This week we were privy to both new inflation and initial unemployment claims data. The CPI data revealed a rather mundane inflation scenario. Meanwhile, the weekly initial claims number came in at a whopping 853K and missed estimates by the largest amount since June. Yet,...
With the economic weakness in China permeating Asia and EMs generally, we should not be at all surprised to see copper making a new cycle low, and it is (chart 1). But Dr. Copper is hardly alone in providing a dis-inflationary signal. Indeed the broad-based weakness...
We're pleased to present our first quarterly commentary on the Gavekal Knowledge Leaders Indexes, the intellectual property behind our new strategic beta products. As a data driven firm, we spend significant time working with data, from sourcing it to scrubbing it to identify Knowledge Leaders,...
As we look at our screen today we see basically all commodities down between 1-2%, but this is just the continuation of a much longer-term trend. Indeed, economically sensitive commodities like copper, crude, natural gas and aluminum (charts below) are all plumbing/trying to plumb new...
Oil tends to get all the headline but commodities in general continue to take a beating. The Reuters CRB Continuous Commodity Index is down nearly 24% over the past year. Our commodities diffusion index is at its lowest level since February 2009....
The trend is your friend, so they say…as long as you are on the right side of it. That saying is particularly relevant to the trend in bond yields (30-year down 7bps) as today we get new all-time lows in the US long bond despite...
2014 was a rough year for commodities (and not just for oil)....
The simplest way we know of to measure whether an index is overbought or oversold is to calculate the percent of stocks in the index that are trading above their own 200-day moving average....
Given that commodities are for the most part priced in USD, it follows that stronger USD weighs on commodity prices, and vice versa. As we can see from the first chart below, the long-term correlation of monthly price changes between the CRB Index and the...
The Reuters CRB Continuous Commodity Index is up about 3.5% over the past year and is only about 11% higher than it was four years ago. So on the surface commodity prices seem relatively stable. This year, however, we have seen a significant expansion in...
Copper prices continue to recover from weakness earlier in the year, but are approaching an area of resistance: Taking an even longer-term view, we see just how important this level has been in the past five years: Our point-and-figure chart also indicates that copper prices...
With an impressive jump in coffee futures and a breakdown in copper, commodities have received a fair amount of attention so far this week....
One of the charting ”tools” that we like to use are diffusion indices. A diffusion index is a simple, yet effective, way to look at breadth in any market. Below we chart a one year diffusion index of selected commodities vs a year one diffusion...
The Boom-Bust Baromter (CRB Raw Industiral Index/Initial unemployment Claims) has rallied since making a low on October 4th back to almost new highs. If the market keeps pushing higher will the Boom-Bust Barometer be able to keep pace?...
The Markit Flash PMI was released today for China, showing that manufacturing expanded at a slower in November than in October. Every component except one was down compared to the previous month. This data point is in line with the weakness we’ve seen in the...
