Topley’s Top 10 – December 02, 2022

1. S&P Closes Above 200day Moving Average


2. History of S&P Below 200day for 6 Months

From Dave Lutz at Jones Trading Looking at the previous 13 times (since ’50) it was beneath the 200dma for 6 mos or more and closed above showed only once did it move back to new lowsUp avg 18.8% yr later and higher 12/13 times, Carson notes.


3. Another Large U.S. Arms Sale this Week $323M to Finland…Defense ETF New Highs

ITA-Aerospace and Defense ETF about to make new highs

www.stockcharts.com


4. International Outperformance EFA Developed International +13.2% vs. S&P +5% November

www.yahoofinance.com


5. MSCI China +25% November

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/MCHI:NASDAQ?  sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj6zZi74tj7AhWJpXIEHVFsAgQQ3ecFegQIHBAg


6. Tesla Traded Down to 200 Week Moving Average

Tesla after 3 lower tops..almost hits 200week on long-term chart

www.stockcharts.com


7. Bitcoin Returns After Rolling One Month -20%

Not sure if this matters but here is the history

https://www.nasdaq.com/solutions/nasdaq-dorsey-wright


8. China Facing 11.58m College Grads this Year Looking for Jobs

My thought 18% Youth Unemployment Historically Equals Social Unrest

Bloomberg China’s Record Graduates to Pressure Youth Jobs Market in 2023

  • A record 11.58 million students will graduate next year: Gov
  • Youth unemployment rate hit all-time high this year on Covid

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-16/china-s-record-graduates-to-pressure-youth-jobs-market-in-2023?sref=GGda9y2L


9. Number Of Handgun Owners Carrying Daily Nearly Doubles In US

ZEROHEDGE BLOG BY TYLER DURDEN  A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health revealed the number of law-abiding Americans carrying a loaded handgun daily nearly doubled between 2015-19.

The study titled “Trend in Loaded Handgun Carrying Among Adult Handgun Owners in the United States, 2015‒2019” found the number of law-abiding US adults carrying handguns nearly doubled from 9 million in 2015 to 16 million in 2019.

“Proportionally fewer handgun owners carried handguns in states where issuing authorities had substantial discretion in granting permits,” the study’s authors said.

The authors claimed that very “little was known about the frequency and features of firearm carrying among adult handgun owners in the United States before this study. In fact, over the past 30 years, only a few peer-reviewed national surveys, conducted in 1994,1995, 1996, and 2015, have provided even the most basic information about firearm carrying frequency.”

Research firm Ipsos conducted the national survey between July 2019 and August 2019. Respondents were from firearm-owning households drawn from Ipsos’s Knowledge Panel, an online sampling pool of approximately 55,000 adults.

There was no explanation by the study’s authors for the rapid increase in daily handgun-carrying adults. But during the period, social unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore City, Maryland, as well as surging violent crime across certain metro areas, could be the reason behind the trend.

After all, an overwhelming number of respondents said they were carrying handguns for “personal protection.”

“And all of these increases happened before the Covid lockdowns and the “Summer of Love” where many US cities experienced massive rioting, violence and staggering increases in crime,” firearms blog Bearing Arms said. Much of this unleashed a tidal wave of law-abiding citizens panic buying guns, even to this day, for personal protection.

And then there’s this summer’s US Supreme Court’s NYSRPA v. Bruen ruling affirmed the right-to-carry applies outside the home, which forces states to stop arbitrarily denying carry permits to applicants who didn’t meet specific requirements. This ruling has allowed millions of gun owners to conceal carry if they take a two-day class and pass a background check.

Suppose the authors were to update the study for the pandemic years and the Bruen ruling. In that case, we believe the number of Americans packing heat has dramatically increased as the country is plagued with violent crime in progressively run cities.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/number-handgun-owners-carrying-daily-nearly-doubles-us


10. 10 things crypto people said at Thanksgiving this year

This article was written by Joe Weisenthal. It appeared first on the Bloomberg Terminal.

Well this is awkward for you. As Bloomberg’s Claire Ballentine notes, if you were preaching the gospel of crypto to your family at Thanksgiving last year, then this year you had a lot of explaining to do. Here are 10 things I’ve written that could have been said around the dinner table this year, that if nothing else, could salvage a few scraps of reputation and dignity.

1. “As bad as it seems right now, trust me, Mt. Gox was worse.” It doesn’t even matter that you weren’t around or even aware of crypto when that infamous exchange went down in early 2014. Nobody can really disprove the statement. And it gives you credibility about having a long-term perspective. You know the ups and downs.

2. “The collapse of FTX just validates… crypto.” This is really the key one that you have to keep arguing over and over again — that FTX and these other entities that went down this year were just traditional banks that had bastardized the vision of Satoshi Nakamoto. There was nothing “crypto” about them and it’s good that they’re gone. Next cycle, we need to move more and more activity on chain (just don’t bring up Luna!).

3. “Real crypto is working just fine.” Point to the various decentralized exchanges (like Uniswap) or lending platforms (like AAVE) that have continued to operate, without seizing user money. This is the future! And it works today. (Again, don’t bring up Luna.)

4. “Oh you want to mock crypto? I guess you’ve never had to make a payment in a developing market.” If the arguments about “real” crypto aren’t working, then you have to establish your moral superiority over your relatives. Talk about how privileged everyone else at the dinner table is for living in a country with a functioning banking and payment system. (Feel free to say this, even if you yourself have no personal experience with making payments in a developing market either.)

5. “Crypto already has numerous use cases, like stablecoins.” If anyone asks what crypto is, you know, used for (and someone will!) point out how there’s over $100 billion held in stablecoins on Ethereum alone, and how this is a better way of making payments than traditional apps. And if you want to appeal to the patriotic instincts of anyone at the table, argue that this crypto is covertly expanding global dollar supremacy by making USD holdable by anyone with a smartphone anywhere in the world.

There are some other things you can point to as “use cases” as well. Show how easy it is to post your Ethereum as collateral to get stablecoins. Ask them if they can do that with their Tesla shares on Robinhood. They can’t. Then sell some coins with a few clicks and ask them if they can do that on Robinhood. Oh wait, they can’t do that either because the market is closed on Thanksgiving. Checkmate!

6. “Of course crashes happen. But outside of just trading, crypto is changing culture and art.” This is where you bring in the influence of NFTs on art and music. Talk about how you’re all about supporting creators and how traditional models hurt artists and fans. Maybe say something about the Taylor Swift/Ticketmaster fiasco as evidence of the old business models being broken. How do NFTs solve the Taylor Swift problem? Unclear, but that’s for another conversation.

Of course, be careful. One piece of advice: Maybe acknowledge that the apes look dumb, just as a way to shore up your credibility on this point. If anyone does bring up the apes, point to some cool on-chain generative art or something like that.

7. “Crypto is going to change gaming.” This is the corollary to the art discussion. Point to the kids in the family that have left the dinner table to start playing video games. Gesture towards them and talk about how that generation is digital first, and will want to actually be able to own the items that they play with online. Owning their characters and so forth. Moving them from game to game. Acknowledge that the first generation of crypto games were not that fun, but that better gameplay is coming soon.

8. “Bubbles are a crucial part of the innovation process and often leave behind productive infrastructure in their wake.” This is tricky, but sophisticated. Point to the railroads that were left behind after the railway bubble in the 1800s. Point to the telecom infrastructure that was built amid the dotcom boom.

What’s the equivalent for crypto? Well there’s nothing physical you can point to that’s the equivalent of railroads or bandwidth. So your best shot is to talk about the accumulated knowledge gains that have been made in cryptography and computer science, as a result of all this speculation. Talk about zero-knowledge proofs, and how this privacy tech will have a profound, positive impact on how we use the Internet. Argue that any financial institutions, even TradFi ones, will benefit from having to cryptographically prove their solvency at all times.

You can even talk about Automated Market Makers, and how if you stipulate that right now they’re just being used for the trading of magic beans, that one day they can be used to trade equities or currencies without the need for a middleman. The code that’s been built up to support crypto trading is the infrastructure that will power a future golden age of financial markets.

9. We needed a crash to weed out unhealthy speculators.” Maybe the line about bubbles being good and necessary is unconvincing. So instead talk about how crashes are good and necessary. Crypto is a long game, and it’s good for the ecosystem that the newbs and short-term pump and dumpers are out of the game. Now it’s time to build! And since you’re still here, arguing with family at Thanksgiving, then obviously you weren’t just in it for the quick buck. You’re one of the good ones, and in it for the long haul.

10. “It’s a mere 485 days until Bitcoin’s next halving!” It can’t possibly be priced in yet.

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/10-things-people-said-at-thanksgiving-this-year/?utm_source=Email&utm_campaign=628913&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_content=CryptoNewsletterDec&tactic=628913&pchash=817213826%3A125698791

Topley’s Top 10 – December 01, 2022

1. Proxy for Risk…See If Softbank Breaks to New Lows

www.stockcharts.com


2. Bear Market?…Nasdaq NDAQ Approaching New Highs

www.stockcharts.com


3. Video Game Sales First Down Revenue Year in a Decade

NERD ETF $40 to $14

HERO ETF Global X Video Games and Esports $26 to $18

www.stockcharts.com


4. Vanguard Developed International ex-U.S. Closes Above 200day Moving Average


5. Tesla Price to Sales 23x to 8x

Macro Trends-Tesla price to sales chart.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/price-sales


6. Tech Jobs on Ziprecruiter Went Up 87% in One Year…..Now Falling

Marketwatch Zoe Han

The number of job postings for jobs in the technology sector on ZipRecruiter peaked in May with more than 1.9 million jobs, up 87% from February 2020 just before the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic.  But hiring started declining in June around the same time as the Fed’s first 75 basis point hike (one basis point is equal to one hundredth of a percentage point, or 1% of 1%). In October, the number of job postings for tech jobs fell to 1.3 million.

Employers are seeking to fill fewer entry-level tech roles. On Nov. 15, only 2.7% of the active job postings for data engineers on ZipRecruiter were looking for “junior,” “entry-level” or “level I” candidates. Demand was even lower for enterprise resource development engineers (1.6%), software developers (1.2%), software engineers (0.8%) and systems engineers (1.8%). Instead, a large share of active job postings across those roles were seeking “mid-level” or “level II” candidates — 71% of the software-developer job postings and 48.6% of software engineers.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tech-hiring-is-slowing-down-this-chart-explains-how-and-why-11669057738?mod=home-page


7. $8 Trillion…1/2 of Chinese GDP Collateralized by Land Values

The property downturn is a particular problem for China as local government debt – of which there is an estimated $8 trillion of outstanding, half of China’s GDP – is often collateralized by land values. Falling land values increase the chance of collateral calls, leading to the distressed sale of other assets, adding to deflationary dynamic.

China saw the largest rise in private debt since 2010 of any country in the world, with the private-debt-to-GDP ratio rising a dizzying 90 percentage points.

That has led to China’s debt service ratio, the ratio of its debt service repayments to private disposable income, to rise above 20%.

The BIS notes that DSRs of 20%-25% have preceded financial crises in other countries. Hong Kong’s DSR is even worse at over 30%.

One increasingly likely lever China will pull (and has been pulling) to ease the debt problem is allowing the yuan to weaken, and perhaps eventually dropping the fixed-rate exchange system altogether. Property easing measures and an eventual exit from Covid restrictions will help, but the debt problem is not going away.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/end-zero-covid-will-not-cure-chinas-deep-set-debt-problem


8. We have Showed this Chart Before but Now 3 Months in a Row of Falling Rents….Another Lagged Inflation Number

Housing costs 40% of CPI

https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/national-rent-data


9. The Pentagon fails its fifth audit in a row If the Defense Department can’t get its books straight, how can it be trusted with a budget of more than $800 billion per year?

Written byConnor Echols

Last week, the Department of Defense revealed that it had failed its fifth consecutive audit.

“I would not say that we flunked,” said DoD Comptroller Mike McCord, although his office did note that the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. “The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want.”

The news came as no surprise to Pentagon watchers. After all, the U.S. military has the distinction of being the only U.S. government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit.

But what did raise some eyebrows was the fact that DoD made almost no progress in this year’s bookkeeping: Of the 27 areas investigated, only seven earned a clean bill of financial health, which McCord described as “basically the same picture as last year.”

Given this accounting disaster, it should come as no surprise that the Pentagon has a habit of bad financial math. This is especially true when it comes to estimating the cost of weapons programs.

The Pentagon’s most famous recent boondoggle is the F-35 program, which has gone over its original budget by $165 billion to date. But examples of overruns abound: As Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Jack Reed (D-RI) wrote in 2020, the lead vessel for every one of the Navy’s last eight combatant ships came in at least 10 percent over budget, leading to more than $8 billion in additional costs.

And another major overrun is poised to happen soon, according to a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office.

The Navy plans to expand its ship production in an effort to maintain an edge over China, with a particular focus on a new attack submarine and destroyer ship. The Pentagon has proposed three versions of this plan at an average cost of $27 billion per year between 2023 and 2052, a 10 percent jump from current annual shipbuilding costs.

But the CBO says this is a big underestimate. The independent agency’s math says the average annual cost of this shipbuilding initiative will be over $31 billion, meaning that the Navy is underestimating costs by $120 billion over the program’s life.

As Mark Thompson of the Project on Government Oversight recently noted, these overruns “shouldn’t come as a shock” to anyone who has paid attention to DoD acquisitions in recent years. “But it does suggest a continuing, and stunning, inability by the Navy to get its ducks, and dollars, in a row,” Thompson wrote.

So will the Pentagon manage to get its financial house in order any time soon? It’s possible, if a bit unlikely.

Despite the long odds, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proposed a bill last year that could help make that happen. The legislation would cut one percent off the top of the budget of any part of the Pentagon that fails an audit. That means that, if the proposal had already passed, 20 of the agency’s 27 auditing units would face a budget cut this year.

Unfortunately, momentum around that bill appears to have fizzled out, leaving the Pentagon’s accountants as the last line of defense. Per Comptroller McCord, the DoD hopes to finally pass an audit by 2027, a mere 14 years after every other agency in the U.S. government blew past that milestone. That may coincide with another historical moment, according to Andrew Lautz of the National Taxpayers Union.

“[W]e could reach a $1 trillion defense budget five years sooner [than the CBO estimates], in 2027,” Lautz wrote.

Responsible Statecraft’s independent, authentic journalism promotes democratic accountability and poses a transpartisan challenge to militaristic foreign policy! Responsible Statecraft is the online magazine of the Quincy Institute(QI). Please help us lift up new voices of realism and military restraint with your 100% tax-deductible donation to the Quincy Institute in support of Responsible Statecraft. Donate here.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/11/22/why-cant-the-dod-get-its-financial-house-in-order/?utm_source=chartr&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=chartr_20221130


10. Cognitive Strategies of Elite Soccer Players and Athletes

Psychology Today Can time dilation explain soccer superstars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo? Raj Persaud, M.D. and Peter Bruggen, M.D.

KEY POINTS

  • Perceptual time can appear to slow down in some instances and may have practical benefits.
  • Elite athletes deliberately train under more challenging conditions that they would normally endure.
  • Physical strength may compete with superior mental processing to determine who wins in sporting competitions.

Soccer is the planet’s most popular sport (outside of the USA), and the FIFA World Cup is therefore perhaps the largest mega-event in sports, possibly even surpassing the Olympics in worldwide fan interest.

Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi

Source: Fanny Schertzer

Arguably the two greatest soccer players of all time, Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal and Lionel Messi of Argentina, are both playing in the current FIFA World Cup tournament in Qatar, representing perhaps the last opportunity to witness such a unique spectacle.

Theories as to why some elite athletes become practically unbeatable, invoke not just physical strength but also neuroscience and psychology.

How to Freeze Time

A research paper entitled, “Can Lionel Messi’s Brain Slow Down Time Passing?” suggests that elite competitors become outstanding at anticipating their opponent’s next move, before they make it.

The authors argue that the key reason why the Argentinian soccer star is difficult to stop is that he makes sure his adversaries don’t have enough time. This is because, so the argument goes, in Messi’s mind time passes more slowly.

These authors contend that if perceptual time for an elite athlete slows down, this enables them to see more of what is happening on the field of play. Paradoxically, if their sensory systems work faster, then more computations-per-second deliver a “wider bandwidth” for grasping events on the pitch.

The authors of a study entitled “Psychological and Neural Mechanisms of Subjective Time Dilation”, show how for any set period of time, certain events can be experienced as longer than others.

For example, they suggest you try this for yourself: Take a quick glance at the second hand of a clock or watch. Immediately, the tick will pause momentarily, and appear to be longer than the subsequent ticks. Yet, they all last exactly one second.

Suppose for athletes like Lionel Messi, on the field of play, they see the equivalent of the second hand as always running slower than their opponents?

Another study entitled, “Mastery in Goal Scoring, T-Pattern Detection, and Polar Coordinate Analysis of Motor Skills Used by Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo,” argues that it is the dynamic nature of superior skill that distinguishes the elite athlete; the player needs to perform the right action at the right time.

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Goal-scoring sequences were analyzed from the moment the player receives the last pass to the moment he scores a goal, and the conclusion of this investigation was that both players, Messi and Ronaldo, better anticipate the actions of their opponents, resulting in higher success in attacking.

In a paper entitled, “The Discovery of Slowness: Time to Deconstruct Gretzky’s and Messi’s Predictive Brains,” the Argentinian example, it is suggested, was preceded by the astounding case of ice-hockey star Wayne Gretzky.

Between 1979 and 1999, the Canadian ice hockey player broke numerous records. As he was not a particularly impressive physical specimen, when trying to explain how he differed from other players, it would appear that during a match, time could be said to “freeze” for him.

According to Gretzky, he considered ice hockey as a rather slow game. By weaving together his reading of immediate sporting predicaments, Gretzky often predicted what would happen next.

Being able to predict what is going to occur is not just useful for elite athletes, it is of everyday significance in our daily lives as well.

The authors of a study entitled, “Why am I Always Late? Modelling the Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Anticipatory Timing Under Uncertainty,” give an example: imagine trying to swat a fly? This requires being able to predict precisely where the insect will be and when, given the fly usually moves faster than you can. In life, you are not just spontaneously reacting to some event, but rather you are frequently engaging in anticipatory timing, calibrating your actions for a scenario you figure is coming.

A lot of life is a kind of choreography, where if you are not good at anticipating the move of your protagonist, you are going to collide.

In their experiment, subjects viewed the motion of a ball and then had to predict where it would be when it was occluded from view for a while.

The authors found there was a link between people’s ability to correctly anticipate the ball, and some other key aspects of their lives, linked to time judgments, including their tendency to be late, the ability to plan ahead, starting and completing tasks on time.

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The results of this experiment suggested that generally becoming more aware of the passage of time, even as simple as glancing at a clock more often, could help improve anticipation, and this could have knock-on benefits to us in a wide variety of different areas of life, particularly if we have generally a problem with timing.

But what if you want to get as good as Lionel Messi with your visual reaction time? Can you make time slow down with training?

A study entitled “Sports Vision Training: A Review of the State-Of-The-Art in Digital Training Techniques” points out there is a long history of athletes purposefully practicing under tougher conditions than they would find in an actual match, in order to develop.

From the use of strobe lights in otherwise dark settings, to digitally controlled eyewear that can be used in natural practice situations, by intermittently disrupting vision, individuals are only allowed to see brief snapshots of their environment. They therefore train under tougher conditions, which include a disrupted visual experience.

The stroboscopic effect, the theory goes, produces better visual skills when athletes return to normal conditions.

The Takeaway

The recurring pattern in the lesson of how to become an elite athlete is to create tougher conditions than normal, and the body and brain grow and adapt in response to the challenge, becoming stronger and fitter.

Lionel Messi was diagnosed with a growth hormone deficiency as a child, and at five foot seven inches he remains one of the shortest players in the FIFA World Championship.

According to the sportstar.thehindu.com website, if we take a continental average, the European dominance in average height across teams at the current FIFA world cup is massive. The average height of European squads in Qatar is 183 cm. This drops to 180.9 cm for South American teams.

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The shortest squads in terms of average height will be from North America, with their average heights touching only 180.7.

But it appears that even in sport when physical reality like height can be very important, it is possible for psychological mechanisms to compensate.

Maybe time slows down for Lionel Messi because this is how he adapted over many years to compensate for his body being shorter, compared to all the other kids, who may now be taller.

Faster mental speed, for some, could be more than a match for slower physical growth.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/slightly-blighty/202211/cognitive-strategies-elite-soccer-players-and-athletes