Juggling Dynamite

Lest we forget our place in the universe. A little perspective to start the day. Here is a direct video link.

With the US oil services sector index (OSX) already in a bear market, down 24% since June so far, and falling, thoughtful minds might wonder what if anything this sector’s performance might portend for the broader stock market.  While the S&P 500 is about 10% weighted in energy, the Canadian TSX 60 Index is more than twice that at 23% in energy. This overweight helps explain why the TSX Index has historically been closely correlated with price moves in the oil service sector. The chart below shows price movements for both since 2004.

In a closer view below, we note the now ominous gap that has developed since June between the diving OSX and the still modest 7% decline for the Canadian broad market. A re-coupling to historical correlations, would see the TSX composite decline at least a further 17% from current levels, to around 12,000, or the level it first reached a decade ago. And that’s if it gets off luckier than previous secular bear declines which typically have registered -50%. Buy and hope?

Last Week Tonight’s Jon Oliver looks at sugar. Here is a direct video link.

The aspect I have always found most disturbing is the potentially lasting harm we are inflicting on the health of our youth. I actually see it as a widespread form of child neglect and abuse today. We don’t allow companies to market drugs and alcohol to kids. Child protection laws are expected to intervene if adults are found giving drugs, alcohol and cigarettes to children. And yet we condone and inflict similar damage every day through diet choices and giving free rein to the big food industry . Their profits are quite literally coming at the long-term expense of all of us. See: Drinking a ‘medium’ soda every day can age you as much as smoking does:

“Just as soda companies plunk down millions of dollars to defeat local soda-tax ballot measures, researchers have found a link between regular soda consumption and premature aging.

Published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Public Health, a study of 5,300 adults compared the cells of people who drink soda every day to those of their non-soda-drinking counterparts. In the soda group, the ends of the chromosomes—known as telomeres—were shorter, a sign of their cells’ diminished ability to regenerate. Our telomeres naturally shorten as we age, but scientists have discovered that a few behaviors—including smoking—can shorten them prematurely.

And here’s the really interesting part: People who drank a 20-ounce soda every day experienced an additional 4.6 years of telomere aging—the same amount observed in smokers. “The extremely high dose of sugar that we can put into our body within seconds by drinking sugared beverages is uniquely toxic to metabolism,” lead author Elissa Epel, a professor of psychiatry at University of California-San Francisco, told Time.”