| Several of the major indices made new record highs Thursday despite a trio of terrible economic data releases. I didn't check every index, however, I did see that several are indeed in uncharted territory: SPX, COMP, QQQ, and Nasdaq futures to name a few. The day's first report was the weekly jobless claims data. The consensus was for a 286K increase in unemployment claims, but it was worse with an actual print of 295k. Measured against the prior week's number of 294K, it didn't move very much. Measured against the 4-week average, however, we see an improvement of 20K jobs, which could make the upcoming monthly jobs data an interesting one: If it's better than expected; will the market price in rate hikes? The PMI (manufacturing) data came next and it too was a miss. The consensus reading was 56.0, but it came in at 54.2. Bloomberg reported the following - Early indications on this month's manufacturing activity are not encouraging including a 54.2 reading for the PMI flash where details are weak. And it's been weakness in export demand, the result of soft foreign economies and strength in the dollar, that has been hurting the sector. New export orders show their first decline in this report since November 2014. New orders overall are growing at their softest rate since January.
Production is also slowing, showing its softest growth rate since December. On the rise, however, is employment which continues to get a boost from confidence in the outlook. This confidence appears to be based on the assumption that first-quarter weakness was temporary and will not extend further into the year. Last week's Empire State and Philly Fed reports were similarly soft, showing better readings at the headline level but weakness in orders tied to exports. The manufacturing sector is having a rough year so far and has not been contributing to the nation's economic growth. The new home sales data were a real disappointment; instead of getting close to the consensus number of 518K home sales, it was only 481K. Bloomberg reported the following - One day up, one day down is a fit description for recent housing data. Last week's declines in housing starts & permits were a surprising blow to the outlook, reversed in part by yesterday's very strong report on existing home sales. But today it's bad news again as new home sales fell a very steep 11.4 percent to a 481,000 annual rate.
The bulk of the decline came in the largest region, the South, where sales fell 15.8 percent. The drop here does follow a 9.3 percent gain in the prior month but the latest result is not good news for the region's builders. Also contributing to the decline was the Northeast, but sales in this region are very small, as well as the West, a much larger region where sales were down 3.4 percent. Sales in the Midwest rose 5.9 percent in the month. Was it the weather's fault? Is it raining too much in the Spring now? Hmm, the chart below actual reveals a trend overall of the seasons...down since 2005.  Despite the very poor data, as mentioned in the opening salvo, the markets rocketed to new all-time highs. Trade well and follow the trend, not the perma-bull OR perma-bear "experts." Behold the age of infinite moral hazard! On April 2nd, 2009 CONgress forced FASB to suspend rule 157 in favor of deceitful accounting for the TBTF banking mafia. | 
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