Is the majority of this board still thinking the bottom is still ahead of us?

I am warming up slowly to the thought that the bottom has passed. And then I check my bank account and see that the cost of living is still as high as giraffe arse and I make damn good money. No clue how anybody making sub 6 figures makes it these days.

It’ll stay propped up until the elections, imo

Looks like they have postponed the “bottom” for 2023.

The market loves 12 yr, 6yr and 3 yr cycles. I would say these are very dramatic, volatile years.

1929+3=1932
1975+12=1987
1987+12=1999
1999+3=2002
2002+6=2008
2008+3=2011
2008+12=2020
2020+3=2023

Amazing how this stuff works. Almost like everything is already written in the math.

6 months down Jan - June

3 months UP gets ya to the next Fed meeting

6 months up gets ya to a possible double top

So, rollover in September or double top in December is my line of thinking

I have no idea.

I'm 67% in the market and 33% cash.

When Apple beat that was my indicator the market has bottomed and is going to continue to climb. I went from almost exclusively long crypto (exclusions being long Disney at $90.25 and NVDA at $155 and puts on AAPL)) over the last couple of months to being about 50/50 tech and crypto now. That will continue to slide heavier to tech and less in crypto once BTC reaches $30k.

I think we have seen the bottom, but I recognize this run is giving indications of running out of steam. We may not go back to recent lows, but I doubt we straight line either.

PPI, CPI and Unemployment are down and GDP didn't shrink as much in Q2 as it did in Q1 so what's not to be optimistic about?

A lot, in my view. These numbers look good, but many seem to be stopping their assessment there instead of digging into how they can be this way with continued high inflation, high fuel prices and inflation outpacing wage growth.

Prices on the shelves and at the gas pump continued to rise throughout Q2 yet Real GDP shrank less than it did in Q1? Wage growth has lagged well behind inflation so it seems to me that the fast and continued growth in inflation has masked some of GDP's retraction in Q2 as even though people are spending more money they are actually buying less product.

Being able to afford less product means the appearance of less demand due to elasticity. Even with that, prices have continued to climb.

Another aspect of this is that we've seen consumer debt rising quickly since Q1 2021 and has been trending as speeding up (with the notable exception of Q4 2021 to Q1 2022 where the rate of increase slowed) rather than slowing down. We're at historic levels of consumer debt and it's still rapidly rising.

So any benefit to GDP in Q2 exposes itself as riding on the back of consumer debt. Vehicle repos and home foreclosures are up, which seems to reflect the point of excessive consumer debt.

Unemployment beat expectations but digging into the numbers appears to show this is due to more people simply dropping out of the work force while those remaining are picking up extra jobs.

CPI is skewed downward by a couple of factors, not the least of which is that increasing home prices are blunted as BLS doesn't look at home prices but rather at OER (Owner's Equivalent Rent of residences, in other words they are looking at how much in rent they think a homeowner would be paying to rent their home).

Fuel prices are down but it's not because supply has increased, it's because demand finally dropped in the face of historically high fuel prices combined with constantly rising inflation.

Fuel prices are likely to increase as demand kicks back in due to prices dropping at the pumps, which will at least continue high CPI and PPI (don't expect CPI to be below 5% for the rest of the year). Not only that, but when getting into fuels like natural gas (~4x what it cost pre-COVID), coal (~5x where it was pre-COVID) and heating oil (~2x), those prices are still increasing (meaning electricity costs are likely to continue to increase).

The longer this continues, the longer and the more people will have to depend on debt to maintain their lifestyles. That's an untenable scenario as you can't put the consequences of ever-increasing debt off forever. Even shifting credit card debt to a 12-month no APR card is only a delaying tactic. Were inflation moving close to 0 or were we to hit deflation I could see this resolving itself, but that's far, far from reality.

All of this taken together is why I think any "bottom" we've seen is a false bottom. I think October-ish will either be the bottom or will give us a better view of how much longer til we hit it.

I think this winter when gas prices quadruple in Europe you are going to see global economic issues that cause a new bottom. They are fricked unless Putin turns on the spigot.

I’d add, the draining of the SPR is helping prices. Eventually that’ll have to stop and we’ll find out how much that’s been helping prices. Much worse would be if we found ourselves in a hot war with it being drained… those jets don’t fly with solar panels and windmills - and we have to refill it and subsequently increase demand by 1m barrels a days. That would take the cake for our government sucking.

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I’d add, the draining of the SPR is helping prices.

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Very little.