Buckle Up

This is the morning report for February 13th, 2024.

Before we get to CPI, this was the headline that was running on Bloomberg prior to 8:30am:

"Investor allocation to tech stocks highest since August 2020"

Why is August 2020 interesting? Because in yesterday's morning market report, I quoted an article saying that this current stock market rally was the biggest since the one ending August 2020:

"The S&P 500 has risen 22.1% over the past 15 weeks as of Friday’s close, the largest 15-week advance since a 22.5% gain during the period that ended Aug. 28, 2020"

And this was the chart I showed last week when I said "This Market Wants To Crash".

Which gets us to CPI running much hotter than "expected".

Last night I warned that investors have been ignoring stronger than expected data recently.

This morning, the futures are exploding on the basis that CPI year over year is still above 3% (3.1%). Recall that CPI hit 3% six months ago, so economists have been expecting the downward trajectory to continue. But as we see in the chart below, CPI is starting to form a base at the ~3% level. Back in 2007 when the Fed paused and then started cutting rates, CPI TRIPLED. If that happened this year then CPI would be back at 9% by the end of this year.

Buckle up. This will be the biggest opening gap 'n crap we've seen in months. Maybe years.