W.O.O.D. – 8 June 2019

Intro

This is another of the W.O.O.D. series of semi-regular
Weekly Occasional Open Discussions.
(i.e. if I forget and skip one, no big)

Immediate prior one here:

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2019/05/24/w-o-o-d-24-may-2019/
and remains open for threads running there (at least until the ‘several month’ auto-close of comments on stale threads).

Canonical list of old ones here:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/w-o-o-d/

So use “Tips” for “Oooh, look at the interesting ponder thing!”
and “W.O.O.D” for “Did you see what just happened?! What did you think about it?”

What’s Going On?

I finished the GHCN v3.3 vs v4 Europe graphs; and with that, ALL of the continents are done!

I’m now working on an “index posting” to point at all the parts from one spot. I’ve also started making a Version 4 Statistics & Anomalies set of data based on cutting off the anomalies data used at 2015 so that the same years are used for v3.3 as for v4. Then I’m going to do a few “spot check” graphs to see what changes. This is substantially using a “Baseline Period” that runs from the start of all records through 2015 and addresses the point that the existing method will have the v4 anomalies shift a little just from averaging in the 2016, 2017, and 2018 data (to the extent they differ from the average prior years).

I’ve already made the table layouts, loaded the mstatsS4 (S for Short) table, and presently it’s computing the anomS4 anomailies table. Then it’s just make a few sample graphs and compare / measure impact. (Plus debugging whatever pops up).

W.W.II D-Day

We’ve likely had the last D-Day Commemoration that will have many living survivors present. Likely, too, the last for Queen Elizabeth.

There can never again bee such a landing. Too easy to just pop a nuke over the top of it and sink all the ships. Given the number who died, perhaps that’s a good thing.

My wife’s Dad was a liaison to the British Gliders and went in on one of them as the US contact for the 101st Airborn. Then wandered around with them a while. Eventually got in that Bastogne Siege… He also managed to get separated from his army, and got reassigned to the 82nd Airborne and jumped on Arnham. Not a lot of folks can say they were in W.W.II in Gliders, as a Parachute drop, and in three different services ;-) though one was just liaison to that service. He said Bastogne was rough, but liberating the prisoner camps was the worst emotionally. Oddly, he met Marlene Dietrich while in the field. Seems she worked both sides of the lines entertaining both sets of warriors. A class act in a time when chivalry was not quite dead yet. Just a passing stop on a road, a few minutes of posing and then moving on. Two jeeps passing on a rural road.

My Dad was a Combat Engineer. Landed the 2nd or 3rd day (he wasn’t sure what day it was ;-) in an LST on Utah beach I believe. One of those big ships where the front opens. He then proceeded to drive around Europe in a “Deuce and 1/2” truck blowing up bridges and things, re-building bridges the Germans blew up, taking up land mines, laying land mines, disarming booby traps and more. Rebuilt a chunk of Cherbourg Harbor. He said one of the hardest bits was having your whole army behind you, and their whole army in front of you, and you have to build a bridge in the middle. Then there was when you had to take the demolition charges off of it if they failed to get it blown during retreat. The Marines like to talk about “first in last out”, but the guy building the bridge in front is really there first, and the guy blowing up the bridge after you crossed it is the last one to pack up.

I’ve plotted their two paths, roughly, and they were more or less near each other over most of the war. Airborne out in front some of the time, Dad out in front making them a bridge at other times.

May no one ever deal with such a thing again.

BREXIT, The EU, and MEP Elections

The BREXIT party was the Big Winner. The new European Parliament will also have lots more “Nationalist” membership from many other countries.

Watching the “news” coverage was fun. So many Globalists sputtering in their rush to decry it as horrid.

Gee, national leaders charged with making their nation better being elected by the people of that nation who then don’t throw their nation under the wheels of Rampant Globalist Ambitions, and this is seen as a bad thing?

T. May is now out, Britain is trying to decide who is worth a fig when 99% of them just bleat about wanting to a) End Brexit or b) Have a 2nd referendum or c) get a Satrap Deal tighter than T.May’s bad “deal”.

This circus isn’t over. It’s a long long ways to Halloween…

Venezuela

“God Only Knows” continues.

Will it resolve? Will anyone notice?

Mexico

Decided they didn’t want their Economy in the dumper all that much and that just maybe having a few hundred thousand “transient” “migrants” wasn’t working out all that well for them anyway. Now we get to see if they actually DO anything.

You know they will not stop the drug traffic. Way too many $Billions in their collective pockets. They also won’t want to stop Mexican Migrants (as they ship boatloads of money back to Mexico too). But I could see them shutting off the non-Mexicans.

France 24 had some dopey guy claiming all sorts of nonsense about what this would do to Trump’s election prospects. Very Globalist Sympathy, in touch with “Red States” not so much.

Global Warming Push

I’m not sure what is driving it, what is “coming up”; but both Sky News and France 24 have started having the Global Warming Scare Of The Day (“GW-SOD”) story. Seems it is going to dissolve Mont Blanc in France. France24 said so. Complete with dramatic film of a landslide and a voice over stating that the mountain is held together by permafrost and when it melts the mountain falls down.

No mention at all of ice cycling causing rock spalling, but hey, give them time.

Sky was treating us to a tour of Venice and how it’s just being washed away from “Sea Level Rise” with floods rising from 5 / decade to some huge number in the hundreds? Something like that. Of course, no mention that the city is built on soft land and has been sinking slowly for centuries. “Subsidence” not in their vocabulary.

So The Bum’s Rush is picking up speed and intensity. Just a reaction to the “Nationalists” winning? Or something else in the wings?

Speaking of Coups…

Dimocrats continue to push the Impeachment Screechment. TDS is strong in them.

I do hope Trump and the DOJ get some indictments running on a few of them soon. They really need a wake-up slap in the fixation.

Space X

NASA is selling rides and hotel accommodation on the Space Station. Up to a month. 12 a year. Just bring your $Millions vacation plan with wallet…

The Weather:

It has finally gotten warm in California and the rain stopped here. Unfortunately, Oregon is still having some frozen while the Mid-West is a soggy bog of water and mud. China, in their corn belt, is also having issues.

There is a very real probability of grain shortages globally. One report had a huge spike in corn and other grain futures. This is a “watch this space” as if delay goes much beyond what we’ve already got, it will be too little time to grow to maturity.

I did learn a new term: “Wet Planting”. Seems when you have Crop Insurance you only get paid if you put seeds in the ground. So when years are crappy and the land too wet too late, you just plant anyway and let the seeds drown and rot. Good for the wallet, not so good if we burn through too much of the seed corn when replacing it might be at risk too. Looks like the traditional thing of doing a fast “catch crop” (like buckwheat) instead is now out of fashion in favor of financial games and contract law.

One good thing, they had a chart up with “use” on it. Looked like about 1/3 went to gasoline. So… we can take a 1/3 loss of corn production and not even notice just by having an emergency wavier of the “pollute and dilute my gasoline with alcohol” requirements… The downside is that absent such relief, blenders alcohol could become quite expensive and drive up gasoline prices too.

Markets

I ought to get back into tracking markets more. They are about 80% machine trade driven now, so really it’s reflecting computer programs / decisions not human actions, so less reasonable in what happens and more prone to volatile runs from feedback effects. (One computer kicks off a minor trend and then the rest hop on it).

The chart formation is not good.

SPY 8 June 2019 1 Year

We took a big dip in January, then a straight rocket back up. When people drive things they more often get concerned about getting out with any recovery and you get a dip back to the Simple Moving Average stack. I’ve typically used that as a confirmation of a move. It looks like that is breaking down under machine trend amplification.

Now we’ve hit a top, same height as last September, and failed to advance. Then the much more typical penetrate the SMA stack to the downside, return to it from below, and fail to cross it.

MACD is below zero (though crossing to an upward pointing in response to the rebound). Volume is also falling off. (Notice how high volume went in the January dump).

ADX / DMI is showing low volatility (ADX black line low) along with somewhat confused red / blue lines (as happens at waffling tops). Looks to me like more downside available than upsides.

Yes, the economy is going great. Yes employment is nearly full. OTOH, we’re getting news about “low jobs report” for new jobs. When everyone who wants a job, has one, it becomes hard to have continuing massive job growth…

Will there be another dump like last January? Or just a summer malaise of waffling at the top? I’d bet on more down as the Dimocrats do something stoopid to spook the markets (like acting against Trump).

But the biggest problem is that we’ve now got to predict what a computer algorithm thinks of things, not what human nature would do… They mostly do near instant scans of the newspaper stories and jump on key words, so if you can predict what will be printed “soon”, you have a chance of it.

What is clear is that we’re reaching the limit of how fast the economy can grow, and that the market has hit a ceiling it didn’t like.

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