Consumer Opportunity:
With conflicting messages from banks on consumer spending, BAC today said it “remains resilient” and one week ago GDP suggests it was soft. Regardless of that, examining PRICE action will tell the real story. As the saying goes, “stocks don’t lie, people do.” Below is the ratio chart comparing the staples to the discretionary sector, and it is often a good measure of risk appetite. If consumers are buckling down and purchasing just the bare essentials (staples) that is a sign of fear. The chart below shows the XLY may be done going down against the XLP as it breaks ABOVE a bearish descending triangle, and we know from FALSE moves come fast ones. To be fair and at the expense of sounding like a broken record it will need to be AMZN and TSLA doing the heavy lifting inside the top-heavy XLY (but to be fair the XRT:XLP does not look much different).