By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

With baseball season coming, I couldn’t think of a better way to start this quick economic update.

Since we highlighted Excess Inventory, Increasing Delinquencies Falling Shipping last week, April has provided us with largely weak economic data.

Every bit of data this month has hinted at a slowing economy.

The inflation front is not being helped by oil, with WTI surging from $69 to $80 in less than two weeks, supported by OPEC+ cutting production, rather than from solid global growth prospects (I’m assuming the world’s leading oil exporters have a sense of where demand is heading).

Maybe this is “just” catching up to some overly good data in recent months (The Citi Economic surprise index shot from -10 in early February, to above 60, and was still at 48 before today’s data). Or maybe the data recently was skewed by bad “seasonal adjustments”, “low response rates”, a “shifting economy that isn’t fully captured in current data”, etc…

[ZH: We note that this decline in the macro surprise index has been driven (until very recently) by a collapse in 'soft' survey data]

We get NFP on Friday, while the stock market is closed, should make for some interesting trading late on Thursday and Monday.

From a positioning standpoint, I’m updated some things since Sunday’s Fortune Favored the Bold:

On the bright side, in the first week of April, everyone’s team is in the running to win the World Series! (unless you are a Washington Nationals fan, in which case you can give up already).