to be overcome before we can call a top. That said, the speed and evenness of the advance leads me to expect much more choppiness for the remainder.

Shorting precious metals has been frustrating, and I suspect that we are repeating the pattern of last spring, when we had to work our way through several months of chop after receding from manic levels (1030 gold that time, vs 1007 in February).

It is important to keep in mind the real situation, not just the current market mood (though you can’t trade on fundamentals alone). We can’t work off the greatest credit bubble in history in 18 months and just a 57% loss in the stock market. The real (private, productive) economy is not going to stop shedding jobs, let alone add them, for years, and people are so indebted that they cannot be enticed to reflate the asset bubble or return to previous levels of wasteful spending. It will take a generation to work through our debt and lifestyle delusions.

It bears repeating that today’s official headline unemployment number (8.9%) cannot be compared to numbers from before the 1990s, when the Clinton administration changed the reporting methodology to exclude large segments of unemployed. A more useful measure for historical comparisons is U-6 unemployment, which now stands at 15.8% for April. Today on Bloomberg I heard Christina Romer say that things were nothing like the Great Depression, as she compared apples to oranges. In reality, we are at solidly depressionary levels already.

Also bear in mind that stock valuations remain at bubble levels. This is easy to see when you remember that stocks have no intrinsic value other than marked to market book value and heavily discounted future earnings. The major indexes’ trailing PE’s on net earnings will be under 10 by the time this is over. We still need to work off the bubble that was blown in the 1990s, which didn’t finish deflating in 2003 because of the easing of credit. Every kind of credit is tightening now, unless of course you are a bank holding company.

Trading sardines vs. eating sardines

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I have no strong opinion on near term market direction. I was prepared for this little downward correction, as for the larger bounce off 666 on the S&P500, but am highly ambivalent about where we go from this juncture.

Has this been a four month flat correction?

A case can be made that the entirety of market action since November has been one giant zig-zag correction that terminated last week, in which case we are now about to plunge to 550 among the kind of panic conditions that were so lacking at the latest lows. In support of this scenario we have the death-defying performance of a great number of tech and consumer stocks that have failed to even re-approach their November lows, as well as some of the most extreme readings on retail bullishness since the start of the bear market (Rydex bull/bear fund assets, put/call ratio, NYSE Tick). Remember, the ’29-’32 market corrected from its initial crash with a 48% rally from November ’29 to April ’30. If this is the Greater Depression (and by the looks of the latest trade and manufacturing numbers, let alone the scale of the debt saturation that caused this situation, it is), perhaps a big zig-zag is all the enthusiasm society can muster this time.

Or was it actually a washout?

That said, more likely in my mind is a protracted rally extending to 900 or higher by summer, then rolling over to meet a date with 400 next winter. Look at last year’s rallies from March to May and July to August for an idea of what this might look like, though on a larger percentage and time scale because we are correcting a larger sell-off. The case for such a move is bolstered when you hear major investment banks’ strategists calling this a dead cat bounce. Too many people are still afraid to call a bottom, and they need to be suckered into long positions before this is over (along the same lines, too many traders are embracing the dead cat bounce and need to be shaken out before it can get back to leading the buy-and-holders to slaughter).

I am highly skeptical, though respectful, of calls for a the mother of all bear market rallies. Robert Prechter and some other Elliott Wavers, as well as Tim Knight (slopeofhope.com) seem to be anticipating a 6-month or longer rally to as high as 1050. I simply don’t see why that is necessary in this environment. This is a depression, and the last one was accompanied by bear market that, after the first 6 months, maintained the momentum of a cruising supertanker. Rallies of 20 percent and 2 months were about all you got from April 1930 to July 1932 as the Dow dropped from about 295 to 41. That deflation-driven event was a much more orderly bear market than the jagged trajectory of the dot-com crash, which occured while the credit bubble continued to expand. Interestingly, the 1966-1982 secular bear (a brutal 75% loss in real terms) also traced out such a series of steep plunges and rallies as the bubble kept inflating thanks to a compliant Fed and the abandonment of the last trace of the gold standard. Employment was down, but animal spirits were still running high with the computing boom, the advent of securitization, and new innovations in consumer credit.

Feel like a depression yet?

Though the current bear market is half over in terms of price (three weeks ago we hit -57% and you can’t lose more than 100%), we are still early in the game as far as the economy goes. Official (read: bullshit) unemployment is still just a tad over 8%, and while the old measure (U-6) is reading 14%, we are headed for 25% in a hurry. Baring a catalyzing event, Obama’s approval rating has nowhere to go but down — in terms of historical context his term is positioned like that of Hoover, not FDR, who took office after the market had bottomed and already doubled.

This all spells a continuing deterioration in mood, possibly even at an accelerated pace, but because the market is not efficient and couldn’t care less about the economic fundamentals, an aggressively bearish trading stance is still only warranted when the market is highly overbought in multiple time-frames. Right now, we are only mildly overbought on a week-by-week scale (on Friday we were very overbought on this scale), while of course oversold on a daily scale and still somewhat oversold to neutral on a monthly scale (picture a 1-year chart). It is the 3-10 year chart that makes me nervous about being too quick to load up on shorts again. All things being equal, does this look like a good spot to go short?

3-year view here from bigcharts.com:

To deal with this situation I have lately been slowly accumulating December 2011 OTM puts on the S&P, scaling up purchases as the market rises. These positions are for keeps. I do not intend to part with them until the market has fallen well below 600 if not 500 (32 months should be more than enough time for that to happen, no matter how things girate in the interim). For trading the twists and turns along the way, December 2010 and even 2009 puts do very nicely. They are highly liquid and responsive to the market’s daily moves.

I am still bearish on the precious metals from a trading standpoint, and exercise this opinion mainly through the silver futures market and various equity puts (that said, if you don’t already have a nice pile of physical gold, get some and you’ll sleep better). Here and there investors are still losing their minds over certain stocks (ahem, Best Buy), and I always stand ready to short such silliness.

Quick opinions:

S&P earnings: Analysts still have their heads in the clouds and the I-banks are still getting away with talking about “expected operating earnings.” NET NET NET trailing report earnings are all that matters, and those will fall under $20 and stay there for many months before they start to grow again. Put a PE of 8 on that Jackson for your stock market bottom.

US bonds: bearish but not shorting

US dollar: bullish

Euro and Swiss Franc: bearish

Yen: neutral

Oil: neutral but prepared to start shorting at 60

Base metals: neutral to bearish (will short again if higher)

Grains: still waiting to buy

US real estate: wait until 2012 and figure on a cash market, but maybe buy in late 2010 if you can still get a low fixed rate loan.

NYC real estate: wait a year longer than the rest of the US — amazingly, denial still runs deeper there.

Guns ‘n ammo: good to own, but worthless if you don’t learn how to use them intelligently.

Obama: To appease and distract the masses, will he be crucified like Nixon?

Fear recedes, so how will it return?

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The markets are experiencing a bit of a thaw today, with the memory of panic several weeks behind us now. The VIX has just broken decisively below 40 for the first time since September. Treasury yields have broken out just a tad from their extreme lows. Oil has jumped back to the mid-40s, copper has relieved its oversold condition, the GDX gold stock ETF has more than doubled, and the Dow has crept back to near 9000 again.

The question now remains, how will fear return? In several more weeks or months after the mood turns from relief to greed (and fear of missing out), or in the very near future?

My mind is not made up, but any breakaway rally is way overdue. With every week since the November 21 lows, we have been relieving the oversold condition as a function of time rather than price. That is not to say that the Dow couldn’t creep all the way to 10,000 by March, but the longer we hover here, the less necessary such a rally becomes.

What would be interesting in a January plunge is for the bond market to sell off with the stock market for the first time in recent events. But if the inverse correlation still holds, the overbought condition in Treasuries could find relief in a “happy days are not quite here again but will be soon” rally in stocks. Today’s action is what such an environment would look like, but with a great deal more animal spirits — $65 oil might even materialize (before new lows of course).

At any event, with the VIX below 38 I picked up a few more cheap puts on GDX today. Gold stocks have had a great run, and the same people are buying them today as were holding them in the crash, and for the same reasons. That is a bad sign.

My favorite short though is still the death-defying Home Depot. Also keep an eye on WalMart. People need cheap stuff, but they don’t need as much of it as they have been buying in recent years. At 16.5, the PE on that behemoth is still out of line, as is Costco’s at 18.5.

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PS — Note that in this kind of analysis, I don’t pay much attention to news pieces or economic releases. That is not the way to trade. For instance, we have horrible manufacturing data out today, and all data is worse than 6 weeks ago, but the mood is hopeful and stocks are up, so how can you make money trading on the news?

I look at the mood of the market itself and try to figure out what it is feeling and what themes it is trading on: greed, panic, relief, inflation, deflation, dollar bad, dollar good, etc. I try to figure out the mood by what different asset prices are doing, and wait for entry and exit points when trends look exhaused. To know the larger trend is key, in this case deflation and depression, but the market’s take on the situation is always changing. You wait for Mr. Market to be very wrong about a situation or just too enthusiastic, as in the case of the overextended bond rally this month — in deflation, bonds are good, but overbought is overbought.