Long Time Leaving

06/06/12 08:00AM EDT

This note was originally published at 8am on May 23, 2012. INVESTOR and RISK MANAGER SUBSCRIBERS have access to the EARLY LOOK (published by 8am every trading day) and PORTFOLIO IDEAS in real-time.

“I been a long time leaving, but I’m going to be a long time gone.”

-Willie Nelson

I think we have been pretty clear on this – Global Growth is slowing and the USA is not going to “de-couple” from this globally interconnected world. This time is not different.

Last night on CNBC I asked Goldman’s chief of everything US economic forecasting, Jan Hatzius, when he was going to cut his US GDP forecasts again. He didn’t really answer the question.

That doesn’t mean that you don’t have to answer it for yourself and/or your clients out there today. Real-time risk waits for no one.

Back to the Global Macro Grind

Willie Nelson is also known as the Red Headed Stranger. He’s the kind of Red-White-and-Blue blooded American we Canadian folks from Northern Ontario grew up respecting. He was born during a legitimate Great Depression (1933). He was self-made. And he didn’t wake up every morning looking to point fingers at anyone but himself.

That’s who I am. That’s who many of you are. That’s why this entire political Gong Show that has become our policies and markets gets us so fired up. That’s also why we are going to lead from the front and change it. The day you stop blaming everyone but yourself, is the day you start to lead.

Morgan Stanley got a subpoena last night for doing what it is that the Old Wall does. So, they put out a press release admitting as much – but, in doing so, entirely missed the point – i.e. what it is that they do during the IPO process doesn’t make sense to The People. This is a huge political football going into the US Presidential Election.

Since Morgan Stanley was a recipient of socialized bailout policies, now that’s their problem to deal with. That’s the other side of the Hank Paulson trade. It’s now the US stock market’s problem too. The US Financial Sector ETF (XLF) is laden with the Too Big To PR names.

In the last 2 days I have basically yard-sale’d my Global Equity exposure. On Monday morning we had 27% US Equity and 12% International Equity exposures, respectively. I’ll go into the open with the following:

  1. US Equities 6% (Healthcare = XLV)
  2. International Equities = 0%
  3. US Dollar = 9%

I’m not going to apologize for playing this game fast. Sometimes you have to. I’ve been a Long Time Leaving this charlatanic parade of storytelling. There are only so many times you can assure people that growth “is back” or it just “feels like” an economic recovery.

Enough of the “feel” already.

Quantitatively, this doesn’t feel like anything other than what the score is telling you. Growth Slowing has been plainly obvious to any economist/strategist who has live quotes and real-time data since March.

Inclusive of this morning’s selloffs, here are the asset price draw-downs (ie real-time indicators) since February-March:

  1. Japanese stocks (Nikkei225) = -16.6%
  2. Hong Kong stocks (Hang Seng) = -13.3%
  3. Indian stocks (BSE Sensex) = -13.5%
  4. German stocks (DAX) = -11.8%
  5. Italian stocks (MIB) = -23.8%
  6. Russian stocks (RTSI) = -27.5%
  7. Commodities Index (CRB) = -12.3%
  8. Oil (WTIC) = -17.8%
  9. Gold = -13.0%
  10. Copper = -14.1%

If you bought into any of the cockamamy “surveys” that growth “feels” fine, you can tell me how that’s going to feel in your P&L today. We, as a profession, have been living through growth slowdowns for 5 years and we are better than some of the said sources on growth have repeatedly proven to be.

You’ll note that I didn’t include Spain or the US stock market in the draw-down table. But they are in our refreshed Chart of The Day. You’ll recall that you’ve had plenty of opportunity to sell US Equities in the last 3 months; plenty of opportunity to ask yourself ‘heh, why on God’s good earth would the US, China, and Japan “de-couple” from mean reversion risk?’

Even if you didn’t say it to yourself that way, you probably thought about it in terms of what we have coined as The Correlation Risk. Get the US Dollar right, and you’ll get pretty much everything else right. That’s not a perma-strategy. Nothing is. It’s just the one that’s not losing you money right here and now.

With the US Dollar up for the 4thconsecutive week to $81.80 this morning, here’s your refreshed immediate-term inverse correlations between the USD and everything else:

  1. SP500 = -0.95
  2. Euro Stoxx600 = -0.96
  3. MSCI Emerging Market Index = -0.97
  4. CRB Commodities Index = -0.93
  5. US Treasury 10-yr Yield = -0.93
  6. Copper = -0.97

How does that “feel”?

I’ve been a Long Time Leaving the broken forecasting processes of the Old Wall. Most of these outfits have missed every single Growth Slowing call since 2007. Unless they change what it is that they do, they might just be a long time gone soon too.

My 27 person research team and I will be grinding through our long/short positions on our Best Ideas Conference Call this morning at 11AM EST. Please ping Sales@Hedgeye.com if you’d like access to Risk Managed Buy-Side Research built by buy-siders.

My immediate-term support and resistance ranges for Gold, Oil (WTIC), US Dollar Index, EUR/USD, and the SP500 are now $1533-1571, $90.13-93.28, $1.26-1.28, and 1286-1326, respectively.

Best of luck out there today,

KM

Keith R. McCullough
Chief Executive Officer

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