Okay. Rebuild the bull case for me again, with this and unemployment rising at a dramatic clip? I'm outta' here. I am going to transfer more of my assets to cash. And yes, I'm serious. Good luck to you galactically amazing, true, intraday traders, that can capture almost every tick while avoiding the nicks. I'll leave you with some very wise words from Birinyi; "Laszlo Birinyi Sees No Precedent to Gauge Market Crisis": http://www.bloomberg.com/avp/avp.ht...//media2.bloomberg.com/cache/vxzeFhqC7JSg.asf
It was a flawed index to begin with. The fall in the index has much less to do with falling demand than it has to do with delcine in marginal costs of dry shipping.
That may be true. Maybe it's better to merely say that in a liquidity-driven environment, everything moves up AND down together. Oh, and by the way, the Baltic Index correlates too strongly to crude oil.
Excellent. When the numbers don't say what you want them to, just discard them. CPI too high, just change the numbers. Mark to market accounting creating losses, just get rid of it. M3 showing an uncontrolled expansion in the money supply, just don't publish it anymore. Next step, the NYSE just announced this morning that their new pilot program on stock pricing has them removing the dollar sign ($) in front of most stock prices (since they have dropped so much). Starting on Monday instead, they will substitute a picture of a banana for the dollar sign. Should be interesting.
Hey it can't go much lower. It is going to be cheaper to let the ships sit then to run them and once trade finance comes back this index will rise quickly. I can almost guarantee that. It is also over rated as a prediction tool.
Karen Finerman actually stated some very intelligent things about this situation. She opined that we have not seen the lows on this index until there are some bankruptcies, and I tend to agree with her. At that time, it would be wise to peruse the strong balance sheet shippers that have been cleaved 60%+ and go cherry picking for some long term value plays. FWIW, IMO the Charles Dow theory on transports is not to be dismissed lightly.
..."It is now almost 90 percent cheaper to ship goods over the oceans than it was at the beginning of the year. And because the huge vessels known as capesize ships can't currently charge much more than their daily operating cost of about $6,000 per day, their captains have slowed down to economize on fuel and save money, to about 8.68 knots from 10.33 knots in July, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It isn't just the oceans that are emptying. Air freight traffic dropped 7.7 percent in September, according to the latest figures from the International Air Transport Association. That's the steepest decline since the trade group began compiling the data in January 2003." Pardon the source: http://www.kitco.com/ind/nadler/oct302008B.html