Transportation Sector

See: Dow Theory.

Trucks. Trains. Boats. Someday, that I Dream of Jeanie blinking thing. Maybe the Star Trek thing with body molecules moving all over. The whole sector, moving people around, seems to move as a singular-ish group. When Carnival (the cruise ship company) is up, so is Southwest, United, and Greyhound.

Even though, long-term, the sector’s investment results have been meh relative to other groups, it is followed closely by Wall Street and by economists because of its role as a kind of canary in the mineshaft of, well, everything. When the economy or business cycle starts to roll over, this is one of the very first early movers to sink, with volumes and pricing declining fast. So we feed this canary…and watch it closely. With plenty of newspaper underneath it.