My son played his first soccer game over the weekend. He's playing under 9's for a local club. It was so amazing for me to watch his first game. I had a smile on my face for the entire 40 minutes. Not all the parents shared this feeling. There was a lot of criticism from the sidelines. For the avoidance of any doubt, this was not the EPL, it was an under 9's team who is playing together for the first time. The good news is they're learning, they will continue to improve, and they had a lot of fun. The bad news is that they got smashed, 10 to 1 or something like that. It doesn't matter. What happened, happened.

I've been talking about this for sometime - the consumer, and their "hunch" for what is yet to come. Yet they've been consistently wrong for a long period of time. What you think should happen and what actually happens can be two very different things. Sure, you might be right evetually, but the real questions is not whether you were right or wrong, but how much money did you lose or forgo in the interim.

I came across this chart last week, and on Friday night a friend of mine also sent it through to me and asked whether there was any similar analysis for Australia. I told him I would look into it over the weekend.

It doesn't feel like stuff is going up in price as much as it used to - do you also feel the same way? We recently had the US release their CPI figures for April. It came in at 4.90%. This is one for the record books folks - 10 straight months of declines. And we are seeing inflation falling faster than it rose - hard to believe isn't it? Don't believe me? Here are the figures: CPI increased by just 3.80% in the 10-month leading up to its peak of 9.10% in June of 2022, compared to a fall of 4.20% since.

Allow me to pull back the curtain and give you a snippet into how the consumer is trending right now. US households are in excellent shape, the ratio of liabilities to net wealth has declined 50% since the GFC, and household leverage is currently at levels last seen in the early 1980s. See chart below.

Everyone loves a bear market - especially the talking heads you see on TV. Bull markets are harder to love. The narrative of the bears just seem a lot more sophisticated than the bulls'. They feed off of our fear - it's pretty simple if you ask me.