Harvesting New Low’s
When people saw what happened yesterday, they said things like, “98% of shoes are manufactured outside of the U.S.” I find that owning one or two pairs of high-quality shoes is potentially optimal, especially considering how much space they take up while traveling.
Additionally, demand for shoes from avid collectors has also been in structural decline since 2017 NKE 0.00%↑.
I believe DECK 0.00%↑ UGG boots have dramatically declined in quality since they stopped manufacturing in Australia. GAP 0.00%↑ hasn’t been the same since cutting ties with Yeezy.
LULU 0.00%↑ cannot answer—how many more yoga pants can you possibly sell? And ANF 0.00%↑ feels like a complete knockoff of ALD (Aimé Leon Dore).
Globalization is where companies go to die because they go so far from the core and essence of the creator and founder - it is essentially anti nostalgia.
They need to get back to the IP and the consumer, and out of the sweatshops and DEI.
This pattern of selling into strength is clear if one simply observes the last few sessions’ closes, marked by the evaporation of hundreds of billions in total market capitalization. Institutions clearly didn’t want exposure going into the weekend last Friday or to carry overnight risk early this week. They’re distributing their selling across several days.
They’re doing this through a bit of liquidity harvesting—selling into strength where possible. But there’s virtually no real strength to support the market. Which means, if bears step in with aggressive selling later this week, even lower lows are very likely.
Market Tells: The Close
·The talking heads in the news are celebrating the speculative buying, which they believe could last until Wednesday. What they’re not telling you is the sheer extent to which institutions have been selling into that strength—offloading into the liquidity to retail and so-called dumb money.
