每日市場點評 --- January 3, 2008

The stock market ended the day in a flat fashion in anticipating for tomorrow’s key non-farm payroll report. This morning’s ADP report turned out to be a non-event as the number was more or less in line with expectation. As a result, traders moved their focus to tomorrow’s official job report. Although we are only two days into 2008, the market has already shown investors clear winners and losers. With commodities from soybean to crude oil to gold trading at multi-year highs or even historical highs, commodity stocks are doing extremely well. Financials, retailers, and technologies, on the other hand, are doing poorly as investors are worrying about an imminent recession. In this split fashion environment, stock picking will become ever more important . Oil price retreated a little after reaching another all time high of $100.09 earlier in the day while gold price continued to climb. I would like to share some interesting statistics here. There are about 160,000 tons of gold available on earth (including those already been mined during the past 10,000 years and those still waiting to be discovered). Based on today’s $868 per ounce closing price, the total value of gold on earth turns out to be around $4.5 trillion, less than 1/10 of 2007 global GDP. Now let’s turn to another key commodity – oil. All human beings on earth are burning about 85 million barrels of crude oil per day ( US alone accounts for a quarter of that). So if we use today’s closing price of $99 per barrel, this commodity is costing us about $3 trillion a year, or 2/3 of the total value of gold. If we were stilling living in the gold standard world, this would mean we would use up all our wealth in less than two years by just burning crude oil. Maybe we should indeed thank the end of the Bretton Woods system.