As per Iranian Government request, please let this statement serve to represent that I am pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction by 10 Days to Monday, April 6, 2026, at 8 P.M., Eastern Time. Talks are ongoing and, despite erroneous statements to the contrary by the Fake News Media, and others, they are going very well. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
The third note auction of the week was again weak. Today’s 7 yr yielded 4.255% vs the when issued of 4.247%. The bid to cover of 2.43 was below the previous 12 month average of 2.53 and that is the 2nd lowest going back three years. Direct and indirect bidders took down about 88% of the auction, a four month low, leaving dealers with the balance.
In response, the 7 yr yield is rising to the highest level since July 2025.
Bottom line, of the 3 main auctions this week, the 7 yr was the least bad but weak enough that the 10 yr yield is getting dragged back to 4.40%.
Food prices/Oil execs respond/Paychex on labor market/Other
War trade back on.
We’re of course watching energy prices but still keep your eye on food prices as the CRB Food Stuff index closed yesterday up a touch but to the highest level since last November. As seen in the chart, there is a lot of upside from here, unfortunately. We remain long some fertilizer stocks. From the perspective of the farmer, with higher fertilizer and fuel costs, they really need higher crop prices as the planting season gets underway.
CRB Food Stuff index
In the first release since the war and oil price spike, the Dallas Fed released its Q1 Energy Survey and not surprisingly the index went from -6.2 in Q4 to 21 and the outlook rose from -15.2 to +32.2. However, “Oil and gas production was little changed in the first quarter, according to executives at exploration and production firms. The oil production index increased slightly from -3.4 to 0. Similarly, the natural gas production index edged higher from 0 to 2.3.”
While we’re all guessing as to when/how this war ends and where oil prices go from here, this is what oil/gas company executives think:
And for natural gas prices as US LNG exports become ever more needed around the world:
Container shipping prices continue to rise but as the Houthi’s haven’t yet disrupted the Red Sea, they still remain relatively muted. The Shanghai to LA trip rose by $95 to $2,686 to the highest since mid January. The route to NY rose by a similar amount to $3,393 and to Rotterdam, Netherlands from Shanghai too to $2,552.
Shanghai to LA
Shanghai to Rotterdam
Stock market bearishness continues to rise. In the Investors Intelligence index, Bulls are down to just 39.3 from 42.6 in the month before and it was only just recently it seems that it got above 60 before the kinetic war. That’s the lowest since May 2025 right after the tariff war began again. Bears rose .9 pts to 25. Today’s AAII gauge was little changed. Bulls rose 1.7 pts to 32.1 after falling by 7 straight weeks. Bears fell by 2.2 pts to 49.8 after jumping by 16.5 pts in the prior two weeks. The CNN Fear/Greed index is at just 18, within the ‘extreme fear’ quadrant.
Bottom line, the sentiment is there for a relief rally. We just need news of the relief.
As we have a wide lens on the state of the labor market, this was from the Paychex earnings call and whose stock rose 3% after dropping by 3% Tuesday:
“Amid a dynamic macro backdrop, our clients’ workforce levels remained stable, supported by our solutions that help manage costs and source talent in a tight labor market...For many of our clients, we effectively serve as their HR department, managing a foundational part of their business, their people.”
“on the macro side, I think what we said is and what we see is that it has been relatively stable. It’s really a low fire and a low hire type of environment right now. We’ve not seen a significant change in this fiscal year in terms of the small business index that we report. And again, I think we are in a dynamic environment right now where, again, what we hear from clients, particularly in the small end of the market, less than 50, is a continued inability to find qualified people for the jobs that they have open, and we are doing a lot of things to try to support them there. And then I think you have got a degree of potential hesitancy to add in this uncertain environment as you move up market.”
Chewy’s stock rose 13% yesterday and said this of note on their call:
“Pet is a uniquely attractive industry fueled by increasing pet humanization, premium product adoption and expanding lifetime value per household. Spending in this category is driven by an emotional attachment and recurring non-discretionary needs, which translates into resilient demand across economic cycles. We expect 2026 pet industry dynamics to largely mirror 2025, steady and resilient to macro trends, but without cyclical acceleration. Pet household formation appears stable with no evidence of deterioration.”
“Current estimates suggest low single digit industry growth with dog at the lower end of that range and cat at the higher end. Further, we expect industry growth to be predominantly volume driven with little or no contribution from pricing.”
“When we look across the business, across customer engagement, retention, overall spend behavior, the trends we see remain stable and consistent with what we’ve seen over the past several quarters.”
We’re long Petco which has been a dog of a stock, pun intended, but a really interesting turnaround situation.
A day after the German business confidence index came out which showed a decline, today the March French business confidence index held at 97, one point above the estimate. A drop in manufacturing confidence was offset by a lift in retail, employment and construction confidence. Services were unchanged. Nothing market moving here.
For the week ended 3/21, initial claims rose by 5k to 210k as expected but still remaining very low. The 4 week average was unchanged at 211k. Continuing claims, for the week ended 3/14, fell to 1.819mm from 1.851mm which interestingly is the lowest since May 2024. Is that because people are finding new jobs or because their benefits are expiring? We’ll get a clue next week with March payrolls.
The business media, investment strategists and money managers are herd-like. They think in consensus terms and operate, generally, with "first level thinking." When the tide is rolling in and price momentum is favorable -- in a market that is dominated by passive strategies and products -- the herd typically wins. But, once the tide goes out and price momentum inflects, their lack of rigor, risk management and investment process are revealed. It is then that we realize:
"There is no there there."
- Gertrude Stein
Unfortunately, while market advances are a staircase higher, market declines are often elevators lower - as we have recently witnessed.
In the main and throughout the last 18 months few of those cohorts expressed economic, inflation, interest rate, geopolitical and valuation concerns. Indeed (and in the extreme), as I wrote several months ago, panelists on the "shows" literally could not find any adverse outcomes at all.
For this reason and others are why I wrote this column one week ago:
The Business Media Has Failed You
* Not providing two way discourse/debate (and relying on formulaic programming) has prepared investors poorly for when the halcyon days are over and the tides starts going out...
"So much for objective journalism. Don't bother to look for it here--not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores and race results, there is no such thing as objective journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing
My comments below should be a familiar refrain for those that follow me on Twitter and elsewhere...
Hubert Humphrey once said, "Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate." The same applies to the generation and display of ideas -- in this case, market, economic and company views/outlooks. They are best presented and hammered out in disputation.
The business media, especially Fin TV, has once again failed to properly serve their most important stakeholder - their viewers and readers.
Journalists best serve their constituents by providing balanced and objective reporting. It is especially important for the media to always inject a degree of skepticism. This is even more important when the tide is coming in and the salad days of bullishness (come euphoria) are upon us. The media should do so to prepare for the inevitable downturn in fundamentals, stock prices and investors' sentiment.
It is also important for journalists to remain independent of view and to not have personal relationships (or the desire to have access) with company managements to influence their views. (Salesforce (CRM) , ServiceNow (NOW) and Nvidia (NVDA) come to mind!)
The business media has not provided this service. Instead, formulaic programming offers up the same (day after day) uber confident and non objective "talking heads" and their ever superficial "analysis" that is miles long but only inches deep (by practitioners who would never even qualify for interviews as analysts in any serious hedge fund and who never met a market they did not like) -- and, too often, are not supported by rigorous analysis or investment process.
"Praise by individual, criticize by category."
- Warren Buffett
My comments are not intended to be ad hominem, they are (like Meet The Press' Tim Russert was) fact based - taken from archived videos and interviews.
Without time stamps, guests and panelists in the business media are not held accountable. (Worse yet, they are too often filled with hubris). Case in point, a panelist on CNBC's Halftime, who, in the last three years, has endorsed only three specific stocks as his foundational, "forever" and largest holdings - Alibaba (BABA) , Moderna (MRNA) and UnitedHealth (UNH) :
* BABA missed last night and the shares are -$7 overnight - the shares have receded from $192 to $128 (he has recommended all the way down - as recently as two weeks ago Trade Tracker: Steve Weiss buys more Alibaba )
* MRNA dropped precipitously from $500 to a low of $22 (now $52)
* UNH declined from $595 to $282
(I should note that in the case of Alibaba, the panelist berated the other panelists who purchased BABA due to the ownership structure in which you are not a shareholder but own an interest in an offshore vehicle! Then he bought near the top of the chart.)
Contrary views (read: bearish) are underemphasized or not delivered at all in a backdrop of giddiness and FOMO ("fear of missing out").
Discipline and assessment of downside risk relative to upside reward are nearly always abandoned as an extreme level of complacency is urged at just the time markets mature and overvalued equity prices peak (in a valuation promise of a new never ending bullish cycle and paradigm).
Geopolitical risks, extreme valuations and private equity/credit concerns - were risks that some of us ursine types have been warning about for twelve months. Yet these factors were given little discussion or weight in the media. It is only "after the horse left the barn" (when the problems have surfaced), that a proper discussion is permitted.
Memo to the business media:
There are some situations one simply cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral you are an accomplice. Objectivity doesn't mean treating all sides equally. It means giving each side a hearing.
As mentioned above, disasters have a way of not happening. (h/t Byron Wien)
There have been only 12 data points in which the S&P Index fell by 10% or more:
For the reasons mentioned in "Growing Less Bearish" I have begun to accumulate equities - after being net short for some time.
Here are some more reasons I have begun to buy:
* The compression in valuations has been multiple driven and the swiftness of the drop in price earnings multiples was last seen five years ago during Covid:
* The price earnings ratio of the S&P Index is now one turn under the five year average:
* MAG 7 valuations (excluding Tesla) is down to 19-times vs. 17-times low over the last decade:
* Sentiment has deteriorated. S&P and Nasdaq advance/decline lines are near five year lows:
-LNAI +77% (executes $20M Strategic Transaction at Fixed $1.50 Conversion, Acquiring BBB Delivery Platform for CNS Alzheimer's Therapies with Broad CNS Delivery Applications)
-OLPX +51% (to be acquired by Henkel at $2.06/shr)
-KOD +50% (announces positive Topline results in GLOW2, the second Phase 3 study in Diabetic Retinopathy, demonstrating superiority of Zenkuda (tarcocimab tedromer) over Sham)
-LOVE +13% (earnings, guidance)
-RBNE +13% (momentum)
-MARA +8.3% (repurchases $1B of convertible notes at discount)
-DXYZ +7.3% (momentum)
-PHGE +5.9% (launches X Security & Defense subsidiary)
-GLNG +2.9% (evaluating strategic alternatives)
-BETR +2.5% (Better and Coinbase launch the First Token-Backed, Conforming Mortgage)
Downside:
-WVE -54% (announces Interim Phase 1 Data from INLIGHT)
-MLKN -22% (earnings, guidance)
-WS -14% (earnings)
-WYFI -8.2% (earnings)
-ARWR -8.0% (hearing of cautious comments from DB)
-QNRX -7.0% (earnings, guidance)
-DBI -6.7% (earnings, guidance)
-APP -5.7% (hearing broker piece highlights concerns regarding challenge to business from META)
-JBS -4.2% (earnings)
-SNDK -3.7% (concerns regarding Google Research new TurboQuant technology’s impact to business)
-NEM -3.5% (mining weakness from Iran conflict)
-B -3.1% (delays Pakistan Mega Mine due to Iran war)
-CMC -3.1% (earnings, guidance)
-MU -3.0% (concerns regarding Google Research new TurboQuant technology’s impact to business)
1:30 p.m.: Federal Reserve Board holds hybrid public outreach meeting as part of its review of regulations under the Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act (EGRPRA), Washington, DC (Livestream at federalreserve.gov or youtube.com/federalreserve);
4 p.m.: Fed Board Governor Cook (Voter) speaks on "Reflections on Financial Stability" before an event co-presented by the Yale Program on Financial Stability, New Haven, CT (Text available. Q&A from moderator. Livestream at youtube.com/live/4jb3JmQxW50;
6:30 p.m.: Fed Board Governor Miran (Voter) speaks on "The Fed's Balance Sheet" before the Economic Club of Miami, Miami, FL (Text available. Q&A from moderator. Livestream at youtube.com/live/PxcqPsuzMMk?feature=share);
7:00 p.m.: Vice Chair, Board of Governors Jefferson (Voter) will share his thoughts on the economy in conversation with Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan as part of the Dallas Fed's Global Perspectives speaker series;
7:10 p.m.: Fed Board Governor Michael Barr (Voter) speaks on the economy before an event hosted by the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC (Livestream at brookings.zoom.us (Pass code: 698770))
Treasury Auctions:
11 a.m.: Treasury announces a 6 Week and 3 and 6 month bill auction;
11:30 a.m.; Treasury hosts a $85B 4 and $80B 8 Week Bill Auction;
HIGH YIELD: OAS Spread moved 1 beep yesterday - looked nothing like the uniquely American Panic Attacks you see with certain types chasing stocks on green
It may be tempting to think that the rise in yields is the product of a US-centric dynamic (relating to OPEC recycling no/fewer petrodollars into Treasuries), but the next chart shows that yields are rising everywhere. This is global reset, not unlike 2022. pic.twitter.com/jqizogsawh
#Iran War Update No. 26 (focus on Iranian strategic narrative):
🔹Israel continued striking inside Iran, including new waves of airstrikes in Tehran, describing some targets as naval shipyards and other military-related sites. This indicates that Israel was maintaining…
This month is proving painful for macro traders: Brevan Howard Master Fund: -6% (MTD through March 20), -0.5% YTD Brevan Howard Alpha Strategies: -3.7% (MTD through March 20), +0.6% YTD Taula: -9.6% (MTD through March 20) Caxton Macro: -15% (MTD through March 20) pic.twitter.com/Y1Fe8gROD6
