Dude, Where's My Retirement Pension?

Stocks took another punch to the gut on Thursday, extending the February losses on all global indices.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average officially (-10%) entered correction phase.

The NASDAQ is within a hair of a 10% drop, from 7,505.77 to 6,777.16. 6755.19 is the magic number in this case.

On the S&P 500, the January 26 top of 2,872.87 is far away from the close into correction territory (at 2585.87), achieved in today's session with a triple-digit loss.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average Scoreboard looks like this:

Date	Close	Gain/Loss	Cum. G/L
2/1/18	26,186.71	+37.32	+37.32
2/2/18	25,520.96	-665.75	-628.43
2/5/18	24,345.75	-1,175.21	-1,803.64
2/6/18	24,912.77	+567.02	-1,236.62
2/7/18	24,893.35	-19.42	-1,256.04
2/8/18	23,860.46	-1,032.89	-2,288.93

That's in just six trading sessions, people. All the major averages are down for the year, but, hey, it's only February. Plenty of time to boost those profits.

This is only the beginning of a collapse that may be unprecedented. Considering the adherence to antiquated Keynesian economic theories spoon-fed to the masses, the unwinding will be a farce, fed by propagandists, though it's effects will be somewhat permanent on the financial status of almost everybody.

Precious metals were among the few gainers on the day.

At the Close, Thursday, February 8, 2018:
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 23,860.46, -1,032.89 (-4.15%)
NASDAQ: 6,777.16, -274.82 (-3.90%)
S&P 500: 2,581.00, -100.66 (-3.75%)
NYSE Composite: 12,270.65, -416.53 (-3.28%)

How is Your Money Doing? Here's the February Dow Scoreboard, Day 5

In the sports world, all manner of statistics and scenarios are routinely trotted out in attempts to reinforce how one team or player is better than another. All of this analysis is done every day on TV and radio talk shows, but the in the final analysis, as so perfectly expressed by the king of sports talk radio, Jim Rome, is "scoreboard," as in, who won the game, no matter the stats.

The same kind of metric can easily be applied to stocks and investments, as it no doubt should be. Thus, there's no need for analysis, no need for bald-headed, econo-speak commentators, no need for inverse correlations, causations, or extrapolations. All that matter can be found in the daily closing prices for individual stocks, or for individual stock indices, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the measure by which everybody measures success.

Over the past four trading sessions, there's been more than sufficient ammunition for all kinds of wild speculation and analysis of what happened and why, and there may be a thousand reasons why the Dow and other indices were slaughtered last Friday and again this Monday. The more simplistic answers appear in the comeback sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday, which failed to recoup all of the losses. Thus, it's all in the scoreboard, i.e., the daily closes on the Dow. Nothing more, nothing less. No analysis necessary. You either won or you lost.

Let's just track the Dow through the month of February and see how well those precious stocks are doing.

Here are the only numbers that matter:

Dow Jones Industrial Average dates, closing prices, gains or losses:

Date	Close	Gain/Loss	Cum. G/L
2/1/18	26,186.71	+37.32	+37.32
2/2/18	25,520.96	-665.75	-628.43
2/5/18	24,345.75	-1,175.21	-1,803.64
2/6/18	24,912.77	+567.02	-1,236.62
2/7/18	24,893.35	-19.42	-1,256.04

So, as can clearly be seen, even adding in the smallish gain on Feb. 1, the Dow is down a massive amount. The contention here at Money Daily is that there has been a sea change in the market. Not only is a correction in the works (-10%), but a bear market (-20%) is quickly developing. We'll keep tracking so you at home can keep score on your "investments."

At the Close, Wednesday, February 7, 2018:
Dow Jones Industrial Average, 24,893.35, -19.42 (-0.08%)
NASDAQ: 7,051.98, -63.90 (-0.90%)
S&P 500: 2,681.65, -13.49 (-0.50%)
NYSE Composite: 12,714.83, -30.62 (-0.24%)

Dow's Dramatic Comeback 4th-Best in History

That was something to behold.

Not only did the Dow open down a whopping 500 points, but it battled back and forth across the unchanged line - as did the other major indices - until finally launching itself into a hyperbolic ascent in the final hour of the session.

While the Dow's rise was the 4th-biggest point gain in its long history, there's still work to be done. Just to get back what it lost last Friday and Monday of this week will take two more days of equal heavy lifting, something that is unlikely unless one lives on the planet Utopia, where unicorns spit skittles and money grows on trees.

Even more daunting may be the return to all-time highs (26,616.71), a mere 1,700+ points away. It could happen. It very well may happen. However, if it does, stocks will once again be more expensive than ever before (they are still).

The market action over the past week has been a warm-up, conditioning the masses for more carnage to commence and shaking out the weak - or wise - hands. Those who cannot allocate by themselves (like people with 401ks or government retirement plans) will be stuck with whatever the fund managers deem prudent. Call them bag-holders.

The swift and the wise are playing the ups-and-downs, though that was quite the challenge in today's session. Volatility has returned and it should be pointed out that some of the greatest one-day gains (in fact, the two largest occurred in the fall of 2008) happened in bear markets.

The fun has just begun.

At the Close, Tuesday, January 6, 2018:
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 24,912.77, +567.02 (+2.33%)
NASDAQ: 7,115.88, +148.36 (+2.13%)
S&P 500: 2,695.14, +46.20 (+1.74%)
NYSE Composite: 12,745.45, +172.53 (+1.37%)

Dow Sheds Record 1,175 Points, Global Markets in Panic Mode

Anybody already not convinced that stocks have been relentlessly pumped by buybacks and central bank interventions over the past nine years may have had a rude awakening over the past few days and especially on Monday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost a record 1,175 points in the week-opening session.

While the percentage loss was nowhere near record-setting, it still managed to crack the top 20 of all-time percentage losses for a single trading day. Combined with Friday's collapse, the Dow is down over seven percent in just the past two sessions, wiping out all the gains from an over-exuberant January.

What happened?

Interest rates exploded. That was the first salvo from massively intertwined markets. The ten-year note, which has been comfortably below 2.5% for most of the last nine years of "recovery" following the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) from 2008-09, smashed through 2.80% on Friday and continued its ascent Monday before some odd force pushed US treasury rates lower across the curve. The 10-year note ended at 2.79, still higher than anybody expected, but not at a level that would cause a panic.

Other than the obvious villain in the bond pits, the other dynamic at play is the obvious overvaluation of stocks, and that is a global problem. By artificially keeping interest rates too low for too long (avoid the pain that should be measured across the board), boosting asset prices in stocks alone, the Fed, ECB, BOJ, PBOC and Swiss National Bank (SNB) created a market structure with one sure feature: failure.

Because borrowing money was such an easy proposition, many of the major corporations on the Dow, NASDAQ and S&P took to buying back their own shares, enriching only major shareholders and especially top executives with cushy compensation plans. That gambit appears to be over, and it's troubling, because when companies buy their own stock at inflated prices, they own it at those prices. Selling it back into the market at reduced prices causes a loss, which in turn causes earning to collapse. That is the expected conclusion, already evident in some recent quarterly filings. More carnage - much more - is to come.

It has been reported that 84% of all wealth created in 2017 went to the top one percent globally. That's an unsustainable level of wealth inequality largely gone unreported by the news-speakers, analysts and squawkers on Wall Street and the economists in the government. The one percent at the top of the wealth ladder will only be marginally affected by losses, largely because they have more money than they need and probably have been doing most of the trimming over recent days. Who will be harmed? Pension funds, which are already massively underfunded and cannot maintain any measure of credibility in a market crash currently gaining momentum.

Those who have been derided for warning about just this kind of occurrence are now being proven to have seen the most obvious overvaluation and manipulation of markets early. Being early and being wrong are two different animals, but anybody who isn't invested at the moment is - at long last - looking fairly smart.

The global economy has been sputtering and stuttering ever since the crash of 2008. Nothing that caused the problems then has been fixed. In fact, credit has been extended even further than the levels seen prior to that singular solvency event.

Claims (especially those by President Trump, who has unfortunately embraced the massive gains and now will bear the brunt of blame for the losses) that the economy is strong and growing are largely a smoke screen hiding mountains of debt and poor financial management in government. The US Treasury is more than $20 trillion in the hole. Other major governments, especially Japan, are over-leveraged and broke.

The continuing narrative that the economy is strong - which will be heard repeatedly as the market correction (or slow motion crash) extends - is complete garbage, shoveled to an unsuspecting public that desperately wants to hear only good news. The federal government is broke. State governments are broke. Pension plans cannot deliver on the promises made to employees and retirees. Households are deeply in debt and businesses have enriched only their shareholders in recent years. The recipe for collapse has been ripe and the meal is now on the table.

As Wall Street prepares for another onslaught of selling, markets in the East have already taken the low road. In Japan, the NIKKEI was down over 1,000 points. The Hang Song dropped 1,600, or five percent.

This is not over by a long shot. Instead of an end of the bull market, this should be characterized as the beginning of the end for globally-induced monetary madness and an epochal message to believers in what were once known as "free" markets.

Nothing is safe.

At the Close, Monday, February 5, 2018:
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 24,345.75, -1,175.21 (-4.60%)
NASDAQ: 6,967.53, -273.42 (-3.78%)
S&P 500: 2,648.94, -113.19 (-4.10%)
NYSE Composite: 12,572.93, -512.42 (-3.92%)

Markets Turn Ugly As Bond Yields Soar in Ground Hog Day Massacre

Even as January's non-farm payroll report painted a rosy employment picture, adding 200,000 jobs for the month, the 10-year note crested over the 2.80% level on Friday, sending stocks into as vicious tailspin in a mid-winter crash.

The nearly 666-point decline on the Dow was the sixth largest one-day point drop in market history, though in percentage terms was the mildest of the top ten, all of which have occurred in the 21st century.

The fact that all of the major point losses happened since 2000 is made obvious by the enormity of the index, still standing at more then 25,000, an epochal figure in market terms. Notably, the Dow Jones Industrial Average first passed the 10,000 mark in 1999, amid the notorious dotcom boom, prior to the dotcom bust, which took a full three-and-a-half years to fully play out.

Friday's drop was the largest since a 634.76-point loss on August 8, 2011 which sent the blue chips down 5.55%, to 10,809.85. Noting the relative percentage puniness of the Ground Hog Day Massacre, it may be wise to expect larger point and percentage losses in the near to mid-range future (three months to one year).

While it may be simplistic to point to the gaudy valuations placed on equities in the current market dynamic, it is nonetheless a significant factor in the current shaky environment and as good a reason to sell out of stocks as any, though the other major catalyst - rising bond yields - provides a more granular perspective.

The long end of the Treasury yield curve was extended on Friday as the 30-year bond smashed through the psychological 3.00% barrier, signaling to long-term investors that the aging bull market in stocks (and bonds) may be coming to a quick conclusion.

Bull and bear markets do not begin nor end in vacuums, which is why this most recent pullback should be regarded as a change of tone in market functioning. Nothing gos on forever, and empirical data suggests that while stocks have enjoyed salad days for years, the general economy and the welfare of millions of Americans has been less than a full meal.

It's easy to look at macro data and conclude that all is well and central banks have the markets and global economies under control, but sometimes one needs to look around and actually see the mountains of debt, stock buybacks, and central bank meddling which have fueled the gigantic recovery and historic stock gains.

Money is undoubtably becoming tighter and the labor market - according to government figures - is straining at full employment, but wages gains have not nearly kept pace with either inflation or taxes for at least the past 15 years. A breaking point is coming, wherein multi-national corporate behemoths are going to have to sacrifice the massive salaries bestowed upon top executives in exchange for pay increases for Mr. and Mrs. America.

With the Federal Reserve ready to hike the federal funds rate another 25 basis points at their upcoming March FOMC rate policy meeting, the world's central bank seeks to create a buffer against an almost certain recession, one which they, by their own reckless actions, will have caused.

If stock declines continue through February, expect the Fed to pause on their quest to raise rates and unload debt at the same time. The outward absurdity of their position is dangerous to the welfare of not only business entities, but individuals and governments as well.

What may have been the most telling circumstance from Friday's demolition of all asset classes, gold and silver also took precipitous drops, action which harkens back to the tumultuous days of the fall of 2008, when precious metals were slammed along with stocks. Notably, it was the metals which recovered first, but under the current conditions of mad money mindlessness, the shiny stuff may be suppressed even further, simply because central banks don't appreciate competition for their various fake currencies by real money.

The era of easy money is ending.

Real assets will endure.

At the Close, Friday, February 2, 2018:
Dow: 25,520.96, -665.75 (-2.54%)
NASDAQ: 7,240.95, -144.92 (-1.96%)
S&P 500: 2,762.13, -59.85 (-2.12%)
NYSE Composite: 13,085.35, -296.62 (-2.22%)

For the Week:
Dow: -1095.75 (-4.12)
NASDAQ: -264.83 (-3.53%)
S&P 500: -110.74 (-3.85%)
NYSE Composite: -551.67 (-4.05%)