NO STRINGS ATTACHED NEWS THAT MAINSTREAM JUST WON'T COVER.
Here’s the most insane golf shot you’ll EVER see … Jordan Spieth skipped a ball SEVEN times over the water in a pond — and landed it within 10 feet from the hole!!! It all went down Wednesday at The Par 3 Contest — the prelude to this weekend’s…
https://www.tmz.com/2019/04/10/jordan-spieth-pga-the-masters-trick-shot-water/
Oil Unimpressed As OPEC+ Committee Recommends Further 500,000 Bpd Cut
OilPrice.com's Tsvetana Paraskova notes that a ministerial committee of OPEC and its partners led by Russia recommended that the OPEC+ oil production cuts be deepened by 500,000 bpd, two sources told Reuters on the sidelines of the OPEC meeting in Vienna.
And despite plenty of volatility, oil prices were thoroughly unimpressed...
The Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) of the OPEC and non-OPEC countries with representatives of the leaders of the two groups, Saudi Arabia and Russia, respectively, met to discuss the state of the oil market and to suggest a course of action for the full OPEC ministerial meeting which is taking place at the time of writing. The full ministerial OPEC plus Russia-led non-OPEC meeting will be held on Friday.
Russia’s Energy Minister Alexander Novak said at the end of the OPEC+ JMMC panel meeting that the recommendation is to deepen the cuts by 500,000 bpd in the first quarter of 2020 with full compliance and JMMC to meet again in March to review the market situation.
On Thursday, the much-anticipated meeting in Vienna began with rumors among analysts that a so-called “Saudi surprise”—deepening the cuts by 800,000 bpd or even more—may be in the making. The unusual level of ‘no comments’ from delegates and unusually cohesive discipline in (the lack of) messages to the media raises questions, Financial Times Energy Editor, David Sheppard, tweeted.
Then word began to circulate that Saudi Arabia and Venezuela proposed at the OPEC+ panel deepening the cut by 500,000 bpd. A Saudi official told Energy Intelligence that there was “No deeper cut being advocated by the kingdom.”
There are also reports that Saudi Arabia told on Thursday its partners that it is no longer tolerating any cheating on quotas, and, according to Bloomberg, they are offering a quid pro quo - "we will cut, if you stop cheating.”
According to analysts who have run the numbers, deepening the cuts by 500,000 bpd - considering the October 2018 baseline in the current deal - would not be much of a hassle for the OPEC+ group, because they are currently overcomplying as a whole with the level of the cuts. If laggards in compliance, such as Iraq and Nigeria, fall in line, and if Russia wins with its request to have condensate out of the crude oil production numbers, then these additional 500,000 bpd ‘cuts’ are no actual cuts at all.
Tyler Durden Thu, 12/05/2019 - 15:10 Tags PoliticsThe Other US-China 'War': Plunge Protectors Versus National Team
As tensions increase between China and US over trade, democracy/Hong Kong, Taiwan, Huawei, and diplomatic travel, there is another 'struggle' going on that is all about appearance.
Bloomberg opines that an unusual sense of tranquility has descended on China's financial markets, especially notable amid the chaos of dueling headline-algos that a deal is close (or not).
Notably, Bloomberg raises the specter of China's "National Team" - as state-backed funds are called - which is sometimes suspected of buying shares to ensure market stability around major events like legislative meetings or big anniversaries.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see if the government asked banks or funds to not react to the news,” said Justin Tang, head of Asian research at United First Partners, who added that he does not see direct intervention as in the past.
“The government could be a quiet hand of the market in China.”
However, one thing Bloomberg does not dare to mention is the US Plunge Protection Team appears to be have been just as active...
Since the "Phase One Complete" headlines, China has slid notably while US markets have risen almost incessantly (and far too linearly)...
Source: Bloomberg
Additionally, while Bloomberg notes the relative calm of China's markets, it has relatively exploded relatiove to the collapse in volatility in US markets...
Source: Bloomberg
We give the last word to Hao Hong, chief strategist at Bocom International:
"Does this lack of volatility feel normal? No!"
But do not for one second believe this is China only, given the charts above, it's clear that someone or something is desperate to keep US markets aloft...
Source: Bloomberg
And don't forget...
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXmNpdYpfnk]
And so it is that both China and US are desperate to maintain the appearance of 'strength' - as indicated by their respective stock markets - as trade deal chatter reaches the vinegar strokes.
Tyler Durden Thu, 12/05/2019 - 14:55 Tags Business FinanceRickards: Time To Reduce Exposure To The Stock Market
Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,
The major stock market indices will move sideways through the remainder of the month (and year) to end the year about where they are now. That said, if markets move outside a narrow range, there is more downside potential than upside.
This is a good time to lighten up on equity exposure and reallocate to bonds, cash and gold.
Stock markets haven’t gained much over the past two years. That may come as a shock to investors who feel like they’ve been on a roller coaster ride since early 2018. Yet, the fact is that the Dow Jones Industrial Index was 26,616 on January 26, 2018 and about 27,850 as of today.
That’s about a 1,200-point gain, or 600 points a year. 600 points is one good day for the market. Is that the best it can do over two years? Even adding an average 2% annual dividend yield, the annualized return is about 3%. That’s far less than an investor could have made in super-safe U.S. Treasury bonds.
If you’re a day trader, you might have made money buying dips and selling near the top in rallies. More likely, non-professional traders lost money chasing the rallies and bailing out during the drawdowns. If you’re the typical buy-and-hold investor watching your 401(k) statements, you’ve gone almost nowhere despite the fireworks. You’re right back where you started.
The question is, why?
The drivers of the sideways movement in stocks are slow economic growth and weak earnings growth in individual companies.The drivers of the short-term volatility along the way are good news/bad news on trade wars, and utter confusion at the Fed.
The bottom line is stocks are moving sideways on a sea of uncertainty. Let’s back up a minute to see how we got here…
After the Trump tax cuts passed in late 2017, the White House was predicting growth would return to the long-term trend (post-1980) of 3.2% or higher. That hasn’t happened.
The second quarter of 2018 did show annualized growth of 3.5%, but that was a one-time effect from employee bonuses and consumer confidence due to higher stock prices resulting from the Trump tax cuts.
That euphoria quickly faded.
Growth in the fourth quarter of 2018 was only 1.1%. For all of 2018, U.S. GDP grew by 2.9%, higher than the average growth since the end of the last recession in June 2009, but far less than the White House projected.
Since then growth has slowed even more as the effect of the 2017 tax cuts has faded. On an annualized based, the first quarter of 2019 showed 3.1% growth, the second quarter was 2.0% and original readings of third-quarter growth came in at 1.9%. It was upgraded to 2.1%, but that’s nothing to write home about.
This puts annualized growth year-to-date at 2.4%, almost exactly where it has been for the past ten years. In short, the Trump growth miracle is a mirage. We’re in the same 2.3% rut we’ve been in since 2009.
The cumulative impact of trade wars, currency wars and geopolitical tension is also reflected in a slowdown in global growth. The following summary comes from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook press conference on October 15, 2019 as presented by Gita Gopinath, Director of the IMF’s Research Department:
As for the global economy, the global economy is in a synchronized slowdown. And we are, once again, downgrading growth for 2019 to 3 percent, its slowest pace since the global financial crisis. Growth continues to be weakened by rising trade barriers and growing geopolitical tensions. We estimate that the U.S.‑China trade tensions will cumulatively reduce the level of global GDP by 0.8 percent by 2020. Growth is also being weighed down by country‑specific factors in several emerging market and developing economies and also by structural forces, such as low productivity growth and ageing demographics in advanced economies. … The weakness in growth is driven by a sharp deterioration in manufacturing and global trade, with higher tariffs and prolonged trade policy uncertainty damaging investment and demand for capital goods… Overall, trade volume growth in the first half of 2019 has fallen to 1 percent, the weakest level since 2012.
The good news/bad news volatility is also easy to explain. Stock markets are no longer traded by humans with different perspectives. Stocks are traded by robots, and robots are dumb.
Many investors still have the belief that their buy or sell stock orders are matched against other orders by humans with different views. The orders are matched by computers and the result is an orderly market with efficient price discovery. That scenario is not true.
Today, over 95% of New York Stock Exchange trades are generated by robots using algorithms to decide when to buy and sell. These are not matching systems (which have been around since the 1990s). These are trading robots that decide what to do without human intervention.
Trading is no longer man v. man or woman v. woman. It’s robot v. robot with a small number of trades in the form of man or woman v. robot. You’re not trying to outwit another human. You’re trying to outwit a robot.
The good news is that robots are easy to figure out. They act automatically based on source code and algorithms developed by coders and applied mathematicians who don’t necessarily know much about the psychology of markets. Robots buy or sell based on headlines or key words.
They also buy “high” (as defined) and sell “low” (also as defined) based on boundaries set by the developers.
This dynamic explains both the short-term volatility and the longer-term range bound trading. On the one hand, robots will scramble (in microseconds) to dump stocks if there’s a negative report in the trade wars.
They likewise buy stocks if there’s a positive report in the trade wars. At the same, robots will sell when stocks approach Dow 27,000 (or similar benchmarks on the S&P 500) and buy when stocks approach Dow 25,000.
Unfortunately, neither the robots nor their human developers were ready for the Age of Trump.
President Trump will call President Xi of China his “best friend” on Monday and denounce Chinese “theft” on a Wednesday. Robots are good at reading headlines, but they’re no good at understanding nuance, body language or Trump’s Art of the Deal style.
The same is true of the robots’ ability to understand the Fed.
Jay Powell was a hawk in December 2018 (when he raised rates), a dove in January 2019 (when he promised not to raise rates), a super-dove in the spring of 2019 when he decided to cut rates and end Fed balance sheet reductions, and utterly confused in September 2019 when he said he might not cut rates soon, but would expand the balance sheet. Then Powell cut rates again in October.
How is a robot supposed to understand a highly conflicted human? It can’t. But, it can issue automated buy and sell orders on every new headline.
The bottom line is that growth is weakening, the Fed is cutting rates, the trade wars are not over (despite happy talk) and political tensions are rising.
That’s a mix of support for stocks (Fed rate cuts and good trade war news) and headwinds for stocks (bad trade war news, weak growth and politics). These forces will tend to offset each other and leave stocks in early 2020 about where they are now.
That’s a reason to reduce equity exposure and consider some of the stronger plays in bonds and gold.
Tyler Durden Thu, 12/05/2019 - 14:40 Tags Business FinanceHow Smartphones Add To Election Chaos
A study by The Guardian and research agency Revealing Realty has concluded what we've known for some time; people tend to cram as much information into their brains, as fast as possible, with little to no scrutiny.
What that leads to, according to the report, is the rapid spread of misinformation while people ignore the substance of an article - often instead heading straight to the comments sections for an argument before absorbing key information.
While The Guardian says the analysis is a "snapshot" and not a "statistically representative sample of the population" due to the fact that they tracked the smartphones of just six volunteers in the UK who agreed to have their smartphone behavior monitored over three days - the publication says the results comport with previous studies to illustrate patterns of behavior across the political spectrum. Given the source, this may also be part of some argument that the nanny state needs to do a better job monitoring and filtering content - for our own good, we're sure.
Charlie in Sunderland consumed much of his election news through memes on lad humour Facebook pages, spending more time looking at posts of Boris Johnson using the word “boobies” than reading traditional news stories. Fiona in Bolton checked out claims about Jeremy Corbyn’s wealth by going to a website called Jihadi Watch before sharing the far-right material in a deliberate bid to anger her leftwing friends. And Shazi in Sheffield followed the BBC leaders’ interviews purely by watching videos of party supporters chanting the Labour leader’s name outside the venue. -The Guardian
"News is becoming intermingled with entertainment," says Revealing Reality's Damon De Ionno, who spearheaded the project after inventing the method of recording participants' smartphone screens. "You’re no longer asking: what’s going on in the world today? It’s very different – you want to be entertained."
Notable (though not entirely surprising) findings:
Several of the subjects shared Facebook articles without clicking the links - and instead dove into the comments sections. People tend to read news that confirms their existing views. We "may be becoming a nation of trolls" (Only right-wing abusing the left, of course).One 22-year-old Conservative-voting woman was observed going out of her way to read reputable mainstream news sources so she had a balanced understanding of Labour policies. But she would then seek out provocative far-right blog posts to share on Facebook because their headlines would anger her leftwing friends and create online drama.
Mainstream news sources have ceded ground to alternative news outlets.“It’s total anarchy,” said De Ionno. “The idea of fake news and fake ads, with Russians manipulating people, is a really easy bogeyman. The reality is there’s many more shades of grey and it’s hard to unpick.”
How the study was conducted
At Revealing Reality’s headquarters in a converted ballroom in south London, a group of analysts working for De Ionno are attempting to piece together how Britons are consuming news in this general election campaign with the aid of a wall of photos of each volunteer in their home, pages of data, and transcripts of interviews.
Although there were some changes in behaviour during the study – one person complained they had had to restrict their viewing of online porn while the study was taking place – the researchers believe most people largely forgot their phones were being recorded.
Analysts then studied the recordings of each volunteer’s screen activity using an coding system adapted from software originally built for the study of animal behaviour, before comparing notes following a three-hour interview with each participant.
"They’re disengaging with mainstream sources," said one analyst.
"If social media content is playing such a central role in shaping people’s views on the election what are the implications for high quality journalism, reputable sources and well constructed and evidenced articles?" asked the researchers.
"News doesn’t stick as well. There’s a new drama every day and cliffhangers on a daily basis. A lot of the respondents didn’t have a good memory of what happened a week ago, said De Ionno.
In short, people don't trust mainstream news, often don't read past the headlines, prefer content that reinforces their worldview, and love sharing quick memes while arguing in the comments section.
"If everything people that people are seeing is via social media – who is accountable? There is very little human intelligence or decision-making behind it, no attempt to give a balanced view. That seems to leave all responsibility on the reader."
We're sure there's a nanny-state solution to that!
Tyler Durden Thu, 12/05/2019 - 14:25Trump Mocks Pelosi's "Nervous Fit" After Melting Down At Reporter
Update (1150ET): It did not take long for President Trump to respond to Pelosi's outburst...
Nancy Pelosi just had a nervous fit. She hates that we will soon have 182 great new judges and sooo much more. Stock Market and employment records. She says she “prays for the President.” I don’t believe her, not even close. Help the homeless in your district Nancy. USMCA?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 5, 2019 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js* * *
As we detailed earlier, having accused President Trump of "abuse of power" and calling for the House to draft articles of impeachment for "using the office of the President for personal gain," pointing out that The Founders "could not have foreseen such a rogue president;" and then calling the president a "coward" for not helping kids on gun violence, blasting him as "cruel" for not helping DREAMers, and slamming him for being "in denial" over climate change; a reporter at Speaker Pelosi's weekly press conference dared to ask if she "hated" President Trump.
Pelosi snapped...
"I don't hate anybody. I was raised in a Catholic house, we don't hate anybody - not anybody in the world. So don't you accuse me of any [hate]," Pelosi said during her weekly press briefing in the Capitol.
"As a Catholic I resent you using the word 'hate,'" she continued.
"Don't mess with me when it comes to words like that."
Watch the full clip here as The Speaker lost it...
Q: "Do you hate the president?"@SpeakerPelosi: "I don't hate anybody…As a Catholic, I resent your using the word hate in a sentence that addresses me. I don't hate anyone…So, don't mess with me when it comes to words like that." Full video: https://t.co/l9peY9RTzl pic.twitter.com/zpqUaCcVrS
— CSPAN (@cspan) December 5, 2019 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsWas it just us or what was going on with her arm during her rant?
Tyler Durden Thu, 12/05/2019 - 14:11 Tags Social Issues Religion Belief Politics
![[CB] Panic, EU & WTO Ruling, Trump Moves Forward Against The [CB] - Episode 2036a](https://i2.ytimg.com/vi/aDggfyENYqE/hqdefault.jpg)
