We don’t know what we want. This week, we will find out what it is that will propel us forward or turn us back after the S & P 500 on Friday closed at a new record high for the first time in more than two years. For example, we have three rails that report this week: Union Pacific , CSX and Norfolk Southern . Among them, you have pretty much every non-service portion of the U.S. economy spoken for: housing, industrial production, minerals, road building, heating, and food. What kinds of numbers do we want from these three? Do we want them softer to help the case for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates? Or do we want them to show positive year-over-year numbers to demonstrate that there will be no hard landing for the American economy? Or do we want them plain out strong so that we flirt with tightening even as so many central bankers have assured us the Fed is done? I imagine the answer lies somewhere in the middle, the avoidance of the tightening hard landing with decent comparisons. The rails are too significant to ignore even as the bond market seems to rely, I would say, wrongly, on the broader data. Maybe that’s why you have the forward curve so wrong. And why is it that the forward curve could be so wrong? I think it’s a factor of big money flows that aren’t sensitive to what moves rates and don’t mind being wrong. We know from the banking crisis that followed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank nearly a year ago that banks make so many stupid investments that you can draw no conclusions from them. No matter, I think that stock investors will stay focused on both rates and what moves rates — and if you want to be informed, we need to watch the reaction to the rails, regardless of what informs us on what the market wants to see. The Super Six Why is this so important? Because we have a default mechanism that pops up constantly: a return to the Super Six, my new moniker for the Magnificent Seven, because Tesla , which reports Wednesday, has become…
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