The Heat Is On
It was a holiday week in the States last week, so I didn't pay all that much attention to what was happening. I know there was some hype around the jobs reports. I do know from watching the regular news that it was hot. Not just in the U.S. either, it was hot everywhere, like record setting hot. Our title highlights that using one of the few hits from the solo career of Eagles co-frontman, Glenn Frey .
The financial markets data was not hot this week for those with long positions. Equities were weak across the board. Commodities were mixed even within type. One standout was the performance of Yen versus the Dollar. A super strong day to end the week was nearly a two sigma event. Bonds saw a bit of a selloff, pretty much across the board. The longer end of the curve saw the most sell off.
This week I want to touch on the start of Earnings Season. It's not a huge week in terms of names or size, but it's important names that kick us off. Looking at some global benchmarks, we can see that both the 2023 and 2024 numbers have come in considerably since the beginning of the year. The 2023 growth numbers are essentially crap, but 2024 is still holding on.
As I said, not a ton of names, but UNH and JPM are the largest. Banks are the general highlight, but I'm also interested to hear from Delta with all the travel consumers are taking lately. Citigroup has a rather large Predicted Surprise to the downside.
Best of the Week
This one is a little old, as it came out a few months ago, but it was just brought to my attention via Meb Faber 's weekly newsletter. The data in this report is amazing. Automation has been a big topic in many industries and it's no different in retirement savings. Automated savings has tripled since 2007. The average rate of savings for Vanguard plan participants is 7.4% with employers matching 4.5%. The most surprising stat to me was that 83% of people use target date funds. One that wasn't so surprising was 12% of people have some loan on their retirement account outstanding. The report is an enormous 115 pages, but has a ton of valuable info.
Best of the Rest
This episode is a discussion of some of the points made in PGIM's 'Food for Thought' paper . Food was a very important link to the global economy. Roughly 40% are employed with some tie to the global food sector. The combination of extremely weather and rising temps are putting 12-15% of crops at risk. It's not just agriculture, this will also cause problems with fish populations. They chat about how ag-tech and cultivated meats might lead to some improvements. More developments in automated vehicles and packaging would also help improve on the nearly 40% of wasted food. Listening time: 30 minutes
领英推荐
Continuing on one of the points above the earth has set multiple records this week for hottest average temperature on record. Monday started it off with the third hottest day ever, then Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday each consecutively broke the record. This has me keeping an eye on the Workspace Agriculture Weather Dashboard.
This one is a little more news than normal, but this industry is at a crossroads. New home construction is on the rise with a current seasonally adjusted annualized number of more than 1.4M units and there's more to come with permits at 855k annually. Even with all that work, the US is still short homes. Charlie Bilello has some good charts on this in his weekly newsletter . For example, he points out the new highs in the Home Construction ETF.
This right here is one of the major reasons the United States continues to be the major market for equities. You never know how the winds of change might impact things in other countries. While the U.S. is a bit of a crap shoot lately with political parties at odds, they still take forever to enact any real change and swings like this rarely happen.
This was an awesome conversation. Dr. Kaku is one of my favorite scientists. He was at Google to talk about Quantum computing. This gets into some really technical stuff, but it's a fascinating talk. A couple of points he made boggled my mind. An example was that Moore's Law is coming to an end, because we'll be at the point where chips will not be able to get any smaller and we'll have to move into quantum computing. He says that while quantum computing has always been in the future, we're now on the precipice. These new processes will help solve the energy crisis, the food issues I highlighted above, and cure previously incurable diseases. Listening time: 65 minutes
One for the Road
Ignore the podcast name, this isn't just a topic for men. Everyone thinks they're good at multitasking, but the truth is that less than 2% of us are capable of moving from one task to another effectively. The real value in this conversation comes from our shift from one role to another. Parents and/or spouses that have a rough day at "the office" often take this home. Dr. Adam Fraser helps you make a proper transition into home life. Listening time: 54 minutes
Thanks for reading this week. Over the next couple of weeks, the blog will either be very light or not published depending on what sort of internet signal I have while traveling.