Daily Chartbook #131

Welcome back to Daily Chartbook: macro market charts, data, and insights pulled from various sources around the Internet by a solo retail investor.

1. Case-Shiller. "US home price acceleration continued to slow (-0.54% MoM - slightly stronger than expected) for the 5th straight month".

2. Home Price Index. "November [FHFA] House Price Index -0.1% m/m vs. -0.5% est. & 0% prior".

3. Rent prices. "US Rents fell 0.4% in January, the 5th straight monthly decline. The year-over-year % increase has now moved down for 14 consecutive months after peaking at 18.1% in November 2021. At 3.3%, this is the smallest YoY increase since April 2021".

4. Global outlook (I). The IMF raised its outlook for economic growth for the first time in a year. It now expects global GDP to expand 2.9% in 2023 (0.2% more than forecast in October)."

5. Global outlook (II). "The IMF boosted its forecast for emerging-market and developing economies, saying they will grow 4%, a 0.3 percentage-point upgrade from October and compared with 3.9% for 2022. It raised the estimate for China’s expansion by 0.8 percentage point to 5.2%".

6. Top consumer concerns. "Inflation remains by far the top concern with 61% of consumers listing it as their primary concern, followed by political environment".

7. CB Consumer Confidence (I). Confidence fell 1.9pt in January. "Morale remains low for consumers with low-income and younger generations most downbeat, & concerns about job prospects & home buying".

8. CB Consumer Confidence (II). The "measure of labor market tightness improved for the second month in a row (more jobs plentiful vs hard to get) in January".

9. ECI (I). "Employment Cost Index (ECI) posted a moderate 1.0% q/q advance in Q4 – its smallest gain since Q4 2021 – with the wage component rising 1.0% and benefits increasing 0.8%".

10. ECI (II). "The all-important private sector wages and salaries gauge advanced 1.0% q/q: smallest since Q2 2021".

11. ECI (III). “'Core' wage growth, excluding volatile incentive-paid occupations, from today's Employment Cost Index data shows wages growing 5.1% over the last year and 3.6% annualized over the last quarter”.

12. Wages. "The debate is over: wages are slowing down. It's just a question of when and how this deceleration ends".

13. Chicago PMI. "January Chicago PMI down to 44.3 vs. 45 est. & 44.9 prior … new orders, employment, and inventories fell at a faster pace; supplier deliveries rose at faster pace; production fell at slower pace".

14. Cardboard box indicator. "U.S. box shipments fell by 8.4% in the fourth quarter...the most severe quarterly decline since the Great Financial Crisis (2Q09)".

15. Surprise. "Rapidly improving inflation surprise indexes".

16. Cautious credit. "Credit has been rallying because tighter policy lowers inflation first before hurting growth later. The Fed hikes of 2022 are still flowing through the US economy, and should make their maximum impact on US corporate borrowing costs in H2 ’23".

17. Dollar decline. "The move has been extreme. Time for some mean reversion?"

18. Bearish bonds. "Treasury futures positioning is extraordinarily bearish".

19. Liquidity. "The aggregate measure of market liquidity has turned lower, which suggests stocks may struggle".

20. Big daily moves. After today’s session, this month saw the most 1% daily moves in the month of January since 2016.

21. First or worst. "Bitcoin has been the best or worst performing asset every year since 2014, while it's still very early, 2023 is no different".

22. Short Big Tech. "+$1.9 billion into $SQQQ in January -- record monthly inflow -- even as it fell ~24%".

23. Single stocks vs. ETFs. "Record January for single stock buying vs. ETF selling".

24. Investor flows. "Global equity and fixed income funds made up 42% of past month's ETF inflows".

25. Earnings tracker. "S&P 500 results for Q4 have been pretty disappointing so far. A greater share of member companies have missed analyst EPS expectations since at least 2014 with the exception of the March 2020 pandemic distortion".

26. Earnings surprises. "Positive earnings surprises have been smaller than usual".

27. Large-cap reactions. "The average 1-day large-cap post-announcement relative return was +46bps, with EPS beats +76bps and EPS misses only -34bps".

28. Margins pressured. And finally, “4Q earnings season is proving to be even worse than feared, especially for margins, as cost growth is rising faster than sales growth for ~80% of S&P 500 industry groups”.

Thanks for reading!