Daily Chartbook #194 [UPDATED]

Welcome back to Daily Chartbook: the day’s best charts & insights, curated.

Updated: The previous version was missing sources. Apologies for the double emails.

1. Fed sentiment. "Various measures of Fed sentiment indicate less hawkishness and more dispersion of views over the last few months."

2. JOLTs (I). March saw "9.590 million job openings, the lowest since April 2022, and a drop of 384K from the upward revised February print. Combined with the sharp drops in January (-671K) and February (-589K), the combined three-month drop in job openings was the 2nd biggest on record!"

3. JOLTs (II). "This is good news in that it shows labor demand is slowing BUT it still takes several quarters before this starts to weigh on wage inflation. The reality is that "sticky" inflation will be with us for much of 2023."

4. JOLTs (III). "The number of quits dropped by 129K to just 3.851 million, the lowest since May 2021."

5. Factory orders (I). "0.9% MoM versus +1.3% MoM expected (and Feb's 0.7% decline was revised down to 1.1% MoM decline). That pushed the YoY growth in factory orders to just +1.4% YoY - the weakest since Feb 2021."

6. Factory orders (II). "However, Core Factory Orders plunged 0.7% MoM in March (the same as the 0.7% decline in February)...That is the first annual contraction in core factory orders since Dec 2020."

7. Bitcoin transactions. "Bitcoin’s daily transaction counts are approaching all-time highs."

8. Copper/gold warning. "The ratio has been moving down, while the market is moving higher. Last time this happened, it ended with the market declining rapidly."

9. Money markets (I). "Investors poured >$50bn into money market funds last week as investors enter the sell-in-May-and-go-away period."

10. Money markets (II). "Money market fund assets relative to global equity market cap are low."

11. US fund flows. "2021 = 'Buy Everything'…2022 = 'Sell Everything'…2023 = ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

See: ,

12. Active ETFs. Active funds make up <6% of total ETF assets "but have attracted about 30% of the total flows to ETFs so far this year."

13. Investor flows. "Aggregate bond ETFs have received most inflows over past month, followed by government bond funds ... some interest in equity ETFs given they accounted for 23% of past month's inflows, but they had net outflows last week."

14. Twitter economic sentiment. Fintwit recently turned bullish.

15. Equity positioning. "Systematic equity positioning is in the 39th percentile and discretionary equity positioning is in the 14th percentile."

16. Equity options. "Index / ETF Options have far overtaken single stock options."

See:

17. Call skew. "Investors are moving into panic buying mode pushing the call skew to record levels."

18. CTAs vs. SPX (I). "CTAs remain heavily short the S&P 500. Based on COT data, ‘Leveraged Fund’ short positioning is ~85% of total open interest."

19. CTAs vs. SPX (II). "In general, high CTA short positioning supports the market short term. On average, S&P 500 is +10% in six months following CTA short positioning reaching 75%. One caveat: Only down case occurred last April."

20. Hedge funds vs. regionals. "Prime book regional bank L/S ratio currently stands at 1.14. On a 5yr look back this is surprisingly still in the 37th percentile."

21. Technical Overbought/sold Composite. "The current reading stands at 76.68, near the overbought level."

22. Shiller CAPE vs. forward returns. "Next time you hear somebody tell you they are bullish (bearish) because the market is cheap (expensive) think of this chart. There is very little information content in index valuations with regards to forward returns."

23. SPX scenarios. "In a soft landing scenario, Goldman Sachs forecast for S&P 500 EPS is $224 in 2023, and its S&P 500 price target is 4,000 by the end of 2023."

24. Interest coverage. "Stocks with the highest interest coverage are increasingly dominant in the S&P 500."

25. Q1 earnings. "We are tracking 1Q-23 earnings that is the weakest since 2020, but better than in 4Q-22."

26. Earnings beats. "The breadth as well as the size of earnings beats bounced in the current earnings season."

27. Earnings revisions (I). "Slowing pace of cuts: 1m and 3m earnings estimate revision ratios improved in April."

28. Earnings revisions (II). "Eight of the eleven sectors witnessed a decrease in their bottom-up EPS estimate for Q2 2023 from March 31 to April 27."

29. Forward guidance. "Forward guidance jumped to the strongest level since Oct. 2021."

Thanks for reading!