Count the cost | Catholic Daily No. 134

Wednesday belongs to Our Lord, and today His words are among the hardest in the Gospels: hate not, carry, reckon the charges, renounce. The Church sets them beside a bishop who, in the worst year of his city, did exactly that.

First reading, Philippians 2:12-18: "Wherefore, my dearly beloved, (as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but much more now in my absence,) with fear and trembling work out your salvation. For it is God who worketh in you, both to will and to accomplish, according to his good will. And do ye all things without murmurings and hesitations; that you may be blameless, and sincere children of God, without reproof, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation; among whom you shine as lights in the world. Holding forth the word of life to my glory in the day of Christ, because I have not run in vain, nor laboured in vain. Yea, and if I be made a victim upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I rejoice, and congratulate with you all. And for the selfsame thing do you also rejoice, and congratulate with me."

Gospel, Luke 14:25-33: "And there went great multitudes with him. And turning, he said to them: If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. And whosoever doth not carry his cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple. For which of you having a mind to build a tower, doth not first sit down, and reckon the charges that are necessary, whether he have wherewithal to finish it: Lest, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that see it begin to mock him, saying: This man began to build, and was not able to finish. Or what king, about to go to make war against another king, doth not first sit down, and think whether he be able, with ten thousand, to meet him that, with twenty thousand, cometh against him? Or else, whilst the other is yet afar off, sending an embassy, he desireth conditions of peace. So likewise every one of you that doth not renounce all that he possesseth, cannot be my disciple."

The Latin of the tower is Quis enim ex vobis volens turrim aedificare, non prius sedens computat sumptus, qui necessarii sunt, si habeat ad perficiendum.

The Douay-Rheims note on hate not says what the word asks: "we must be in that disposition of soul, as to be willing to renounce, and part with every thing, how near or dear soever it may be to us, that would keep us from following Christ."

In the Catena Aurea, Gregory begins with the crowd: "great rewards cannot be reached except by great labors." On the tower he adds, "every thing that we do should be preceded by anxious consideration." Chrysostom says what the cross is: "He means not that we should place a beam of wood on our shoulders, but that we should ever have death before our eyes." And Bede answers the last verse: "it is the part of all the faithful to renounce all things, that is, so to hold the things of the world as by them not to be held in the world."

Charles Borromeo was born in the castle of Arona, on Lake Maggiore, on October 2, 1538. In 1559 his mother's brother, Giovanni Angelo de' Medici, was elected Pope Pius IV, and in January 1560, at twenty-one, Charles was made a cardinal and given the administration of the papal states as secretary of state. He used his office to help bring the Council of Trent back together. After the Council he oversaw the catechism that carried its teaching, the revision of the Missal and Breviary, and a commission on church music that asked Palestrina for three Masses.

Then he went to Milan and began to carry out the Council's decrees there. He held diocesan synods, opened a seminary, and founded the Oblates of St. Ambrose, a congregation of priests who lived in community. One day a man fired a shot at him as he knelt at the altar during prayers. The ball did not pierce his clothes, and he motioned to his household to finish the prayers.

In 1576 the plague came to Milan. He prepared himself for death and made his will on September 9. Then he gave himself up to the sick: he visited the plague-stricken houses, went to the hospital of St. Gregory, where the worst cases lay, and walked in procession barefoot, with a rope round his neck, at one time carrying the relic of the Holy Nail. The plague began to abate at the beginning of 1577 and by the beginning of 1578 had disappeared from all parts. He died at Milan on November 3, 1584. Pope Paul V canonized him on November 1, 1610 and set his feast for November 4.

His emblem is the word humilitas, crowned. It is the word we had in Philippians yesterday: he humbled himself.

The Catechism (2015) says in a sentence what the Gospel says in three: "The way of perfection passes by way of the Cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle." And 2013 answers the worry that this is only for monks and martyrs: "All Christians in any state or walk of life are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity."

Tuesday's close: SPY $754.38, +0.3% · Nasdaq 100 +0.6% · Russell 2000 +0.2% · tape BULL, regime correction · new longs still paused by the two-loss warning

Tuesday opened almost at its low and climbed. The S&P 500 fund opened at $752.61, touched a low of $752.44, rose to a high of $757.06 and closed at $754.38, up 0.3% from Monday's $752.04. That is 3.2% below the six-month closing high of $779.10. The Nasdaq 100 fund opened at $684.13 and closed at $685.32, up 0.6%. The Russell 2000 fund gained 0.2%, but the equal-weight S&P 500 fund fell 0.3%, so the index did better than the average stock, the reverse of Monday. Only four of the eleven sector funds rose: technology gained 1.3%, communication services 1.2%, industrials 0.9%, and real estate was flat. Consumer staples fell 2.1% and materials 2.0%, energy lost 0.8%, consumer discretionary 0.7%, financials 0.6%, utilities 0.6% and health care 0.3%.

The two-loss warning is still on, and tonight's scan moved the level: the system takes no new long until SPY closes above $781.59, up from $779.37 on Monday. Tuesday's close was $27.21 short of it, 3.6% below. The tape turns, and the system sells every long, only on a SPY close below $629.29; Tuesday's close is 19.9% above that line. By our own count, 7 of the last 25 sessions are distribution days for the S&P 500 fund and 8 for the Nasdaq 100 fund, one fewer each than Monday because an old one aged out of the window; Tuesday was not one, because prices rose. The scanner's list holds thirty-three names at or near their 52-week pivots, up from twenty-six on Monday. Five stocks broke through their pivots on volume and cleared every gate, and the warning held the system back from all five. That is two more than Monday's three, and no orders were placed on any of them.

The house account closed at $985,417. Its two largest holdings are the idle-cash sleeve: SHY, the short-term Treasury fund, at $579,314 and DBC, the commodity fund, at $282,034. Gold and long Treasuries are both below their 100-day averages, so their thirds sit in SHY, and commodities are above theirs, so DBC stays. The sleeve queued two orders for Wednesday's open: buy 183 shares of DBC and sell 73 of SHY. Outside the sleeve the account holds one stock position, the Invesco DB Agriculture Fund (DBA): 3,604 shares, $95,650, 9.7% of the account, down about 1% on the day. The seven puts cost $18,426 and were worth $28,348 on Alpaca's marks, up 53.8%, down from $30,483 on Monday. They lost value on a day the Nasdaq 100 fund and technology both rose, as a hedge against a falling market does. The Palantir put closed at exactly its purchase price, $1,805.

Palantir, Apple and AMD. Both of Monday's reporters opened sharply lower and recovered part of it. Palantir opened at $167.95, 5.9% under Monday's close, rose as high as $176.49 and closed at $175.34, down 1.7%. Apple opened at $325.60, 3.9% under, and closed at $331.70, down 2.1%. After Tuesday's close AMD, which makes the Instinct GPUs and EPYC processors for AI data centers, reported third-quarter revenue of $13.4 billion, up 45% from a year ago, with data center revenue of $8.5 billion, up 97%. Non-GAAP earnings were $2.09 a share, up 74%. It guided the fourth quarter to about $17 billion, plus or minus 3%. AMD closed Tuesday at $484.07, up 3.7%, before the report, so Wednesday's open is the first test of how the market takes it.

The economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has nothing scheduled today. It publishes Productivity and Costs for the third quarter on Thursday at 8:30 AM ET and the Employment Situation for October on Friday, November 6, at 8:30 AM ET. The October Consumer Price Index follows on Tuesday, November 10. The Federal Open Market Committee does not meet again until December 8-9.

→ Wednesday, Nov 4: McDonald's, Novo Nordisk, Uber, CVS, Emerson and Datadog before the open; Arm, Qualcomm, McKesson, MercadoLibre and AppLovin after the close

→ Thursday, Nov 5: ConocoPhillips, Parker-Hannifin, Southern Company, Duke Energy and Cigna before the open; Monster Beverage, Airbnb, Cloudflare and EOG Resources after the close

→ Friday, Nov 6: Enbridge, Moderna, Humana and Vistra before the open; Berkshire Hathaway (time not supplied)

St. Charles Borromeo, pray for us.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us.

In Christ,

Jonathan Simmons

Enoch Capital LLC

Catholic Daily goes out Monday through Saturday.

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