
string22bla
3.3K posts





Hedge Funds covered their ETF short positions last week at the fastest pace in more than a decade 🤯👀






Larry: Are you becoming chartist? 😀(I kind of remember that something happened at the end of the 1970s, like a trippling of oil prices, which might be vaguely relevant. Do u expect it to happen again?)




One theme that kept coming up in compiling the Orange Book (NI ORANGEBOOK <go>) during the latest earning season is economic recovery. Turned out that an earning transcript based index on the theme tracks /leads/ corroborate the signal from ISM manufacturing new orders index.

I’m massively short TSMC btw. They will ship zero chips next month if this trend continues.



USD demand turning a corner last few days, aligned with PBOC removing the 20% reserve requirement on fx forwards. Chinese corps and banks use forwards to buy USD. Speculation against CNY also just got cheaper. Aligns with slowing Chinese growth as well.


Every recession since 1960 has been preceded by a material downturn in this ratio. Today’s reading is squarely in that danger zone. These charts show the Leading Economic Index (LEI) against the Coincident Economic Index (CEI). The shaded bars are recessions. * LEI = things that move ahead of the economy (orders, hours worked, sentiment, credit conditions). * CEI = things that move with the economy (employment, income, production). When the ratio is high, leading data is strong relative to current conditions → the future looks more buoyant than the present. When the ratio falls, the forward-looking data weakens relative to current conditions → a signal the economy is losing altitude. The current value (≈ 0.85) is: * One of the lowest readings in 60+ years * Tracking levels seen ahead of every recession in the sample * Showing a persistent, multi-year decline—similar to pre-1980, pre-1990, pre-2001, pre-2008, and 2020 patterns. Markets usually bottom before the ratio troughs. Small caps and cyclicals underperform sharply during the downward leg. Quality balance sheets outperform junk. Valuation dispersion widens. Forward returns improve dramatically into the trough.













