Index Round-Up ‘07

by Phil - December 31st, 2007 7:54 am

"We have problems on the North, South, East and West,
New York City, Saint Louis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles,
Detroit, Chicago,
Everybody has problems,
And personally, I don’t care." - Alice Cooper

I wish I could say I was happy to put this year behind us but it’s been a fantastic year and I doubt we can expect the same from 2008.  We have many burstable bubbles that may join the housing bubble in decline including oil and metals as well as Asian markets if we get a stall over there.

I continue to believe that US equities are the least sucky place for global investors to put their money in ‘08 for the same reasons I outlined in August, when we were still below 13,100 and we had just made our bottom call the week before.  Although the Dow, Nasdaq and the NYSE are well up since then, we’ve lost ground on the Transports, S&P and SOX so our mission for January is clear - will the top three come down or will the bottom three come up (the Russell is our tiebreaker).

There you go, that’s everything you need to predict the markets in Q1.  Now let’s take a closer look at our indices:

Dow - Weak dollar means strong International sales plus lots of dividends make for a fun "flight to quality play" (if you can call GM quality that is).  We are sitting exactly on the 200 dma at 13,350 with the 50 dma about to form a "Death Cross" and it will only take the smallest bit of bad news to push us to retest the 2007 lows around 12,500 whch is how I agree, yet disagree with Stuart Freeman (BusinessWeek’s market forecast winner of ‘07) as he sees the Dow bottoming in the summer in the low 12,000’s but I see it going lower now and topping in the summer, perhaps close to 15,000 but we both see the year ending around 14,500.

Transports - This is the Achilles heel of the Dow as the energy sector must fall for the transports to prosper.  $100 oil is now required for oil companies to grow into their values but it’s already murdering the consumers and driving up costs for the transports - their own private little stagflation spiral that no amount of Fed cutting is going to fix.

S&P - It’s very disturbing that the broader S&P should underperform the Dow by half in ‘07.  You hear nothing of this in the MSM as…

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