Archive - Jul 17, 2009

Tyler Durden's picture

Guest Post: Supply Side Economics – How Is Gold Going to Fare This Year?





Gold started the summer doldrums looking strong and has retreated since, but what are its prospects for the rest of the year and beyond? That will largely be determined by the interplay between supply and demand; let’s take a look at the supply side.

 

Tyler Durden's picture

Guest Post: The Past Week From A Lindsay Model Perspective





Banking analyst Meredith Whitney made a bullish “trading” call for the financial sector over the weekend,
on the premise that the govt had driven down the cost of capital so low for the banksters that they had
made it easy for them to make money and ramp up their depleted tangible book values. Whitney’s call
alone drove the stock market up 4% on Monday July 13 from its overnight lows. By Wednesday, the stock
market had round-tripped and taken out its previous month high and was up 8% from its intraweek lows.

 

Marla Singer's picture

Radio Zero: DMCA Fridays





And you thought they were done. Nope! Zero Hedge has gotten two more takedown notices. No, we aren't kidding. This just means more Radio Zero for you.

11:30 Eastern. 15 minutes prior for URL details (as usual). I'll be fashionably late (as usual).

The URL: http://cdo.zerohedge.com:8000/listen.pls (Our new test server!)

Radio Zero is EXPENSIVE. Consider donating to Zero Hedge.

 

nickbarbon's picture

S&P: "Mea Culpa. Here's a cookie."





Summaries of the "causes of the crisis" usually devote a trenchant bullet point to the conflicted, procyclical role of the rating agencies in the whole mess. Like the SATs, everybody acknowledges the serious shortcomings of the agencies, but grudgingly accept the need for a common ruler to objectively measure disparate claims of quality.

 

Tyler Durden's picture

Weekly Credit Summary: July 17





Spreads were significantly tighter this week with HY dramatically outperforming IG as tighteners outpaced wideners by over twelve-to-one. LCDX appeared to be the long credit vehicle of choice though as investors moved into the most senior part of the capital structure systemically. High-beta underperformed low-beta names (in large part due to CIT's impact on the tail risk names) as we saw IG, HVOL, and ExHVOL indices considerably outperform intrinsics and widening the skew almost 10bps in IG12.

 

Tyler Durden's picture

Interactive Brokers Having A Really Tough Day With Locates, Meg_C Wishes It Was Tomorrow





Based upon information available through 14:30 today, we remain unable to locate and borrow / re-borrow the shares necessary to meet delivery obligations on certain short stock positions in your account. As current SEC regulations now strictly enforce delivery obligations, these short stock positions will be subject to forced buy-in by IB should our continued efforts to borrow or re-borrow the necessary shares today be unsuccessful.

 

drhousingbubble's picture

Option ARMs: The Most Misleading Mortgage Product Ever Devised. Worst Than Subprime? You Bet. Looking at Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, and Bank of America.





If you had to create a mortgage that was more toxic and more destructive than a subprime loan, you would have a very hard time creating that product. Yet leave it to creative finance to spawn a devilish product with the unique name of option ARMs.

 

Tyler Durden's picture

Goldman Sachs Principal Transactions Update: Humming Nicely





Goldman principal PT shares transacted increased by over 40% from the prior week: 550 million to 765 million, clocking at near 50% of total NYSE principal volume - about par for the course.

 

Tyler Durden's picture

Inflation And VWAP Rule





The day's two key charts.

 

Tyler Durden's picture

Stop Trading





One trader's (to be named as XXX) attempts to understand why his money has to go straight to the big banks' top line following a DDRX buy in courtesy of Interactive Brokers. The following is the record of the chat session that transpired minutes ago.

 

Tyler Durden's picture

Goldman's $4 Billion High Frequency Trading Wildcard





A recent story in Advanced Trading goes after some of the minutae of High Frequency Trading and provides a glimpse of the total value that HFT may provide to behemoth PT powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs. The article presents a very valuable perspective on just why HFT is so critical these days, especially when cash traders go for 6 hour Starbucks breaks between 10 am and 3:30 pm: "high frequency trading firms, which represent approximately 2% of the 20,000 or so trading firms operating in the US markets today, account for 73% of all US equity trading volume. These companies include proprietary trading desks for a small number of major investment banks, less than 100 of the most sophisticated hedge funds and hundreds of the most secretive prop shops, all of which operate with one thing in mind—capture profit opportunities by being smarter and faster than the closest competition." And as the market keeps going up day in and day out, regardless of the deteriorating economic conditions, it is just these HFT's that determine the overall market direction, usually without fundamental or technical reason. And based on a few lines of code, retail investors get suckered into a rising market that has nothing to do with green shoots or some Chinese firms buying a few hundred extra Intel servers: HFTs are merely perpetuating the same ponzi market mythology last seen in the Madoff case, but on a massively larger scale. When it all blows up, the question is whether the SEC will go after the perpetrators of this pyramid with the same zeal that it pursued Madoff himself. We think not.

 

Tyler Durden's picture

CIT To Be Bailed Out By Goldman And JP Morgan





Developing Story: I am the great vampire squid's total lack of surprise. So the government and FDIC will not touch CIT, but Goldman and JPM which have tens of billion in dollars owed to the FDIC via the TLGP can bail them out and make it seem like a private bail out? Red pill please. Are all conversations between 85 Broad and Tim Geithner/Sheila Bair over the past 48 hours FOIAble? Also explains the two banks' recent commingled dinning patterns.

 

J.D. Swampfox's picture

The Real Story Behind the June Housing Starts and Prices





June held good news for Housing, unless one looks at the full story.

 

Tyler Durden's picture

Market Plunge Prevention: Friday Lunch Edition





Rolling buy-ins compliments of our favorite TARP recipients are back in full force. If you are short, you are screwed. Get out of the market right now.

 

Tyler Durden's picture

Goldman Sachs Full Frontal





The full scale media war against Goldman Sachs is now on and Mssrs. Canaday and Van Pragg can't hardly wait for the weekend to come already. The most recent exposure comes courtesy of Time Magazine and CBC Radio. The interesting thing here is not the publicity - everyone who is anyone knows all this stuff, and as for Joe Sixpack knowing the facts, well: absent a pitchfork billion man march on Wall Street, nothing will really come out of it. But the key thing to keep track of is whether Goldman will do a placating PR media campaign or merely stay shut in their shell. At this point the media avalanche is in full onslaught mode, and the insightful thing is whether Blankfein thinks it makes sense to preemptively approach the situation. The CEO of GS knows full well that the "full market support mode" will last only so long, and once it breaks and the floor out of the 666 S&P drops, the public will again demand blood (or Trueblood for all you vampire squid fans out there).

 
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