Momentum Monday…Make America Gold Again
Before I get started…as a follow up to my ode to $UBER yesterday, Ben Thompson dove deep on the new CEO and what he thinks. I am glad we agree.
Ok…
The bad news …there is no Momentum Monday video this week.
I do have this great picture of my view as I write this in Kennebunkport overlooking the Bush compound:
The rest of this momentum post is good news.
The S&P 500 has not had 3% drawdown since the election last November, 2nd longest run in history (thanks Charlie Bilello for that factoid).
The S&P has chopped around for the last few months. The Stocktwits social crew shared this funny GIF of the action as late:
Despite the S&P chop, many stocks continue to run.
I had been counting on a bank breakout which has not materialized. The financials that do continue to run include Visa, Paypal and Mastercard (been long them all).
The payment theme extends to China with Alibaba and Tencent continuing to hit all-time highs (been long Tencent). The Tencent/Alibaba payments battles has been going all Tencent’s way of late (TenPay).
The exchanges also continue to do well including the Nasdaq, ICE and the CME. I do not own them but $CME looks poised for a continued run to more all-time highs. CME Group is the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace offering the widest range of futures and options products for risk management. The hedgies are probably chasing the momentum here as a poor man’s way to play the future of Bitcoin (hedging and futures) and digital currencies.
The most interesting discussions of momentum I have seen the last week though are centered on Gold.
It was trending on Stocktwits today as well.
Technically, it is strong. Here is the breakout.
Michael Batnick wrote a good piece discussion the position he might took and why.
I checked in on the streams of my global macro friends to see what they were chatting about.
Fundamentally things could be ripe for a gold bull run. Millennials and geeks only have eyes from cryptro, but gold is the original store of value and I have to think many trading desks and hedgies could be taking some cryptro profits and swapping into it.
Why?
As Charlie Bilello points out:
Even at 0% Gold has a HIGHER two year yield than 13 countries.
Every developed country central bank in the world is maintaining negative real interest rates (I would add a holy shit to that).
The US dollar is at it’s lowest level since the election…gold now at it’s highest. The confidence that Trump talks about is a huge lie.
After the volatility of the last few weeks the odds of a FED interest rate cut are higher than a raise.
What a time to be alive and covered in gold.
Originally published at Howard Lindzon.
