There’s lots to parse in today’s data dump, and while one can point to mild winter weather, base effects and less-rosy internal breadth to poke holes in some of today’s headline readings, bottom line is that global sentiment (much of today’s releases are survey/opinion data) has clearly improved over the past month.
In the interest of time I simply snipped the list and green (24) and red-spotted (10) the ones that indicate something about general conditions:
Definitely click to enlarge…
Of course one month does not an economic acceleration make, but, nevertheless, the above could be instructive.
What is always instructive is the character of quarterly revenue and sales reports sector by sector. And Q4 continues to reflect what we’ve been finding in our weekly deep-dive into the data (weak business investment, strong consumer spending). Although, the contracting earnings growth for consumer discretionary companies having reported thus far is a yellow flag for our still-strong-consumer thesis:
Click to enlarge…
And remember, as we’ve been intimating, the cyclical companies’ stocks (well, virtually all companies’ stocks for that matter) are priced for perfection!