Daily Chartbook #269

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

1. Case-Shiller. "Home prices in America's 20 largest cities rose once again in June, up 0.92% MoM...That is the 4th straight monthly increase in prices, but they remain down just over 1% YoY."

2. FHFA home prices. "House Price Index from FHFA +0.3% m/m vs +0.6% est. & +0.7% prior … sixth consecutive monthly gain." The index increased by 3.1% YoY.

3. Financial conditions. "The Real 10-Year Yield Less The Neutral Rate suggests financial conditions are the tightest they have been since prior to the last 4-recessions."

4. Surprise. Citi's Economic Surprise Index has rolled over.

5. Redbook reversal. Redbook retail sales jumped 4.2% YoY in the week ending August 26.

6. WFH. "We estimate that the share of US workers performing at least some work from home remains at 20-25%, below its peak of 47% at the height of the pandemic but well above the pre-pandemic average of 2.6%."

7. JOLTs (I). Job openings fell to the lowest since March 2021 (8.8 million vs. 9.5 million est) while the number of quits dropped to pre-pandemic levels.

8. JOLTs (II). "Over past 3 months, 2.55 million job openings have been shed, which is largest 3-month decline on record."

9. Labor differential. “The Conference Board's Labor Differential sank to 26.2, a fresh low for this cycle. This measures the spread between those saying jobs are 'plentiful' versus 'hard to get'.”

10. Employee confidence. "Per Glassdoor Research employee confidence is now at its lowest level since 2016."

11. Consumer confidence. Consumer confidence (lowest since May), present situation (lowest since December), and expectations all dropped in August.

12. Credit issuance. "Expect an active September as issuers address the 2025 maturity wall."

13. Oil demand. Global oil demand has broken out to new all-time highs.

See: ,

14. Crypto flows. "Digital asset investment products saw outflows totaling US$168m, the largest outflow since the US regulatory crackdown of exchanges in March 2023."

15. Bitcoin ETF. Bitcoin spiked after a DC court ruled the SEC was wrong to deny Grayscale permission to convert its Bitcoin trust into an ETF.

16. Bitcoin seasonality. "Since 2010, September is the only month in which Bitcoin realized a negative return (on average)."

See:

17. Smart money vs. UST. "Hedge funds’ Treasury positioning has diverged sharply from that of asset managers."

18. Overall volume. "Yesterday [8/28] was the lightest volume full trading session of the year with 8.1bn shares trading across exchanges."

19. Investor flows. "Another week of outflows for U.S. large-cap equity ETFs, which lowered % share of rolling 1-month inflows from 21% to just 4% ... government bonds had largest share of inflows last week and are back in top spot on rolling 1-month basis."

20. Smart vs. Dumb money. "[Annualized returns] when SM/DM spread is above zero are nearly 4X greater than when below zero."

21. HFs vs. China. "Hedge fund positioning in [China]...has continued to deteriorate, now down to the 24th percentile vs it’s 5.5 year history."

22. Buybacks (I). "Corporate client buybacks slowed last week and have been tracking below seasonal trends for every week since May."

23. Buybacks (II). "Globally, 29% of stocks are buying back their shares, near a record high."

24. Polar opposites. "Can you get much more divergent than the performance of the Nasdaq and the Dow Utilities Index? It's the third widest gap in favor the Nasdaq on a YTD basis on record, and last year the widest ever in favor of Utilities."

25. Micro-caps. "The Russell Micro Cap is the bottom 1,000 stocks in the Russell 2000. They are still down on the year. These are the most sensitive to higher rates."

26. Taiwan vs. World EPS. Declining Taiwan exports point to lower global earnings.

27. AI EPS momentum. "The AI basket performance remains supported by strong positive EPS momentum."

28. SPX realized correlation. "3-month realized correlation for S&P 500 has fallen considerably this year; and despite recent sell-off, increase has been minor relative to historical weak periods thus far."

29. Implied volatility. "Implied volatility across various assets continues to remain at low levels."

30. SPX seasonality. And finally, “September tends to be a challenging month for the S&P 500 in the third year of the US presidential cycle.”

Thanks for reading!