This piece is another great comment from Dave Rosenberg. If there is one sound voice in the ocean of insanity it is DAVE. I strongly recommend to sign up for this FREE daily piece. I'm also tracking Credit outstandings , Mutual Fund Flows, CP outstandings and it all leads to the same conclusion as said here by ROSIE.....
WHO IS DOING THE BUYING?
Is it the private client? Not really — stock funds actually had net outflows of $1.33 billion last week, while bond funds enjoyed an $8.2 billion net inflow.
Is it corporate insiders? Well, heck no — Robert Toll (CEO of Toll Brothers) just disclosed that he sold a total 1.6 million shares of his company’s stock yesterday.
Is it buybacks? Not at all — in fact, S&P 500 companies bought back a mere $24.4 billion on stock repurchases in 2Q, down 72% from a year ago and the lowest in recorded history, according to Howard Silverblatt of Standard & Poor’s.
So who’s doing the buying? Very likely it is still a combination of program trading, short coverings and portfolio managers desperately trying to make up for last year’s epic losses.
WAY TOO MUCH RISK IN THE EQUITY MARKET
Never before has the S&P 500 rallied 60% from a low in such a short time frame as six months. And never before have we seen the S&P 500 rally 60% over an interval in which there were 2.5 million job losses. What is normal is that we see more than two million jobs being created during a rally as large as this.
In fact, what is normal is for the market to rally 20% from the trough to the time the recession ends. By the time we are up 60%, the economy is typically well into the third year of recovery; we are not usually engaged in a debate as to what month the recession ended. In other words, we are witnessing a market event that is outside the distribution curve.
While some pundits will boil it down to abundant liquidity, a term they can seldom adequately defined. If it’s a case of an endless stream of cheap money, we are reminded of Japan where rates were microscopic for years and the Nikkei certainly did enjoy no fewer than four 50% rallies and over 420,000 rally points in a market that is still more than 70% lower today than it was two decades ago. Liquidity and technicals can certainly touch off whippy tradable rallies, but they don’t take you all the way to a sustainable bull market. Only positive economic and balance sheet fundamentals can do that.
Another way to look at the situation is that when you hear and read about “liquidity” driving the market, it is usually a catch-all phrase for “we have no clue” but it sounds good. When we don’t have a reasonable explanation for what is driving prices our strategy is to watch from the sidelines and express whatever positive views we have in the credit market and our other income and hedge fund strategies.
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