All that glitters is not gold.
These are the main indices for the US economy. Don't trust them blindly.

I am just repeating something I posted quite some time ago. You have two pockets, one full of USD, one full of stocks. As a trader you fill each one and empty the other one, when you feel that it is worth it. If half the money is in USD and half invested in stocks, what is the damage to the US economy this last year? And more specifically, the damage of the liquid part of the economy.

Answer: Absolutely zero. Why? Because this "recession" we lived thorough doesn't look like what it looks like.

For decades we took energy, food, health and peace for granted. In a split second we had to start thinking differently.
The same goes for investing, the same goes for trading.

There is this saying, that if you invent a revolutionary trading method and it is successful, when everyone picks it up and applies it, the market absorbs the effect, thus breaking it. You can't fix a problem if you are INSIDE the problem. If you want to look at the US economy, you have to look it from outside.

This chart does something like that. You could measure DJI in Euro or Yen. You could just measure it in an average-of-all-other-currencies currency. I obsess with this transformation. If you measure USOIL in Yen, you will see an immense problem. If you just look at USOIL measured in dollars, everything is peaceful.

Crude Oil Inflation Spiral


If we all believe that DJI is the measure of the strength of the economy, then it isn't. I am oversimplifying. I also won't say that just this multiplication will solve our problems. I just want to point out that the real picture is blurred with all these modern methods and the famous indices.

A handful of companies own most of the worldwide wealth. A handful of people in reality... This is not a conspiracy, it is the Pareto Distribution which is one of nature's fundamentals. They could, in theory and in practice, manipulate the economy at will.

Why am I saying that? Because the smaller companies of SPX were hurt compared to the blue-chips. These charts show just that. Throughout this year, the big ones didn't get hurt at all. And their price movement? Curiously similar to the normalized chart. Did anything happen to Apple, Amazon, Google, Tesla, McDonalds? Nada.

Blue: DXY*DJI/100
Orange: MCD
snapshot

Blue: DXY*SPX/100
Orange: AAPL
snapshot

I am not trying to say that these two companies manipulate the economy. But surely Apple, the biggest company in US, is so heavy that its steps feel like earthquake to us.

Tread lightly, for this is hallowed ground.
-Father Grigori
AAPLBeyond Technical AnalysisDJIDXYMCDSPX (S&P 500 Index)

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