Equities: Dear Albert Edwards, Where is the Correction I Keep Hearing About? (MORT; MORL; REM)

Good grief.
The market isn't up every single day so we hear all this talk about "the correction".
(scare quotes mandatory)

The S&P hit its all-time record intra-day high, 1,687.18, on May 22. That was 12 days ago. the index is off a bit under 3%.

I actually couldn't believe it was that little and thought I had missed something so I had to do the math.
Down 2.77% in a couple weeks.
Perhaps we are confusing the U.S. market with Japan's Nikkei?

Speaking of Japan, the one note of caution shows up in the candlestick chart:

The day the index set its high it actually closed lower than it opened, not constructive or, as Stockcharts puts it:

Candlesticks with a long upper shadow and short lower shadow indicate that buyers dominated during the session, and bid prices higher. However, sellers later forced prices down from their highs, and the weak close created a long upper shadow.

From FT Alphaville:
The bear and the moron

SocGen’s bathed-bear Albert Edward has been forced by overwhelming rage to look past the rich vein of Abenomics to the UK’s George Osborne. It’s the Chancellor’s latest meddling with the housing market that has got Edwards so inflamed:

George Osborne in his March budget proposed an unusually misguided piece of government interference in the housing market. The measures will see government provide lenders with a guarantee of up to 20 per cent of a mortgage in an attempt to encourage lending to borrowers with small deposits. This means that if a borrower defaults on a loan, the taxpayer will be liable for a proportion of the losses. Numerous critics of George Osborne’s scheme range from the IMF to the outgoing Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, who said “We do not want what the US has, which is a government-guaranteed mortgage market, and they are desperately trying to find a way out of that position.”...MORE

Yes, yes I know the mortgage REITS and other so -called bond substitutes are down but even the ETRACS Monthly Pay 2xLeveraged Mortgage REIT ETN is only down 28% from its all-time high:

 

That's a double leveraged play on entities which borrow money to buy long term debt. It's a wonder it's not down 50%.

Back in the day, the REIT biz grew from $1 Billion to $21 Billion 1969-1973 and of that $20 Billion growth 3/4 went to mortgage REITS which promptly declined 85% in 1974.
Good times.

You've seen no mention of these beasties or MLP's or leveraged loans here in our little corner of the www, that stuff scares the hell out of me.
Give me options on natural gas futures any day.

MORT (love that symbol, "Death" in French) is the Market Vectors Mortgage REIT ETF, down 14.4% from the high.
REM, the iShares FTSE NAREIT Mortgage Plus Capped Index Fund is off 14.1%.