CLIENT TALKING POINTS

YEN

The Yen finally stops going parabolic (down -0.3% vs USD) on these poor Japanese central planners who are now calling for an “end to one-sided speculative moves”, LOL. The Nikkei gets relief on that obviously, +1.1% and still -24% since #TheCycle peak in July.

EURO

No relief for the Euro’s ramp ($1.14 vs USD) for European Equity bulls who not only have to deal with the reality of an economic slow-down from #TheCycle (2015) peak, but crashing banks and equity indices; Italy leading losers (again) this morning taking the MIB Index crash to -27% since July.

GOLD

With the Down Dollar trade signaling immediate-term oversold, both Gold (which we like) and Oil (which we don’t like) are signaling immediate-term TRADE overbought at $1262 and $41.57, respectively (good spot to buy some USD for a trade and sell some Commodity exposure).

*Tune into The Macro Show with Macro and Materials analyst Ben Ryan live in the studio at 9:00AM ET - CLICK HERE

TOP LONG IDEAS

MCD

MCD

McDonald's (MCD) hit another all-time high last week. As we continue to reiterate, the company has all the style-factors that we like – high market cap, low beta and liquidity. Stick with it.

We are going to be looking at a much different company 1-3 years from now. Urgency has been instilled from the top down by new CEO Steve Easterbrook. He wants more speed and is encouraging people to get things done faster. The food and experience provided to the customer will greatly improve over the coming months as “Experience the Future” is implemented across the system. It won’t be instantaneous though, as MCD has a lot of work to do around changing the perception to bring back customers it may have lost.

Things like All Day Breakfast, responsibly sourced ingredients, and bringing back the value proposition will lead to increased sales and customer satisfaction. While this company is too big to be completely fixed overnight, management has the right plans in place. We are confident in where they are headed.

CME

CME

We recently completed a granular, deep dive study demonstrating that all classes of volatility including equity, fixed income, and FX have been managed lower by a U.S. Central Bank engineering a historically abnormal quantitative easing policy over the past 7 years.

What does this mean and what are the implications? Well, with Quantitative Easing over (for now) and the Federal Reserve on a rate hiking policy path (for now), for the first time in a long time there is a reason to hedge bond and equity exposure. CME is one of the few venues that allows both institutional and retail investors to do exactly that. The company manages the entire Treasury futures curve and also most of the equity index futures in the U.S.

In this late cycle economic environment, CME Group (CME) has a solid earnings trajectory. The exchange continues to benefit from all 3 legs of the exchange stool including incremental volatility; incremental participants coming into its markets; and also new product introduction. Over the course of the next 12 months, we think the earnings opportunity will jump and the path to more than $5 per share in earnings will become more obvious.

TLT

TLT

We outlined our expectation and outlook moving into Q2 last Thursday in our quarterly macro themes presentation for institutional clients. The first of the three themes was labeled #TheCycle:

With the recessionary industrial data ongoing, employment, income and consumption growth decelerating, corporate profits facing a 3rd quarter of negative growth and Commercial and Industrial credit tightening, the domestic economic, profit and credit cycles are all past peak and continue to traverse their downslope. With this cyclical backdrop, the U.S. economy faces its toughest GDP comp of the cycle in 2Q16”….

The takeaway is that the economy faces a difficult GDP comp (growth rate) in Q2 within the continued late-cycle slowdown. 

Asset Allocation

CASH 66% US EQUITIES 0%
INTL EQUITIES 0% COMMODITIES 5%
FIXED INCOME 24% INTL CURRENCIES 5%

THREE FOR THE ROAD

TWEET OF THE DAY

Utilities $XLU (our fav Sector) +12.4% YTD vs. Financials $XLF (fav Short) -7.1% YTD

@KeithMcCullough

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Albert Einstein  

STAT OF THE DAY

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention smoking kills half a million Americans each year and costs more than $300 billion.