Monday, March 21, 2016

Tuesday Watch

Evening Headlines
Bloomberg:
     

  • Sydney Home Values Have Biggest Quarterly Drop in Seven Years. Sydney home values fell the most in seven years in the December quarter as a regulatory crackdown amid record prices pushed up mortgage rates and sapped demand. The residential property index in Australia’s biggest city dropped 1.6 percent, the first decline in 13 quarters, according to government statistics released Tuesday
  • China's Big Oil Might Do Something Unusual: Write Down Assets. PetroChina Co., the country’s biggest oil and gas producer, and China’s largest offshore explorer Cnooc Ltd., may write down assets following crude’s plunge, analysts say. Analysts from Macquarie Capital Securities Ltd. to Jefferies Group LLC are predicting impairments when the companies report 2015 earnings this week. PetroChina may take a charge of about 28 billion yuan ($4.3 billion), which may push it to its first ever quarterly loss, according to Gordon Kwan, head of Asia oil and gas research at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Hong Hong. Cnooc, which undertook some asset impairments in 2014, may write down more for 2015, according to Lu Wang, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
  • China Stocks Decline as Miners Retreat. Chinese stocks fell, snapping the longest winning streak since May, as commodity producers and industrial companies retreated. The Shanghai Composite Index fell 0.1 percent after the gauge closed above 3,000 for the first time in two months on Monday. Jiangxi Copper Co. and Shandong Gold Mining Co. paced losses by materials shares.
  • Asian Stocks Advance as Japan Shares Jump Amid Crude Oil Gains. Asian stocks rose, led by a rally in Japan as the yen weakened and crude oil futures climbed above $41 a barrel. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index added 0.6 percent as of 9:08 a.m. in Tokyo. Japanese markets resumed trading after a holiday Monday, with the Topix index jumping 2 percent. 
  • Drilling Rig Suppliers Say Oil Recovery Will Be Slower Than Expected. Leaders of the world’s largest suppliers of offshore drilling rigs and the services that go with them see the oil market recovery taking even longer than expected last year. Transocean Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Thigpen expects it will have to wait at least another three years before his company can begin charging higher rates for offshore rigs. Schlumberger Ltd. chief Paal Kibsgaard sees the oil industry, stuck in the deepest financial crisis ever, in no rush to get rigs back online even after prices recover. Before rig owners can charge more, they must first see a boost in activity after the worst crude market crash in a generation. Transocean doesn’t expect an increase in rig leases until late next year or sometime in 2018, Thigpen said Monday in an interview at the Scotia Howard Weil Energy Conference in New Orleans. Daily rates, which have fallen by more than half over the past two years, aren’t expected to climb until 2019 or 2020, he said.
  • Fed's Go-Slow Message on Rate Hikes May Get Burned by Prices. (video) Inflation may be starting to fire up and the Federal Reserve’s credibility could get burned. Just days after policy makers softened their outlook for the pace of interest-rate increases, evidence has accumulated that prices are beginning to move higher. If that trend continues, it could fray investors’ confidence that price pressures remain in check, or lead them to conclude that this is a deliberate effort by the Fed to test the 2 percent target to ensure the US economy remains durable despite weakness and deflationary forces abroad. Exhibit A: Both longer-run survey and market measures of inflation expectations are starting to recover, after dipping during the market turmoil of last the last few months.
  • China Loves IPhones, Just Not Cheap Ones. Two-and-a-half years ago, Apple released a cheaper version of its high-priced smartphone that was supposed to be popular in emerging markets like China. The iPhone 5c was a failure, and Apple killed it off less than a year after it was introduced. This week, Apple is releasing the iPhone SE. Like the 5c, it’s cheaper than the marquee handset by recycling some of the previous year's tech specs. Notably, the screen (an iPhone's single most-expensive component) remains not only smaller but of lower quality than more-recent iPhones.Yet there are a few reasons why the SE will succeed in China where the 5c didn't.
Wall Street Journal:
  • Ted Cruz’s Stealth Delegate Hunt. Senator’s campaign operates under-the-radar effort to prepare for contested Republican convention against Trump. Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign has been operating an under-the-radar effort to prepare for a contested Republican convention this summer, and those moves appear to be bearing fruit in places such as this Atlanta exurb.
  • Calling It Genocide Won’t Stop It. Now that it’s been labeled, how about a strategy to end the ISIS slaughter?
CNBC:
  • Corporate profit ride turning into a train wreck. (video) If the stock market rally is going to continue the next couple of months, it will have to do so against an aggressively worsening profit backdrop. The corporate earnings picture is ugly and getting uglier in a hurry, with S&P 500 companies expected to post an 8.3 percent decline in first-quarter profits from the same period a year ago. While history suggests that earnings season always ends up looking better at the end than it did at the beginning, if the current trend holds up it will be the worst period since the third quarter of 2009, according to FactSet.
Zero Hedge:
Business Insider:
Hong Kong Journal:
  • Shenzhen Group Bans Crowdfunding for Property Speculation. Shenzhen Internet Finance Assoc. asked member cos. to halt such financial services, citing a notice issued by the group. Notice bans offering of new crowdfunding services for property speculation.
Night Trading 
  • Asian equity indices are -.50% +.50% on average.
  • Asia Ex-Japan Investment Grade CDS Index 148.75 +18.0 basis points.  (new series)
  • Asia Pacific Sovereign CDS Index 57.25 -3.0 basis points
  • Bloomberg Emerging Markets Currency Index 71.66 +.01%. 
  • S&P 500 futures -.06%. 
  • NASDAQ 100 futures -.08%.
Morning Preview Links

Earnings of Note
Company/Estimate 

  • (GIII)/.43
  • (CTAS)/.95
  • (XONE)/-.15
  • (FIVE)/.76
  • (KKD)/.21
  • (NKE)/.49
  • (RHT)/.47
  • (SCS)/.22 
Economic Releases 
9:00 am EST
  • The FHFA House Price Index MoM for January is estimated to rise +.5% versus a +.4% gain in December.
9:45 am EST
  • Preliminary Markit US Manufacturing PMI for March is estimated to rise to 51.9 versus 51.3 in February.
10:00 am EST
  • The Richmond Fed Manufacturing Index for March is estimated to rise to 0.0 versus -4.0 in February. 
Upcoming Splits 
  • None of note
Other Potential Market Movers
  • The Fed's Harker speaking, Fed's Evans speaking, Germany IFO report, UK retail sales report, Germany ZEW Index and the US weekly retail sales reports could also impact trading today.
BOTTOM LINE: Asian indices are mostly lower, weighed down by technology and industrial shares in the region. I expect US stocks to open mixed and to weaken into the afternoon, finishing modestly lower. The Portfolio is 50% net long heading into the day.

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