F-150 Truck Sales

To me watching sales for Ford F-150’s is the most fascinating indicator of what is going on in the US economy.  This Government debt funded economy action has moved into the retail sector as tech has lost its luster. As CNBC’s Cramer rightly says this morning, the current stock market is not being driven by Trump/Mueller interaction, it is being driven by retailers who have had some time to react to the Amazon phenomenon and rebuild their story.  2/3 of the US economy is the consumer.

Getting back to F-150 truck sales, they are part of the retail sector that really reflects the effects of the Tax Cuts.  If one chooses to ignore the warning signs of the U of Michigan sentiment numbers, you cannot ignore the tip of the iceberg, sales were up 10.2 % in July.  We see coming September sales numbers as being what to watch. See recent article in Automotive News.

DETROIT — Thanks to a blistering first-half pace, Ford Motor Co. might sell more big pickups in the U.S. this year than it ever has, shattering a 14-year-old record set at the height of the housing boom.

The automaker sold more than 450,000 of its F-series line — one every 35 seconds — from January through June. That’s 4.2 percent more than in the first half of 2004, when it set an annual record of 939,511.

There’s good reason to believe it can keep up the pace: Fifty-two percent of F-series sales typically occur in the second half of a year, when the new model year arrives and languishing inventory gets marked down.

Based on the first-half gain, Ford would sell more than 941,000 of the trucks in 2018, setting a new high-water mark four years into the F-150’s product cycle.

In the meantime, the Macro Fracture F3 Chart and the Yield Curve continue on the macro trajectory set in place back in January.