GLOBAL ECONOMY (December 3rd 2012): Global PMI Round-up; ISM Below 50 Again, China Bottom?

Today saw the final Manufacturing PMI reports to be released in 2012 from Europe to China and the USA. We focus on the trend in PMI statistics from around the world, to serve as an accurate bellwether for trends in business conditions and economic activity. While market timing can be a difficult, if not impossible task, trends in leading indicators are an important...

Read More

US MARKET ANALYSIS (November 10th 2012): Prevailing Bearish Sentiment in Market Breadth

Just a quick post this weekend to highlight the technical weakness in US market breadth, which has deteriorated over the last month or so. As we highlighted last week, leading economic indicators were broadly disappointing for the month of October. While encouraging signs were made in the recovery of US indicators, and there were some early signs of a "bottoming out" of Chinese...

Read More

GLOBAL ECONOMY (November 4th 2012): Global PMI Round-up; How Strong Is the "Improving" Trend in Economic Data Worldwide?

Thursday and Friday this week saw the release of important economic reports from the United States and the rest of the world. ISM Manufacturing, Non Farm Payrolls, Unemployment Claims and PMI stats were released for October - with important implications for the imminent US Presidential Election, ongoing global monetary policy and overall trends in the global economy. In...

Read More

US ECONOMY (October 18th 2012): Unemployment Claims Spike - but DON'T TRUST THE HEADLINES, the TRUTH is less exciting

Last week we wrote an article on the subject of Weekly Jobless Claims, suggesting that the 339k reading (a multi-year low) might be considered the first sign that QE3 was being felt in the labour statistics. You can read that here. However, it was soon made clear that part of this was a technical difficulty, with some of the claims not being recorded in that data...

Read More

US ECONOMY (October 16th 2012): Capacity Utilization Rate

The US Capacity Utilization Rate is an indicator to be respected. Very few monthly economic indicators show long term trends in the US economy quite as simply as the CUR. It is exceptionally useful for providing noise-free, long term bullish and bearish cycles in the US economy, when viewed on longer timeframes. If I had to give a complete novice ONE MONTHLY...

Read More