Out Fox The $treet

Don't look now, but the EIA is reporting that natural gas inventories are close to the 5-year averages. After record inventory stocks over the last year, the current amounts are 21% below the levels of last year and nearing the averages. While the 1,876 Bcf in storage is still 9.5% above the 5-year average, the numbers are skewing towards the middle of the range. A few more months of reductions should just about do the trick. See the chart below: With rigs drilling for natural gas near record lows, one has to assume the numbers will eventually overshoot before exploration companies back any moves to increase production.

Again, the market is trading with little to no rationality. This action is similar to the bottoms of the last 3 years. Don't really want to rehash all the news today except to say that the BLS report is continuously incorrect due to seasonal adjustments that are faulty. Normally that is why the jobless claim numbers are used for the leading indicator calculations. Combine the steady jobless claims with the strong ISM employment index and the Household survey and the jobs picture is a lot stronger then perceived by the market. Below is a graph from the Calafia Beach Pundit on the jobs data. Does this look like a data point to fear? The jobs market continues to make steady progress. Anybody using the Establishment survey as the only tool for investing is very misguided. Will the market bottom next week is impossible to tell? The above data tends to be pushed to extremes and nobody knows what is going to happen with Greece. The jobs data is the US just isn't a reaso...

Jobless claims continue to drop towards the mid 300K level. A number generally consistent with solid jobs growth, but not near the lows of 300K in the mid 2000s. Mark Perry has a great chart showing the jobless claims as a percentage of the civilian workforce. The jobless claims number provides the absolute number of how many looking for a job, but it does a poor job of relating the relative change of the number over time. As the workforce increases over the decades, the absolute total of jobless claims will rise adjusting what should be considered normal claims levels. Unfortunately the market doesn't accurately grasp these changes. Most economics and analysts on tv still subscribe to the numbers from the '80s and '90s when the labor force was much smaller. Seeking Alpha article from Mark : From the chart, it is much clearer that the unemployment situation is actually better than in the '70s and '80s. Only the lows in the '00s provided a sustained l...