We’re happy to announce that episode 3 of Bespokecast is now available to the general public via the various podcast platforms.  Be sure to subscribe to Bespokecast on your preferred podcast app of choice to gain access to new episodes.  We’d also love for you to provide a review as well!

In our newest conversation on Bespokecast, we speak with BTIG’s Chief Technical Strategist Katie Stockton.  Katie is one of the top technicians around, and this is a wide-ranging discussion on technicals as an investment strategy that is both educational and instructive.  Katie has a long career in markets and has been immersed in the discipline of technical analysis right from the beginning.  In our hour-long conversation, we get her basic approach to technicals, background about the goals and toolkits that technicians use, and her current view of market technicals.  We also discuss non-market topics, including the work-life balance for finance professionals with families.  We had a fantastic time recording this conversation, and we hope you enjoy it!

Each new episode of our podcast will feature a special guest to talk markets with, and Bespoke subscribers receive access one week before it’s made available to the general public.  If you’d like to try out a Bespoke subscription in order to gain access to these podcasts a week in advance, you can start a two-week free trial to check out our product.  To listen to episode 3 or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, GooglePlay, OvercastFM, or Stitcher, please click below.

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Each month, Bespoke runs a survey of 1,500 US consumers balanced to census.  In the survey, we cover everything you can think of regarding the economy, personal finances, and consumer spending habits.  We’ve now been running the monthly survey for more than two years, so we have historical trend data that is extremely valuable, and it only gets more valuable as time passes.  All of this data gets packaged into our monthly Bespoke Consumer Pulse Report, which is included as part of our Pulse subscription package that is available for either $39/month or $365/year.  We highly recommend trying out the service, as it includes access to model portfolios and additional consumer reports as well.  If you’re not yet a Pulse member, click here to start a 30-day free trial now!  Below we highlight the results of questions we ask regarding discretionary spending and inflation expectations.  These are two of literally hundreds of data points included in each monthly report.

Our monthly tracker for expected discretionary spending over the next few months broke out in November to its highest levels in the history of our survey.  Obviously, seasonal strength is a major contributor as holiday spending drives a huge portion of total US consumer spend, but this result also suggests that the Black Friday to December holiday shopping period is trending towards exceptionally strong levels.  As the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker of Q4 growth is expecting total growth of +3.6%, if this holiday season proves to be as strong as our tracker seems to indicate, then that number could be setting up for a 4-handle GDP in Q4 2016.

Piggybacking off consumer expectations, one interesting development in the data this month was that we saw a steep drop-off in inflation expectations (lower chart).  The average expected price increase over the next one, five, and ten years all fell sharply for a typically stable tracker from month to month.  There doesn’t seem to be a good explanation for this decline, but given the prior trend of accelerating price pressures (which have also been visible in market pricing of inflation, realized CPI and PCE inflation, commodity prices, and other indicators) the sharp shift was eye-catching.

Want to see more of our proprietary survey analysis, including data for individual consumer technology stocks?  If you’re not yet a Pulse member, click here to start a 30-day free trial and view our full November Pulse report.

Get Bespoke’s 2017 Outlook Report with a 30-day free trial to Bespoke’s premium research!  Click here to learn more.

While sentiment on the part of individual investors definitely has seen an uptick since the election, in the last two weeks the positive momentum has stalled.  In this week’s sentiment survey from AAII, individual investor bullish sentiment saw a very slight decline, falling from 43.78% down to 43.12%.  While the move was extremely small, optimism is still down over six percentage points from where it was two weeks ago even as equities have been rallying to record highs.  While you may say that it’s perfectly natural for investors to become less positive as stocks become more expensive, that would mean that they would have had to become positive in the first place, and that has not been the case.  In fact, the last time more than half of individual investors were bullish was 101 weeks ago at the start of 2015.

Looking at pessimism, we have now seen two straight weekly increases in bearish sentiment from 22.08% up to 26.49%.  This is still low relative to recent history, and as shown in the chart below, the level of bearish investors remains below the uptrend that was broken to the downside three weeks ago.

Get Bespoke’s 2017 Outlook Report with a 30-day free trial to Bespoke’s premium research!  Click here to learn more.

For all of the talk about the strong dollar in the last several days, one might be surprised to hear that today’s gain in the US Dollar Index is only the third up day since Thanksgiving (10 trading days).  Yes, this consolidation in the greenback comes after a big surge following the election, but it just illustrates how it isn’t just in politics where the rhetoric often differs from reality.  In the initial post-election surge, the US Dollar Index rallied nearly 4% – a huge move over such a short period of time – and broke out above resistance from its prior peaks in March and December 2015.  Since its high on 11/23, though, the greenback has been trading in a two-week consolidation phase.  During this period, though, it has managed to stay above its former highs, which acted as support from which it is bouncing today.