Monday, October 16, 2017

The Year Of Trumptopia aka. Global Synchronized Asset Crash

The first year of Trumptopia is ending. The world has been enraptured by his leadership, everything 'risk' got bought with both hands. Nevertheless, one can make the case that the next 12 months won't be the same as the last...

It's been almost a year since the election - a year of unprecedented low volatility Trumptopian "bliss". Concerns about WWIII, Brexit, Trump, China, Fed tightening, trade wars, OPEC, are worlds away. The 24x7 rally in large cap EM stocks created the illusion of a one-way market, obliterating short-sellers and otherwise collapsing volume and volatility to record lows. Of course, these are now the riskiest stocks in the casino...

"To everything - turn, turn, turn
There is a season - turn, turn, turn"




But first, it speaks volumes about Globalization that those who control the capital are wholly oblivious to the plight of those who provide the imaginary recovery aka. the labour. The casino class has no fucking clue if there's a recovery at the bottom of this ponzi scheme. They take it as an article of their enduring fake faith that the Fed isn't right now imploding recovery again the way they did in 2000, 2007, and 2017...




One of the central tenets of Elliott Wave theory is that risk is "all one market", meaning that on the downside all global assets reach a correlation of '1'. We saw that in 2008, and again in 2015. 

Great question - is this the meltup prior to the meltdown? If so, which stocks should I buy and who will tell me when to get out?


“For the first time in a number of years,” investors are looking at a “global economic recovery” that is synchronized

Gamblers, economists, Wall Street, and most ironically Central Banksters have all conflated synchronized asset levitation with global synchronized recovery. The exact same levitation Central Banksters themselves sponsored. Leave aside the fact that Wall Street's narrative has conveniently rotated around the globe for the entire past year since the election: first U.S.-led reflation, then European reflation, then Emerging Markets reflation, now just to stretch the narrative to the most asinine extent possible - Japanese reflation. Sure. Because if you buy it they will come. 

The top performing "asset" this past year wasn't Bitcoin, which has risen ~500% year-to-date, it's another crypto-currency Ethereum, which has risen 4,000% year-to-date:

As we see, it peaked in June and again in late August (corrective) and is now clinging to the uptrend line, barely:


The S&P 500 is up ~14% year-to-date. The top performing U.S. sector is semiconductors +36%. Of the top 12 performing stocks in the S&P 500, 5 are in the semiconductor index: Nvidia, Micron, AMD, Applied Materials, and Lam Research.


Semiconductors are interesting, because they are the locus of S&P 500 momentum, they are heavily tied to crypto-currency mining, and they are the locus of Nasdaq 100 momentum:



One can make the case that they are the linchpin to the grenade:


Speaking of melt-up to meltdown, driving this relentless bid of low volatility for this past year are Emerging Market stocks. Primarily Chinese tech stocks which are the global linchpins  (Alibaba, TenCent, Baidu, Sohu, YY etc.) traded on multiple exchanges in China, the U.S. and Hong Kong. 

These are the stocks that give the casino its 24x7 perpetual low volume low volatility bid. Every time the pre-market opens, these stocks already have a bid from the overnight session. They are handed off from one exchange to the next:




It never occurs to gamblers who are now asleep at the wheel after 12 months of low volatility "bliss", that this process will work the opposite in reverse. These same over-bought over-owned stocks will get sold in the overnight, leading to pre-market Shanghai surprise:





No surprise, then that Hong Kong is the top performing global market year-to-date:




Unfortunately, China Tech is already a tad overbought:









Revenueless Biotech had a great run in 2015, but this time can only manage a deep three wave retracement:



Wall Street's most recent unicorn IPOs are all imploding, relative to their first day pump and dump:





Europe has peaked, Canada has peaked, Australia peaked a long time ago. The average U.S. stock has peaked. The fact that bulltards are now hanging their hats on Japan is not overly bullish: