US Auto Sales Inline

One of the metrics that we noted that will be a key indicator as to the health of the economy are auto sales.  Sales were released this past Wednesday with domestic annualized sales coming in at 11M unites which was inline with consensus estimates.  This was .2M units higher than the previous month.


During the great recession auto company and suppliers took great measures to reduce capacity and right size their businesses.  This is actually one reason why we have not seen an even great increase in MFG jobs because some companies rather than hiring new employees and working current employees longer hours.  MFG have also tried to stretch productivity gains as far as they can.  Think replacing people with robots.


We currently own BMW BAMXY and Ford F in the DWCM fund.


Data source Barron's


 Released On 8/1/2012 For Jul, 2012

	Prior	Consensus	Consensus Range	Actual
Domestic Vehicle Sales	10.8 M	11.0 M	11.0 M to 11.1 M	11.0 M
Total Vehicle Sales	14.1 M	14.0 M	13.8 M to 14.4 M	14.1 M