Harrison: We Are Going to See More Volatility
Your Real Vision Daily Briefing for September 21, 2020
- Holly Russel
- September 21, 2020
- 6:00 PM
Real Vision senior editor, Ash Bennington, and managing editor, Ed Harrison, discuss a volatile day in markets.
- Today’s sell-off in stocks, gold, and silver as well as the significant rally in bonds were all part of an increase in volatility we’re seeing both in the real world and in financial markets.
- The next two months will provide a lot more clarity in terms of earnings and where the economy is going, not to mention where the U.S. is heading politically.
- We’ve had surprises to the upside since June because we were too pessimistic, but now our optimism may be overdone and we could soon see the opposite.
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Where do we go from here? That’s the question Ed Harrison addressed during his conversation with Ash Bennington on today’s Real Vision Daily Briefing.
Harrison acknowledged the volatile day we just saw in markets and said we’ll see what happens tomorrow. We are in the middle of Harrison’s pivotal September/October time frame, which he has long predicted will be both an inflection point and a period of increased volatility.
And that volatility expends beyond markets: Harrison also referenced the recent wildfires, hurricanes, and political upheaval leading up to the election as evidence that volatility is all around us.
“This is where volatility comes into play,” he said. “We’re going to get a lot more clarity in terms of where earnings are going and what the economy will be like going forward, especially from the political economy perspective and market perspective,” and Harrison said the tone of the market could change in the near future.
Harrison pointed out that over the past three months, the Fed became more optimistic than they were in June about jobs and economic activity and wall Street followed suit, which added fuel for the fire for equities to rise over that time.
He said the resignation of Nikola’s CEO is interesting. “If it turns out that it is completely fraudulent in some capacity it will be a watershed in terms of how to think about some of these market darlings who have seen their valuations vault upward,” Harrison said.
He believes we’ve had surprises to the upside since June because we were originally too pessimistic, but now our optimism may be overdone and we could soon see the opposite. He thinks Q4 numbers are likely to underperform relative to expectations and said it was possible we could even see underperformance in Q3.
“We’ve never seen swings this dramatic before. We didn’t have the systems to deal with something of this magnitude so there’s a level of volatility that comes with that and it is not over,” he said. “There are more surprises ahead.”
Harrison reminded viewers that volatility doesn’t mean stocks will go down a lot or that they will fall permanently. The data we get over this month and next month and the political economy fallout will combine to tell us whether or not we were overbought through the August time frame or whether we can continue to power forward, he said.
“It is difficult to expect more upside, but I’m open to the possibility,” Harrison said. “It’s not a done deal that this rally is over but we are going to see more volatility.”