So to answer your question very long windedly is yeah I'm also looking for the bear side in junk bonds. It has to be about a weaker economy, if there's no weaker economy there's no trade to short it.
Erik: Yeah I agree with you and I've been waiting for it and you and I keep saying this business cycle is just way long in the tooth it's got to roll over there's got to be a recession coming and I still believe that but it has not come as soon as we thought it would has it.
Raoul: This is the crazy thing, people forget right, basically if, we’re looking at monthly data we get 12 data points a year to look at how the economy is doing. Where markets go, we have hundreds of data points over that period, if you're looking at daily charts, we got 200 data points. So it's always seems frustratingly slow to wait for these economic events because we think of them like financial market events where things move relatively quickly.
So we have to wait for a trend to be established in the economy using monthly data, we are going to have to wait three, four, five, six months for that to happen. So maybe the economy is about to weaken but we are not going to know for a while so it’s a frustrating process and people say well you were dead wrong there was no recession last year, well we came bloody close and fine yes I was wrong, there was no recession but we are still due that recession. Those risks don't go away.
The global economy, the U.S. economy are cyclical you do have cycles, you do have extended cycles like we had in the mid ninety's maybe this time is an extended cycle it's possible. I don’t think either of us can say well it's not possible that it's an extended cycle it could be the longest ever economic cycle but the probability is not inside so that's how I think about this.
Erik: Speaking of how you think about things I want to tell you first of all I really love Real Vision publications ever since my subscription started I've been getting all kinds of cool stuff and it's fantastic. One of those is you wrote an 80 page report for your institutional global macro investor clients and you've got that up on Real Vision publications.
So first of all please give us kind of an overview I'd love to go into it in detail unfortunately we're not going to have time in today's interview but give us the executive summary of what people can expect to find in that 80 pager?
Raoul: Well that 80 pager is my January think piece and I do this every January that I free myself from worrying about what the markets are doing over the next month or two months and sit back and say OK what are the really interesting things out there, what should we be thinking about for the next few years ahead, what is nobody else looking at, what is being really misunderstood?
So in this particular one I wrote an article about the advertising industry and the digital advertising business just because I've learnt a tremendous amount and that's had a huge huge feedback on that, people love that article and I guess it’s because it was like a detective story of me figuring out how deeply flawed the advertising business is online and how high frequency trading creates spreads of 75% which is ludicrous.
Then also I covered-- in fact one of my clients from Global Market Investor, Adam Rothman wrote an article about Ireland and looking at BREXIT and how BREXIT may cause companies to leave London but they want to remain within the European Union so Ireland is the obvious place which is English speaking.
