Surveying the cut's dollar damage

Because the dollar has been declining against a basket of currencies and of assets recently, whenever there's a rally I like to check the returns of dollar-competitive assets and currencies. I use this to see if the gains are just reflections of a dollar slide, or whether they are outpacing the dollar's decline.














Here's a chart of the nearly 3% S&P return for today (The Nasdaq & DJIA were slightly lower), compared to the return in USD terms of the Swiss
Franc (FXF), the Euro (FXE), and the Gold ETF. Since these are ETFs, the returns are not precisely the same as the underlying assets, but you get the idea.

As you can see, these dollar-competitive currencies and currency alternatives (gold) benefited in dollar terms today, though not nearly enough to compensate for the blowout day in the major averages.

My very unscientific conclusion if that if you were long today, you made money even controlling for the accompanying dollar sell-off.

Whether the returns will continue to be positive in currency-adjusted terms is anybody guess.