So bloomberg is now reporting that the surge in stocks that followed the fed decision proved quite short-lived. Not only was it short-lived, but it was like a joke. I mean it was like an hour at the end of the day. Yesterday, boom rug pull right after that.

This is very different from what we saw in march in march. We saw a two-week rally after the federal reserve meeting, and it seems like that. Hopium did not. Last people have lost confidence in jpow.

Now bloomberg is going in here saying that, just after a day after notching the biggest rally in two years, the s p 500 had headed towards its worst session since june of 2020. Remember june of 2020 was actually when we had sort of a summer crash, because we ended up getting a resurgence of covet. We were just getting ready to reopen after may, and things were looking really good in markets, but we got this new surge and was like. Oh no second wave fears.

You know this was well before delta. Right 95 of companies in the s p 500 are down uh. When we look at the heat maps, they're just all red. The nasdaq 100 is on track for one of its sharpest u-turns ever and that's kind of interesting to look at, because when you get these sorts of volatile movements, you know you're in a bear market that these are the definitions of bear markets.

In fact, let me give you the times that we've had these sorts of swings before, and you know we've seen charts like this before and we keep getting more and more of them. It's just more and more evidence that we're in a bear market and all of the times that you've had swings like this before they've been bear market swings uh again, that's a bad thing right. So keep that in mind like this is what a bear market feels like, and it doesn't mean it has to end uh. Personally, i still think it's you know it's a little good time to focus on that quantity rather than that price, but take a look at this got it lost it nasdaq, showing wild swings in 24 hours this year.

Take a look at the highlights at the bottom. There so you get a positive three and a half and a positive three point: four percent day, the very next day you end up down four point: five and four point: three percent uh. You know resp respective to that, that prior day there and look at when these sorts of dates actually happen. Here's the scary thing! This is how you know you're in a bear market.

That should be obvious by now, though, look at the dates march 13th. 2020. Bear market the 2000.com bubble bear market and then the only other time, the 2008 recession october and november of 08., like if you're looking for an opportunity where it's like tell me, when can i go by pain? You got your pain, you got your wish and i ain't talking about charles pain, either i'm talking about real pain, the kind of pain where people are like i got ta sell just because i'm exhausted i'm exhausted that things are going up and down. I'm tired of the pain of worrying about my portfolio.

So what do they do? Rather than hold or huddle? I sell and retail capitulation, probably be picking up after we break the psychological support levels, which unfortunately means potentially more pain ahead or it's an opportunity. It's one of those that's for sure. Doubts now exist that policymakers will be able to actually deal with uh inflation, and now we have the real prospect and concern that the market is beginning in beginning to price. In stagflationary fears see some folks are saying: oh no! It's j pal's fault because he said we're going to do 350, bp hikes one now and then two thereafter, but that's already been priced in by the market as of monday as of monday, the market had already been pricing in 350, bp hikes so the market.

Now, turning worse, even after the pricing into those three bp hikes is really a way of saying. We just think that, no matter what the fed does it's not going to be enough shares of companies like etsy and shopify tumbled on weaker than expected quarterly earnings and forecasts deepening the concern that the pace of online shopping has slowed and creating the concern that this Could be the beginning stage of recessionary changes in spending now fine, but we've also known about the e-comm shift away for quite a while. So there's some real questions there, as are we going to see that you know plummet now in ecom spend end up causing pain in service spend or you know if people see their wealth disappear or they going to spend less money going out to movies and restaurants Or on travel tbd on that either way it's pretty painful, so oil, though interestingly - and this is actually kind of fascinating oil - is actually falling uh or it has been this morning. Let's see uh oh, never mind it.

You turn back, okay, never mind uh, oil's! No! Longer falling, it was, and now it's actually up about a percent nice now one of the reasons - and this was more more expected. Usually when the stock market sells up, you get a little bit of this flight to safety and oftentimes. Those are commodities which that was expected. I was kind of surprised that oil was actually selling off with those earlier you get a flight to safety in either bonds or commodities.

So it's not a surprise to see now brent at 111 dollars, but this is quite high. We've been hoping oil would head down. Unfortunately, the acceleration of russia towards victory day in their attacks in eastern ukraine aren't going to help, especially with threats of that german russian oil embargo 10-year treasury now sitting at 3.05. This is the highest level we've seen all year.

We knew we were going to get to three percent, but now the question is: how high are we going to go? Are we going to go to 3.5? Are we going to settle at 3 percent? 3 percent, ironically, is starting to look very attractive for a lot of people, and this is why you're getting a lot of sort of by the dipping uh in in the bond market uh, but the the the flip side. Is you get by the dipping in the in the bond market uh? You know you have that real potential of getting burned, because if you buy the tip in the bond market uh and then yields rise, you get burned on the value of your bond. So really it wouldn't be surprising to see more people just say: look i'm either commodities or i'm cash. You see everybody every time i say cash.

I always think it's funny. People are like. Oh cash. That's bad in inflationary times.

Well, wait a minute! Is it, though, because if you're not using the cash to buy stuff like goods and services or energy like oil and gas, then you can preserve cash for buying stocks and, if they're losing value, then you're actually gaining because of inflation? It's kind of a weird twisted way to look at it, but it's an interesting uh thing to consider so uh, let's see what else we have here, we have uh nasdaq, almost hitting that six percent. I want to zoom in on that six percent there. For a moment, oh yeah yep we're getting to that uh. Look at that 309 65 was the low we got to 309 80.

yeah, you know. What's really interesting is exxon. Mobil right now is up 41 year to date, that's wild and i mean think about warren buffett's moves even though he's buying the dip on things like apple, charlie, munger, have been buying the dip on things like alibaba. They did substantially increase their allocations to stocks in oil, with big moves into exxon, mobil and occidental petroleum and both of those quite stellar performances, occidental, petroleum up 97 year-to-date, while at the same time the nasdaq year to date is down 22.7 percent.

So hats off to warren buffett again with the amazing positioning now another piece of scary news, just came in u.s retail traffic on a week-over-week basis is down 10.9 percent u.s retail foot traffic fell 10.9 last week from a year earlier so year over year. Right, which is really surprising, because if you look at these weak periods as in like seven day periods and we're comparing to last year, we should really be thinking of seeing increases substantially fewer covet restrictions, more enthusiasm to go out and spend. Is this potentially a beginning of the cracking of the consumer that wait a minute? We could only take so much pain in the stock market before we finally start spending less. What do we got home improvement, centers and furnishing stores had a 24.8 percent decline in retail traffic and off price uh had a decrease of 18.

I think these are usually like your tj maxx kind of uh of stores. Uh beauty was the only one that actually had a gain with 5.6 5.4. Any kind of malls and department stores were down 15.1 percent uh. You have us retail traffic overall, again down 10.9 grocery stores down 5.9, and when you look at that's, that's the change year.

Over year, which is odd, and when you look at the change week over week, what do you get also declines in all categories: double digits and a double digit declines in all categories, with the exception of home improvement, centers and furnishings, which were down nine 6.9 week Over week, grocery store is down nine point one percent week over week, so on some of this initial data, not such great uh changes here and just retail in general, now take a listen to this victoria secret traffic down 47 year-over-year bed bath and beyond. I'm sorry 47 yeah 47 year-over-year week over week, 23 bed, bath and beyond year over year, down 40 best buy down 36 year-over-year home depot 26.6 year-over-year nordstrom 18.4 year-over-year decline, target 17.4 year-over-year decline. I don't know if, like obviously, people aren't spending more money online and if now, all of a sudden we're seeing retail spend go down folks, this is the recession. This is what it feels like to be in a recession, because now this is going to solidify.

Probably a bad q2 result unless, for some reason, spending doesn't plummet here in may in june. It's kind of a problem because remember q2 is april may june. Well, if you had good consumer spending going into april but may and june are terrible and we're going to lap last year's summer forget about it. You got yourself a recession and, quite frankly, we might end up being in a recession all year.

Long now so far the suits tell us. Oh, but don't worry. If we have a recession, a it'll be transitory and b. It won't be that deep, yeah well recessions.

Still hurt two things: we know about recessions number one: you can see layoffs within a recession. Usually they don't lead a recession right, that's odd. It usually happens within a recession. We're still not seeing that in fact we're seeing a lot of attempts to hire like crazy.

Now, but you have these really mismatched skill sets that that we're dealing with this is something jay pal talked about yesterday as well, that one of the reasons we have 1.9 open job slots uh for every unemployed person is because you have this skill mismatch between what Companies want to hire and and the people who are available to work so you've got. You know no cracks necessarily yet in terms of like layoffs, but that usually comes right. After you see, retail spending go down and folks we just got our first news that retail spending went to crap here, and i can't justify that one away and it's not like i'm trying to justify stuff away. I just want to give you my opinion of the straight scoop.

I think those productivity numbers are kind of garbage this morning we talked about those, i don't think those really matter. I think they're important because they're going to give us a beautiful upside next quarter unless of course, retail stops spending. Then it's then you know who knows maybe that's just a leading indicator which usually it's not it's quite a lagging indicator. But the point is: there's a retail traffic move, that's scary and again, if we're in a recession now what do you want to do? Well, as always, you want to a make sure you minimize your debt, clear out margin or have the capacity for clearing out margin.

If you need to like the last thing you want to do is look at your brokerage account and go. There is no way no way. I can empty that kind of margin. That's bad like for me uh.

I am. We just did this math with course, members. Yesterday, as we went through my portfolio, we were doing peg weightings and that uh we are right now, thanks to good old tax day, i'm 2.6 in margin, but closings that i have for some real estate transactions are essentially going to wipe my margin. So i'm going to be at zero, so that means i'm all in and then that means i'm at zero.

Then i've got a few closings coming up after that in about the next 30 days and i'll have that money available to buy the dip which is cool because, if we're in a recession in q2, we're gon na keep seeing this sort of pain for a while. Now, hopefully, the best thing that we can hope for is that the federal reserve actually sees inflation starting to decline, which i have to say. This is where maybe kathy woods could end up being right. Look and read that etsy and wayfair earnings report a huge difference from q1 in q1, every single earnings report i read said we have pricing power, we're increasing prices, we have multiple price increases scheduled, we are like and the consumer's paying it now.

What are you hearing from wayfair and etsy? Oh there, big guy yeah, we're not gon na raise prices just to drop them. You know what we're gon na do is we're gon na keep our prices stable, and these executives are trying to sell it as that, as if that's a good thing like oh well, you know we're one of the few who hasn't been raising our prices. This makes us more competitive. No, it means you have no pricing power and you suck that's bad.

That's very bad. The only thing we have left right now. The only thing this economy has left is the consumer spending money and the fact that retail traffic just had its biggest drop since november of 2020 is very bad and is is something where again get out of margin get out of debt. If you can't take it, then don't be in the market.

If you are looking for a way to kind of like separate your self and your emotions from your stock portfolio, you have to look at the quantity and not the price. This is a very important concept of the q versus the p. How many shares of tesla do i have today? How many shares did i have yesterday? Well, i have more shares of tesla today than i did yesterday. So, for me psychologically, that means my portfolio is actually up because i have more quantity, obviously it's down, but guess what i ain't looking at it like.

I am not looking at it. Actually, it's been kind of a wonderful thing when i go to place an order with jpm, because i still haven't gotten off the platform uh. You know and i really like the people over at jpm. You know i uh.

I call in the order, which is like super antiquated, but it's actually like this really cool thing, because then i don't have to open up my brokerage account and see how bad uh it feels to be down 10 on tesla in a day. Oh i'm sorry. It's only down nine percent, but anyway, this retail move very, very bad uh, not good. I don't know if this is going to lead us to like that's it.

Is this like the worst of the bad news like? Is this it? If we keep getting bad news? Obviously, not we keep going down, but who knows? Maybe this is just the news that we needed to get the additional capitulation. We rubber band down below that zero percent fib. Maybe we can come back up we'll see, but i'll tell you. I can't sugarcoat that retail data that retail data is bad and you know there was there - was this thought that maybe it's just e-commerce.

No retail data is not e-commerce. It's literally consumer spending, i'm just going to read the list. Really quick, victoria's secret bed. Bath best buy ulta, lowe's home depot, kohl's tj, maxx, nordstrom old navy target publix supermarkets, ross stores, walmart, macy's dollar general sephora gap, aldi kroger, all of them down literally every single one of them.

So it's not just ecom. Now it's also retail. Now, that's really bad. So, what's left travel planes, but who wants to be in those indebted companies? And then you know who knows? Maybe people have their travel plans booked, but then they stop booking new ones.

2022 is the year of the recession. Folks, i think i think the bond market and i hate to say it, but i think the bond market was right when we inverted when the yield curve inverted on april 1st and just like dude we, we will have a recession this year, we'll get through it. We won't have a recession, then in 2023, because you know we'll be lapping horrible, comps and uh, and then we'll have the pandemic behind us. And if you could sit there and diamond hand through on quality stocks generally and i'm not trying to say that profit losing companies are not quality, but you know, according to institutions, they don't want to own any company right now that has a negative eps, and so Those are the ones that are getting sold off the most, keep that in mind, but uh yeah big concerns these retail numbers again like i want to be able to say something positive, i mean beyond uh, buying the opportunity, there's nothing positive about it's, it's bad news.

So anyway, there's the news on retail numbers for you, oh, but if you want to get life insurance in as little as five minutes, remember you can do so. By going to medkevin.com life, you can even apple pay an android pay, for it is exactly what lord and i use check it out. It's not in the link down below, but you could just type in medkevin.com life.