Let’s get rolling…
If the good Lord had intended us to walk, he wouldn’t have invented roller skates. – Willy Wonka
Good day to you and welcome back to the skating rink. I’ve seen several headlines trumpeting how “The Bulls Are Storming Wall Street” and what not…but the markets themselves are up just over 1%, and given that action we’ve seen the last few weeks with 3-5% intraday moves seemingly routine, I wouldn’t be overstating a 1% move to kick off this week.
Meanwhile, I’ve not made any trades yet today, but I do see the LPS back above $17 (we started shorting it in the mid-$30s, mind you) on an incredibly rare 3% rally and I might add some puts in there or maybe just short some outright again. We’ll see, but I’m not doing it just yet.
And before I go, here’s a quick note on the smartphone revolution from JP Morgan’s analysts:
Global Communications Equipment: Handset Model Update: Reducing Numbers on Faltering Consumer, But Increasing Smartphone Ests. We are reducing our 2011 handset shipment growth estimate to 6.4% from 6.8% but increasing our smartphone forecast for the full year. Consumer indicators are certainly shaky globally but not clearly in a downward trend yet. Our intention in this update is to begin factoring in the potential for worse consumer dynamics in H2 without going all the way to a recession scenario. Should consumer spending reverse in H2 we would expect a rapid reduction in phone sales from the levels we currently forecast as well as lower smartphone growth. At this point, however, we do not believe the data supports this scenario. Hall.
Two notes — you never, and I mean, NEVER want to take your macro-economic analysis from these sector specialists. That’s not to say that an economic downturn isn’t possible or even imminent (I think we’ll have some more bubbles before the next crash, but we’ll have to be flexible in case the realities turn out different than we expect), but I’ve seen many a great analyst chase himself out of stocks like Apple and Netflix over “concerns about the macro” and they are usually chasing the latest economic numbers as they do it.
But where you do pay attention to sector analysts is in the trends of the numbers that they’re modeling for the sectors that they specifically cover. And in this case, the analyst is covering the handset sector, and he’s making some internal tweaks to his sector models — secular growth of the smartphone within the cyclical growth of the broader handset sector is one of the basis for the smartphone revolution.
Let’s get rolling.