Daily Chartbook #255

Welcome back to Daily Chartbook: the day’s best charts & insights, curated.

1. Mortgage rates. "The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate ticked up to 7.09% last week, a new high for 2023, and is hovering near 21-year highs."

2. Mortgage demand. Mortgage applications, refis, and purchases all declined last week.

3. Housing affordability. The US house price-to-income ratio is approaching mid-2000s levels.

4. Borrowing costs. "June personal income data show that consumer debt now costs more money than it has in years."

5. Container rates. "Bit of an uptick in global container shipping rates...composite rose last week to $1,761, driven by increase for route from China to U.S. west and east coasts; overall levels still quite low relative to pandemic boom."

6. Chinese deflation. "China’s deflation concerns could turn out to be good news for global disinflation. Our recent study suggests a China spillover to global (ex-China) core goods inflation of around -70bp over 2H23."

7. CPI Day cheat sheet. Average one-day returns across various assets on CPI day from March 2022 to June 2023.

8. National Financial Conditions Index. The NFCI "ticked down to –0.35 in the week ending August 4, suggesting financial conditions continued to loosen."

9. Loan demand. "Demand for bank loans in the corporate sector just fell to their lowest since 2008. There is nearly half as much demand as what we saw in 2020 when the economy was completely locked down."

10. Zombies (I). "Currently, just over 2% of public market credit issuers can be classified as a zombie, according to our criteria, with a total net debt of $36 billion."

11. Zombies (II). "Across the current cohort of zombie firms, almost 20% of their outstanding bond maturities will need to be refinanced by 2025 and just over 50% by 2026, implying a high likelihood of default for these firms."

12. Electricity costs. "Americans now pay an average of nearly 25% more for power than they did before the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine."

13. Speculators vs. US gasoline. "Speculative accounts are boosting bets on US gasoline as the hurricane season ramps up."

14. US petroluem inventories. "US commercial petroleum inventories rose by 7.1 million barrels last week, driven by a 5.9 MMbbl crude inflow."

See:

15. Strategic Petroluem Reserves. "The Biden administration actually added 995k barrels to the SPR last week - the largest weekly build since June 2020."

16. Base metals vs. GDP. Sensitivities of base metals to GDP growth have declined over the past decade.

17. BRICS vs. gold. "The BRICS central banks continue to amass gold."

18. Equity fund flows. "While it’s been a weak year for overall equity fund inflows (TARA vs TINA), equity inflows have been gaining momentum recently."

19. Client flows. Across BoFA clients, Tech led inflows last week (first since June) while Industrial led outflows (8th straight week of outflows) and Financials saw their 4th consecutive week of inflows.

20. Small-cap flows. "After extreme 1H outflows, small caps have seen inflows the past six weeks."

21. Growth vs. Value flows. Flows into Value ETFs > flows into Growth ETFs.

22. Retail flows vs. sentiment. "Retail involvement is still lower than that implied by bullish sentiment."

23. Retail options trading. "Retail traders make up ~27% of all options-trading activity, below the pandemic peak of almost 30% but well above levels in early 2020."

24. Financials vs. yield curve. "Financials is the sector to watch as the yield curve steepens. Sector valuations tend to follow the curve."

25. Energy vs. SPX. "The growth to value rotation appears to be resurging at full steam, coinciding with inflation rates potentially in the process of bottoming."

26. Energy vs. Tech. "Energy sector (blue) in lead right now in terms of % of members above 50d moving average … Tech (orange) fading fast when looking at same metric."

27. Mega-caps vs. micro-caps. "Mega cap stocks are becoming a larger share of the market. From 1996 to 2022, megacaps have grown from 7% to 13% of the market. Over the same period, microcaps have declined from 56% to 33%."

28. Coppock Curve. "When [the] Coppock Curve indicator turns positive the market is up 25% of the time over the next month."

29. 1% moves. "The index has only moved +1% up or down from close to close on 42 days so far in 2023 vs 122 last year, which was 2 standard deviations above the annual mean."

30. First-year bull markets. "The S&P 500 has dropped at least 5% in the first year of the past 10 bull markets (and 10% or more in three of them!)."

Thanks for reading!