Still not out of the Woods

When United Airlines flight 863 was taking-off from San Francisco to Sydney (Australia), a 15-hr flight, on a Boeing 747, the passengers were readying themselves for the long journey and seeing that this is pre-onboard entertainment, most were looking forward to a good night’s sleep, being that the flight was a 10:30 PM departure.

Right after take-off, though, a massive and severe shakeout occurred and the plane lost an engine.

The worst time to suffer from engine failure or any loss of power is RIGHT AFTER take-off.

The altitude is low, your nose is facing the other way of the runway, the engine doesn’t have much thrust or momentum and the margin of error is super-low.

For a commercial jumbo jet, it gets even worse, since it is loaded with oceans of fuel, which makes it impossible for it to land, without crashing the plane, due to the weight of it.

Loss of an engine, though, is no cause for excessive concern, when you have four engines.

The problem that flight 863 encountered was that the co-pilot, who the captain tasked with manually flying the rudder, only had one take-off/landing in the past year and was out of shape!

When he received the order to take over the controls, he did two basic and reckless mistakes, which nearly caused this immense metal beast to stall over a residential area, putting hundreds of non-suspecting Californians at grave danger.

Luckily, the Captain was able to take back control of the rudder, avoid the stall, but to do that, he had to regain speed and that meant pointing the rudder forward and the nose down towards the ground to escape the stall.

This plane came so close to the neighboring mountain/hill that the distance was 30 meters!

The co-pilot read the situation all wrong and that’s not what I wish for anybody, but this past Thursday’s CPI report has convinced many that it’s time to go back in to the markets and that bond yields are about to reverse and bring the price of bonds up and, therefore, gold as well.

I’m not so sure…

For one, we’ve seen inflation rear its ugly head and do these head fakes before, so I believe Wall Street is more cautious this time and I consider Thursday’s and Friday’s trading action to be short-covering, not new money going into markets.

We aren’t back to risk-on yet and it will require an encouraging CPI report in December, which is scheduled to be released BEFORE the next FOMC meeting, for this to be considered to be a real trend and, due to that, I am holding still and not plowing into stocks or precious metals, until the CPI report in December.

In fact, if the market rallies and the opportunity presents itself, I will reduce exposure to companies, which are legacy positions and holdings from the time the world was on ZIRP, but that are now questionable, in their ability to turn around their business model to focus on profit margin and cashflow, not on revenue growth and market penetration.

Best Regards,
PortfolioWealthGlobal.com