Daily Chartbook #14

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

1. CO2 emissions. China is not doing its part.

2. Crude oil rigs. Baker Hughes counted 7 fewer oil rigs than last week for a total of 598. It’s the first decline in 10 weeks and the biggest since September.

3. US miles driven. Americans are driving just about as much as they were before the pandemic.

4. Auto inventories. Total inventory dropped by 72,000 units in July.

5. CEO pessimism. Resilient demand is not doing much to boost business leader outlooks.

6. Bankruptcies. The number/pace of bankruptcy filings doesn’t reflect the CEO pessimism (though this is a lagging indicator whereas the above is a leading one).

7. Know your worth. From April 2021 to March 2022, “half of workers who changed jobs experienced real wage increase of 9.7% or more from year earlier; meanwhile, median worker who remained in same job saw loss of 1.7%”

8. Non Farm Payrolls. Recent data pointed to a drop in NFP but, we got a big surprise with 528,000 jobs added to the economy in July. “We've averaged more than 400k jobs/month over the past three months.”

9. Where do you work? Here are payrolls by sector.

10. What do you do? The number of workers holding multiple jobs is still below pre-pandemic levels.

11. Unemployment. The unemployment rate is down to 3.5%, the lowest since 1969.

12. Recovered. There are now more people employed than before the pandemic.

13. Recovery time. The recovery was “faster than the past three recessions going back to 1990”.

14. Past results are not indicative… None of the previous 17 years in which the US economy created more than 3 million jobs resulted in a recession. The only exception was 1972, which resulted in a recession the following year. An important caveat, however, is that the Fed is raising interest rates aggressively this time around.

15. Participation rate. The labor force participation rate ticked down to 62.1% from 62.2%. Here’s a look at participation rates by education.

16. Strong wages. Average hourly earnings grew more than expected (0.5% vs 0.3%) in July and are now up 5.2% YoY.

17. Fed reaction. The hot jobs numbers give the Fed more room to get aggressive with rate hikes.

18. Market reaction. Markets are now pricing in a roughly 2/3 chance of a 75bps Fed hike in September.

19. Looking further ahead. The markets are implying a greater than 50% chance of a less aggressive Fed in November.

20. Everyone has an opinion on recession probabilities. Here’s what asset prices think.

21. Most shorted. A basket of the most heavily shorted stocks tracked by Goldman is up ~31% since the S&P 500’s mid-June low. The S&P itself is up only ~13% over the same period.

22. Less bearish. Positioning has stepped up from very bearish levels.

23. Goldman S&P forecast. Goldman Sachs has the S&P 500 ending the year at 4300, implying less than a 4% upside from the current 4145.

24. Evolution of earnings. How annual consensus estimates (red) and forward earnings (blue) have changed over time, by sector.

25. Earnings calendar. And finally, here are next week’s most notable earnings.

Have a great weekend!