Postcards: Naps, My Love

Who doesn't love a good nap on a Monday? This is how you maintain a marriage and key insights from the best financial voice on LinkedIn.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Forwarded this email? [Subscribe here]() for more [Postcards: Naps, My Love]( Who doesn't love a good nap on a Monday? This is how you maintain a marriage and key insights from the best financial voice on LinkedIn. [Garrett {NAME}]( Nov 20   [READ IN APP](   Dear Fellow Expat: Hello, again from Maryland. My daughter had an academic appointment this morning, and my wife and I had three hours to ourselves. After 30 minutes in a coffee shop, my wife yawned and said she was ready for a nap. I suggested that we head to my parents’ house so that I could pick up a delivery. “That’ll be great,” she said. “You can take a nap for 30 minutes, and when you wake up, I’ll take a nap for 30 minutes.” “Oh no, no!” I boasted, wagging my finger at her. “I propose, my love, that we take naps… concurrently.” And we did. I haven’t looked at my portfolio all day. Thoughts from Roderick LinkedIn is an interesting social media site. There’s a whole contingent of financial voices there that attract my interest. I always listen to the words and wisdom of Valerie Noel at Syz Group, Rick Rule at Sprott, and several other great people who don’t bother with a filter. One of the best is [Roderick Mann](. He’s up in Wisconsin, and his bio says he “Talks about #thegreatreckoning.” Today, he posted something that hammers what’s coming for the U.S. economy. It might not happen today. It might not happen in December. But it’s coming. Roderick focuses on the pending slowdown in consumer spending. From here on, it’s all Roderick’s work in the Block Quote. He writes: Let's talk about consumer spending, accounting for 70% of GDP. Up until only recently, it was growing, generally by gangbusters. Here were the sources of the consumer spending: 1. Stimulus checks 2. Debt forbearance 3. Low-expense environment with stay at home 4. Credit cards 5. Savings accounts 6. Best employment in a half century! 7. Gambling on meme stocks Now we can expect consumer spending to drop going forward: 1. No stimulus checks 2. Debt forbearance over, student loans just restarted too 3. No more stay-at-home, people have returned to normal lives 4. Credit card interest over 20% and the total topped $1 trillion 5. Savings rate is dropping 6. Unemployment finally ticked up from 3.2% to 3.9% and growing 7. Meme stocks cratered So stay tuned, this quarter will be a drop in consumer spending and likely GDP. Oof… that’s quite the warning. And he’s dead on about the state of affairs. What’s worse, the unemployment rate is being anchored by more and more Americans taking second jobs to keep the lights on. This is not sustainable. We’re currently in [positive momentum conditions](. And this market has been resilient. Recall that the market is not the economy, and the economy is not the market. We just had a 10% correction before algorithms pulled us out of oversold conditions. We’re on pace for a 2018 pullback - a two- to three-week drop that gives us a 15% to 20% decline. It’s not happening yet, but pay VERY close attention to when our indicators go red. You’ll want to get out of the way as soon as it happens. We’ve avoided major selloffs and hedged in the last 18 months. We avoided last June’s collapse. We missed this March’s collapse. And we were well ahead of the downturn in this market from August to October. When things go negative, it’s an excellent opportunity to sell calls on your existing positions and buy insurance with an inverse ETF like the Proshort Russell 2000 ETF (RWM) or the Proshort S&P 500 Short ETF (SH). And for the more adventurous - who want to make 20% or more - there are inverse leveraged ETFs like the TZA or the SPXS. I’ll give you a primer on the ETFs I follow and the indicators I use to determine the market's direction. We are far from this period of chop ending. I expect it will last into 2025, but I am bullish over the long term as global liquidity - [as defined by Michael Howell]( at [Capital Wars]( - improves in the years ahead. Stay positive, Garrett {NAME} You're currently a free subscriber to [Postcards from the Florida Republic](. For the full experience, [upgrade your subscription.]( [Upgrade to paid](   [Like]( [Comment]( [Restack](   © 2023 Garrett {NAME} 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 [Unsubscribe]() [Get the app]( writing]()