Weekend Reading - Can American Consumerism Save Us?

There’s hardly any point doing a wrap-up as hardly anything has been happening . If you are buried in the daily gyrations of the market, lots of stuff happens during the day but, as soon as you step back and look at the action - you’ll notice nothing really happened at all.  After a catastrophic downturn on Monday, we pretty much bottomed out at 8,250 on Tuesday until Thursday’s 200-point bump and here we are, back at good old 8,450 - which is  where we bumped along for pretty much all of May .  Indeed our best plays have, by far, been our premium burning plays, as attested by the very nice performance of our $111,659 Portfolio, our exercise in conservative hedging that is outperforming most risk-based strategies in this very choppy market.  The other winning strategy in this annoying market has been Day Trading, and we’ve had fantastic performance from our Oxen Group picks each morning and Ilene has a good article what David looks for in " The 5 Keys to Identifying a Fundamental Day Trade ."  Combine that article with our  Strategy Section and  my article on scaling in and you have your own little day-trader’s manual!  This will be useful next week as we have a 4-day week (Friday is the observed 4th of July) and there’s no way we want to go into the 3-day weekend with too many positions so it’s going to be a lot of in and out trading once again.  I probably shouldn’t but I keep focusing on these silly fundamentals like Bespoke’s GDP chart on the right.  These are FACTS, which are the things being ignored as you hear things like Friday’s Michigan Consumer Sentiment hit 70.  I often point out that these are the same consumers - 60% of whom, when polled, believe their homes have held their value or gone up in value.  Just because they are all chipper for the pollsters, does not mean they will be out there turning these economies around. US consumers are the New York Yankees of global consumption.  They are indimidating, they are record-setting and, from an historical perspective, they give the IMPRESSION of being unbeatable - but I grew up in New York and remember a streak from 1965 to 1975 when they didn’t win a single pennant.  That’s a team that has averaged one World Series Title every 3.3 years since 1923 (26 Times World Champs)  and one League Championship every 2.3 years over the same time period.  Like the US consumer, you come to EXPECT the Yankees to be in contention and…