World Bank Wednesday – Global GDP Gets A Haircut

Global growth forecasts have been cut 12.5% since January.

The World Bank cut its global growth forecast amid weaker outlooks for the U.S., Russia and China, while calling on emerging markets to strengthen their economies before the Federal Reserve raises interest rates. The Washington-based lender predicts the world economy will expand 2.8 percent this year, compared with a January projection of 3.2 percent. The U.S. forecast was reduced to 2.1 percent from 2.8 percent while outlooks for Brazil, Russia, India and China were also lowered.

Chart from Robert Lamy at Advisor Perspectives

This is not shocking to us, of course. I just gave a Live Futures Trading Webinar (replay here) yesterday afternoon where our trade ideas were Dow Futures (/YM) short at 16,920, Russell Futures (/TF) short at 1,171 and Oil Futures (/CL) short at $104.40.

Already this morning (7:40), the Dow Futures are down to 16,870 and the 5-contract trade we were looking at paid $1,250 on the 50-point drop and the Russell is already down to 1,163 – an $800 per contract gain while oil is stubbornly holding $104.40 but I just re-iterated our short below the $104.50 line for our Members in Chat.

That’s why we do these Futures trading webinars. Where else can you get paid thousands of Dollars while you sleep? Even better if you don’t sleep as that World Bank news came out midnight and our indexes didn’t start dropping until Europe opened at 3am.  

I was up and posting at 2:30 in our Live Member Chat Room and, while we were already bearish and this simply confirmed our position – if you were caught too bullish in your portfolio – knowing how to trade the Futures would allow you to put on some quick hedges and save you the pain of a dip.  

While we’re CONCERNED that there will be a major sell-off, we’re not planning on it (also discussed in yesterday’s Webcast) and we discussed 4 of our 29 long trade ideas from the Buy List (Members Only) in yesterday’s post and we added TASR as a long play in Member Chat as under $15 is just too cheap for our Stock of the Decade.