GDP Friday – How Much Will Be Enough?
by phil - July 31st, 2009 8:23 am
As we can see from AlphaTrends chart, that's going to be a tough breakout and, even if we do make it, can we hold it? In yesterday's post I said we were ready to switch off our brains and BUYBUYBUY the rally and our breakout levels did all hold yesterday but I decided, in Member Chat, that we needed to raise the bar slightly before we started shutting down our thought processes into the weekend. We simply used the 2.5% lines of Dow 9,297, S&P 1,000 (interesting!), Nas 2,017, NYSE 6,438, Rut 562 and SOX 308 in my 10:16 Alert as our official buying breakouts but those same levels gave us a great indicator to get out of our longs and press our shorts as they ALL failed by 11:09.
It is going to be very much up to the GDP report and we have a pretty low-bar expectation of -1.5% but that's a heck of an improvement over last quarter's -5.5% and this earnings season has been nothing if not a celebration of "getting worse more slowly." As we all know, personal consumption makes up 70% of the GDP while government is about 18% and business investment just 12%. Durable goods are only 8% of the GDP while consumables (which includes clothes and, obviously, food and fuel) are 20% and 40% is "services" but 1/4 of that number is Real Estate so that's a little confusing.
As we know, not much is actually getting better but that's not the issue with GDP as we are measuring "growth" compared to the prior 4 quarters and our prior year was a disaster! This is like when a raging fire causes a house to collapse and you stand there looking at the wreckage and say "at least most of the fire is out now."
The good news is the comps just keep getting easier and easier the worse things get so, at some point, you are bound to improve! As you can see from Briefing.com's Real GDP chart on the left, there's a pretty wide disparity between the Real and Nominal GDP and that's because the Real GDP meansures the production of goods and services valued at constant prices. So we aren't…