Archive - Jul 2009

The China bubble continues unabated but is finally starting to show signs of resistance.

The last of the upgrades appears to be complete.

Nick Gogerty of Designing Better Futures has come up with another of his highly entertaining and educational videos, this time focusing on a longitudinal comparison of housing prices by geographic area compared to household income.

Main Entry: dis·grun·tled; Pronunciation: \dis-'gr?n-t l\; Date: 1682
Adjective: displeased and discontented; sulky; peevish.

Main Entry: dis·com·bob·u·lated; Pronunciation: \.dis-k?m-'ba-b(y)?-.lat\; Date: 1916
Adjective: To throw into a state of confusion.

RateLab Issue July 7, 2009

Sergey Aleynikov's code dump page has been uncovered, courtesy of the Sergey Aleynikov Fan Club on Facebook. The site can be found here. Intrepid hackers, nascent program traders, Goldman lawyers and DHS lackies should be all over this. As Zero Hedge will be out of pocket for the next few hours, it might make sense for a reader to create a mirror of the content as I have a sinking suspicion this Google page will be taken down faster than Tila Tequila's modesty.The Google Code linked wiki page is already respondiong with a 502 Server Error and it is odd that this page has not also been removed.

Continuing the Program Trading reading series, some insight from none other than Carl Carrie, global head of algorithmic products at JP Morgan.

Back for more? Excellent. We've got six hours of gray matter gnawing sonics just waiting for food.
A brief delay. We begin at 8:45 eastern, sharp. Get your slot now!

http://s9.viastreaming.net:7200/listen.pls

Requests / Chat up the DJ: AIM: radiozh

Oh, owing to demand, we upped it to 50 slots. More room for more space monkeys.

Third "must read" in a row. Now if only Howard could practice just as phenomenally as he preaches...

Must read presentation on electronic trading in this PT-focused Saturday.

My focus on various topics in the realm of program trading and market liquidity has engendered quite a few vitriolic responses, some of which have argued bitterly that Zero Hedge is on the wrong path in describing the somewhat vampiric qualities of liquidity extraction by recent artificial constructs, most notably those undertaken by the NYSE. I present to our readers an original paper by two BNY ConvergEx managing directors from 2007 which should provide some additional datapoints in the great debate on whether or not liquidity benefits at all from the recent domination of computers in the "open" market, and touches on other such highly contested issues as dark pool and dark liquidity value and execution.

A must watch introductory clip by the American News Project which summarizes well the current push to unmask the inner workings of the Federal Reserve, the urgency of increasing transparency and the groundbreaking nature of Ron Paul's HR 1207 bill.

The WSJ reporting that the lender to over 1 million small sized businesses has hired Skadden Arps in preparation of a bankruptcy filing. The formerly largest competitor to GE Capital for any and every semi- and fully-toxic loan imaginable, has been so far outright denied a bailout by an administration that has rarely professed a non-socialist approach to corporate demise. Unfortunately for the company, whose new HQ office lobby on 42nd street looks more like a club out of meatpacking flashing either a blue or deep purple colored decor, may be Obama's first Guinea pig in financial failure since Lehman.

When Zero Hedge first discussed the plethora of problems at National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corporation (aka NRUC) over 4 months ago, two things happened very quickly: the company's CDS blew up from 100 bps to over 250 bps overnight, and the company promptly issued a derogatory press release ridiculing everyone and everything associated with Zero Hedge (they were the first but certainly not the last). Immediately thereafter, likely under the advice of counsel, NRUC promptly retracted the press release but not before The Business Insider managed to keep a record for posterity.

In retrospect this may have been a smart move after Fitch just put the company on downgrade review for very much the same reasons I was concerned about in March.

Looks like Marla made her way to the Paper Street stamina bar last night... Must have been quite a show. For those who never went to bed, here are some early morning observations compliments of Black Swan Capital.

Reconciling Slack + Deficits:

The spread between the 2-year and 10-year points on the US yield curve has been unusually steep since May, when supply fears and convexity hedging caused a back up in rates. As the 10yUST backed up, the steepeness of the 2s10s curve reached a high of over 250 basis points. The same can't be said for forward curve spreads which have remained stubbornly flat. The 2s10s yield curve in swaps is currently ~222 basis points; meanwhile 1yForward is at ~150 and 2yrs forward is at ~87bps.

Read on...