The stock market is falling with the S&P 500 now down more than 10% from its 2023 high. Investors are starting to realize that “higher for longer” now includes inflation and government spending. Bond yields are rising despite the Fed signaling they’re done hiking for now. GDP is high, but misleading. Investors are flocking to alternatives like gold and Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC). If you want to have a better understanding of what’s going on right now, keep reading.

• Despite financial issues in China, Macau visitation is now back at 2019 levels.

• Are we about to see more bank failures? Bank ETFs think we will.

• How are gold and Bitcoin rising while Treasuries are falling?

• 3Q GDP up 4.9%. Do you believe that? We’re skeptical.

• Coursera is still sandbagging guidance.

After three years of the most stringent lockdowns in the world, the Chinese government relaxed restrictions at the beginning of this year. That included slowly re-opening Macau, the gaming capital of the world, to greater visitation levels. This week, Inside Asian Gaming reports that visitation on some weekends in October are now back to 2019 levels.

Accounting regulations allow banks to avoid recognizing losses in their bond portfolios by designating the bonds as intended to be held to maturity. While it’s true that a bond held to maturity won’t cause a loss, this is misleading when a bank has demand deposits. Bank customers can request a withdrawal at any time forcing the bank to have to sell bonds trading at a discount to carrying value and causing the bank to recognize the loss then. When too much of this happens at once (a bank run), the bank’s losses can exceed its equity and cause a failure. This is what we saw at Silicon Valley Bancorp and First Republic earlier this year.

DKI Takeaway:  Investors are starting to realize that many banks have the same problems as Silicon Valley and First Republic and are hiding the losses by mis-marking their balance sheets. In addition, depositors are moving funds away from banks and towards higher yielding alternatives. The KBW Bank ETF ($KBWB) has fallen from $46 to $36 in the last few months, the second large drawdown of the year. HT to Jack Farley for covering the issue in detail.

DKI Takeaway:  I think the gold, Bitcoin, and Treasury markets are all watching Congress. The spending deal agreed to earlier this year ensured we’ll see another $4T of debt between July and the next election. Add to that an extra few hundred billion of incremental interest expense and best case is we add another $4T - $5T in currency over approximately 18 months. That will lead to more inflation which is another way of saying a weaker future dollar. Investors are buying gold and Bitcoin to hedge against that. Bond investors are demanding higher interest rates to compensate.

3Q GDP was announced at 4.9%. That’s a huge number and well above expectations. As usual, DKI notes that government statistics do not represent reality; but rather, support a preferred narrative. For starters, inventory stocking of 1.3% in the quarter nets to zero over time and would take the GDP number down to 3.6%. The price index was only 3.0% which I believe is understated (unless someone wants to tell me their health insurance costs are down and their food inflation is under 4%). An accurate index number would lower GDP further. But it gets worse from there…

Coursera (NYSE:COUR) stock has gotten hammered twice this year on terrible guidance. Each quarter, management provides revenue and EBITDA guidance for the following quarter and the full year. They’ve had a habit of warning about a cratering growth rate, but when pressed, admit that they’re just being conservative. Revenue growth each quarter this year has been above 21% and management has taken up full-year guidance each quarter.

DKI Takeaway:  Let’s ignore guidance and look at platform growth. Registered learners grew by 6.5MM to 136MM in the quarter extending Coursera’s lead as the largest platform in online learning. Enterprise customers grew 21% to 1,315. Two years ago, that figure was 711. Even the previously-underperforming Degrees division grew students 15% at a time when college enrollment has been weak. $COUR has held on to pandemic learn-from-home gains from 2020/2021 and continued to grow. Despite beating 3Q revenue guidance and analyst estimates by a substantial margin, the company only raised 4Q revenue guidance by $2MM. We’ll take the “over”.

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