In the United States, state and local government budgets have been suffering the repercussions of the economic downturn that hit the world since 2008. Lagging revenues have resulted from lower property and income taxes as real estate values and the size of the job market precipitously fell for the past three years. Moreover, public spending at local and state levels had been rising, much thanks to the government’s massive stimulus of fiscal appropriations on the state level, supporting and expanding public payrolls for the past year.

Constructed by years of fiscal white lies and monetary insanity, the body bags have yet to be filled. Municipal governments in China still depend on increasing real estate values, while European banks holding large debts of failing Southeastern states still stand. The United States Economy has “recovered faster than anyone could have imagined” and the S&P 500 at one time had nearly doubled from it’s lows. But still the whispers; 10 year U.S. Treasuries nearing 3% yields, LIBOR trending higher, market technicals showing a shift towards negative confidence, and this weeks economic data hanging in the balance…

As founder and editor of Diamond Slice I’m proud to announce that The Weekly Spectrum is going to be more “focused”. It’s obvious that you can get a weekly outlook anywhere on the net, so the one you’ll find here is about to become a bit, well, edgy. There’s enough “fair and balanced” out there to kill us all of boredom, I believe that we at DS can give you something much better, something much smarter, and something you can actually profit from. So without any further ado, I give you “The Weekly Spectrum” 2.0…

Crude Oil has reluctantly played follow the leader with U.S. equities for much of the past 12 months. More recently, fundamentals took a back seat to short term speculation as risk takers drove the price of hot button commodities up with stocks. Crude has been in a holding range between $80 and $87/barrel for all of March and April, but in the past two trading sessions NYMEX WTI crude plunged directly from the top to the bottom of that range.

U.S. equities have vigorously rallied for the past six weeks to gain +20%, bringing the S&P 500 just above 1200, as Q1 2010 earnings hit the tape. In short, the charts are begging for a pullback, but earnings and economic indicators are giving no reason to sell. Most analysts agree that the good news is mostly baked in stocks, but sellers have left the building and buyers keep coming out of the woodwork.

Here we’ll focus on a few indicators related to the S&P 500, and tell investors why they should be taking profits at these levels.

“That will never happen to this country.” – Timothy Geitner in response to suggestions that the U.S. Treasury may one day lose its Aaa credit rating. Perhaps inspired by Niall Ferguson’s dramatic Financial Times piece, “A Greek Crisis Coming To America“, we see today as a prime opportunity to recap our short U.S. Long Term
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Supporting our highest conviction trade yet, we now see fundamentals, sentiment, and technicals aligned for a significant correction in Crude Oil prices. While DS partners already hold a position in DTO, we are moving to formally call a short term WTI Crude Continuous Spot price target at $70. Below we explain in detail our thesis
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Crude Oil The oil issue has been speculative to this point. It's hard to argue against 90 dollar oil when we saw 145 in July 2008, but the fundamentals aren't congruent with the price growth we've seen and this trader finds it easier to argue FOR $60/ barrel oil. Crude supply in the U.S. remains
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Earnings season officially began, as the first member of the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average to grab Q4 2009 earnings headlines, Alcoa (AA), reported a net profit of $0.01 EPS on Monday, January 11. The shortfall to the $0.06 EPS market consensus was explained by CEO Klaus Kleinfield by the unexpected weakness in the dollar,
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The January 11-15, 2009 week will be crucial to the movement of equities and commodities over the next month. This addition of the Weekly Spectrum will recap the December Employment report and explain which economic reports will affect U.S. financial markets in the week ahead. The December Non-Farm Payroll report dropped traders' jaws as if they
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