Daily Close | Forex, Metals, Oil, Agriculture December 18, 2020

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Agriculture

less General Comments: Cotton closed sharply higher once again on follow-through buying tied to the USDA reports and increased export demand. The reports showed a significant drop in production of US Cotton and much reduced US ending stocks levels.

Currencies

: There wasn t much merger activity this year; in fact, it was the slowest year for takeovers by North American industrial companies on a dollar basis since 2009. When the U.S. Dollar’s sentiment was this low in the past, the U.S. Dollar Index usually fell further in the next few months. Short covering after a strong move this year is one of the few reasons why the dollar could extend its recovery in the coming days. Now we have bitcoin, which has joined the fairy tale, as money printing from the Fed is sure to lead to the dollar’s debasement and stoke inflation rates.
Vaccine progress and the prospect of a stimulus deal are some of the main reasons for the dollar’s weakness and that is not expected to change. less While some may hope that this marks a bottom for the dollar, there’s scope for further losses in the coming week. With that said, the primary driver of dollar flows will be year-end position adjustments, stimulus, and vaccine news.

Metals

So if a new gold upleg is underway, gold stocks will follow it higher. The major gold stocks tend to amplify material gold moves by 2x to 3x. A couple of weeks ago before the major gold stocks’ new uptrend became apparent, I wrote an essay on the maturing gold-stock correction. Like everything else, the gold miners’ stocks got sucked into mid-March’s extreme stock panic spawned by government lockdown orders attempting to slow COVID-19’s spread. GDX’s violent rebound upleg out of that huge anomaly proved a moonshot, the major gold stocks just skyrocketed.
But such extraordinarily-big-and-fast gains naturally left gold stocks very overbought, so they rolled over into a major correction. So the major gold stocks are now in a new uptrend! But such a fast V-bounce left gold stocks overextended, so GDX started selling off again to rebound at $34.29 five trading days later. That portends more big gains coming in gold stocks in the months ahead, increasing the importance of getting deployed.
less The gold miners’ stocks are rallying on balance again, following their recent multi-month correction. The major gold stocks GDX contains more than doubled in mid-2020! If that proves true, gold stocks’ next bull-market upleg has started marching. My essay last week looked at gold’s own recent correction, which was right in line with its bull precedent in both total size and duration! As of the middle of this week, GDX commanded nearly 2/3rds of all the capital deployed in gold stocks through all American gold-stock ETFs!
He is well known for combining technical, fundamental and sentiment analysis into one accurate conclusion about the gold market. The major gold miners again bounced sharply out of that, with GDX surging 5.1% this Tuesday and Wednesday. Gold prices began rising sharply in late 2008 from around $750, peaking in August 2011 at around $1,900. He writes a bi-weekly in-depth analysis for one of Germany´s largest gold and silver retailer the “pro aurum group”.
That beat this contrarian sector to radically-oversold lows wildly disconnected from gold miners’ strong underlying fundamentals. The leading and dominant gold-stock benchmark and trading vehicle is the GDX VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF.

Oil

The oil of this era is data, and we believe companies able to utilize user data could have an edge over traditional brick-and-mortar competitors. It’s a half-hearted alignment with a looming peak oil reality that Exxon s peers have already accepted, but it s a step forward nonetheless, my colleague Liam Denning writes. Big increase in Libya for November of 656 kb/d, accounting for 93% of the OPEC increase in output this month (707 kb/d). Crude Value Insights offers you an investing service and community focused on oil and natural gas.
Gordon Haskett analyst John Inch also recommends looking for opportunities in harder-hit industries, such as oil and gas or commercial aerospace.
A step further being that the dependency on a computer should not have that much power you not being able to purchase groceries or gasoline. OPEC output in October was revised 14 kb/d higher than reported in the October MOMR to 24,402 kb/d. November 2020 OPEC output increased by 707 kb/d to 25,109 kb/d. OPEC 13 and Russian output for November was 35,076 kb/d, up by 716.5 kb/d. The 12-month trailing average for Russia+OPEC was 36,291 kb/d in November down 4438 kb/d from 12 months earlier.

United States

That Democrats are opposing the Toomey language gives away that their plan is to use the Fed to go around Congress if they don’t control the Senate next year. “The surge in demand from wealthy Wall Street investors marks a sharp turn-around from bitcoin’s first run-up three years ago. According to Bloomberg data, Wall Street analysts estimate revenue will grow 26% this year, accelerate further in 2021 and then taper off into 2022. As I noted on Tuesday, the average Wall Street strategist expects the S&P 500 to gain 10% next year.
Today, Wall Street continues to use Zacks research including the Zacks Rank and Zacks Equity Research, which combines the best of quantitative and qualitative analysis. At Thursday’s close, its shares were up more than 650% this year, making it the best performer on NASDAQ. In comparison, the US software industry carries an average P/E of 53xwhile US stocks currently carry a P/E of 19x. The US software industry carries an average P/S 2.72x and prior to their bitcoin purchase, MSTR had a P/S of 2.65x.
If COVID never happened, maybe the US economy would have experienced a recession at some point in 2020 anyway. “I’m going to deliberately stay away from a timetable,” Mr. Kaplan said in a Wall Street Journal interview. The price resurgence in 2020 in part has been fueled by well-known Wall Street billionaires publicly backing bitcoin. -Wall Street Journal At present, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has agreed to return the unused portion of the funding to the Treasury, following the request of Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
CSQ’s top equity holdings include the most popular stocks in the S&P 500, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) (~5%), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) (~4%), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) (~3%), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (~2)%, and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) (~2%). This is an investor trade alert as the Russell 2000 has lagged the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 for the last few years. Research from our team of in-house analysts has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, MarketWatch, USA Today, Kitco, Reuters, US News & World Report, CNBC, and more.
But no other stock makes investors more excited than electric car-maker Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA). Source: Fund Website, Author’s Calculations Geographically, CSQ is almost exclusively focused on the US, which accounts for 91% of the portfolio. In other words, Wall Street strategists are chasing the rally right now and predicting that it will continue. The NASDAQ rallied by more than 0.5% on 97 days over the past 9 months.
Traders learn quickly that it can be very difficult and expensive to fight the Fed.

Europe

Key to the combined firm’s strategy will be its production capacity in Portugal, which will allow it tariff-free access to the EU markets.

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