Last week, I said Russell 1,000 or bust and bust we did – having the first losing week since April in the US markets and, as you can see from Dave Fry's chart, there's no excuse this week as the top of that channel has moved well above 1,000 so there should not be any more upside resistance to a truly bullish market.
Already, in pre-market trading, the Russell is up 10 points as Europe is up over 1% this morning, following Asia's bounce back on no particular news other than Japan has stopped falling. China's Industrial Profits in April were up 9.3%, which is the opposite direction that HBC pegged their PMI BUT March had very easy comps (5.3%) and profits are actually DOWN 2.2% from April of 2011 – which is the way rational investors like to look at things but, shhhhhh – that will be our little secret.
There are few rational investors left in the market these days, least of all US Corporations, as FactSet shows us they spend $93.8Bn buying back their own stocks at near record-highs in Q4, topping off a year in which they bought back $384.3Bn in shares.
That's enough share repurchasing money to hire 11M full-time workers at $35,000 a year but don't be silly – that's not the way US Corporations make money! Our Corporate Citizens are in the business of making money, not stuff and you don't need workers to make money. In fact, they generally just get in the way and moving away from the production model entirely is allowing our markets to soar.
As you can see from the chart on the left from the IMF, this is the year that Emerging markets surpass us in GDP. Sure the average person in an Emerging Market nation…
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