No, I'm not talking about Apple, very loudly creeping up, then down and representing ever more SPX points. The creeping up is oil.
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Portugal, and yields, and Iran - oh my! None of these are new stories.
Portugal is bigger than Greece - but we knew that. Moreover, we knew Portugal was in dire straits. We knew Germany was already hesitant to provide more assistance and would demand higher guarantees.
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Last year I started writing about the divergent forces working on oil: global slowdown vs. geopolitical unrest. So far, geopolitical unrest has been winning.
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Natural gas continues to hang out at its lows, and I'm liking it more and more.

What's also interesting is that UNG, which is the ETF created to play natural gas continues to diverge from the commodity, so that even as the commodity stabilizes and even has a few up days, UNG continues to underperform.

The above chart is the ratio of the natural gas index: UNG monthly since the inception of UNG in 2007.
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A long long time ago, there was a lot of talk about alternative energy, and then the government got involved, and the talk subsided, but it was always there, and there were prominent VC's who touted it, and then we all shifted our attention to Europe - and now . . .
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It's all in the timing. I recently spoke to a client about the recent divergence between oil and the agricultural space. I'm not a chart specialist, but I do like to reference the charts for a quick view of history. In this case, the spread between oil and ag indices looks pretty stretched. .
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From a recent report by McKinsey:
It’s been a while since the world has been truly preoccupied with the threat of sustained high oil prices.
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As the world's growth is being recognized for what it is, namely anemic if not outright negative, oil and the industrial commodities have come off a good 30+%.
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While the world looks at the euro dying a surprisingly slow death, I once again have to shift readers' focus.
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With an economic slowdown starting to get priced in, and deflationary pressures increasing, energy is lower.
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60 million barrels sure sounds like a lot, so thank you world governments for releasing that into the system and alleviating consumers' burdens.
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Earlier this week, Dennis Gartman had a note out on the technicalities behind the failed OPEC meeting, where the votes were roughly split between countries willing and unwilling to boost production.
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World growth is slowing and that means that not all commodities are equal. Commodities have 2 opposing forces at play determining their prices. The first, is a complex, global, supply and demand equilibrium.
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You wouldn't believe the vehemence of the responses I've received for selling silver last week, and the chides so far this week. Sure, I sold silver and bought GDX and XLU in its stead and missed out on a few percentages of relative performance.
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Goldman came out with a note today encouraging clients to dumb their oil holdings and lo and behold, oil is down 4% - correlation, not necessarily causation, I know, but still.
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