Archive - Jul 2010

Ultimately markets will move sideways long-term.

Today, the FT provided some additional information on the BIS' "goldgate" as relates to its 346 tonnes of gold disclosed as swapped recently by the ubercentral bank. As the FT says, "Investors have bought physical gold in record amounts during the past two years and deposited it in commercial banks. European financial institutions are awash with bullion and some are trying to pledge gold as a guarantee." There was nothing necessarily new in the article, and as expected the swap was merely put in place to collateralize a dollar funding crunch ahead of the European insolvency, allegedly resolved by the guaranteeing of $1 trillion in the world biggest bail out fund by the IMF and the ECB. Nonetheless, at least now we can end speculating as to who benefited: it was not entire countries that had pledged their gold reserves to the ECB (contrary to the rumor that Portugal had given Bernanke a lien on its gold), but merely ten banks, of which HSBC, Société Générale and BNP Paribas were the biggest. While HSBC's presence is somewhat surprising, the latter two banks having found themselves in a massive currency crunch makes sense: as Zero Hedge had previously noted, this is confirmation that it was precisely the French banks that had found themselves on the wrong side of some major euro trades (one need only to recall BNP's call for subparity in the EURUSD from a month ago). Yet what is without doubt is that physical gold will play an increasingly prominent role as a hard collateral asset. In light of this, we present to you the thoughts of Sprott's John Embry on the precious metal, titled "Gold's on the cusp of parabolic move up" whose conclusion fits with the implications of the BIS action: "Central banks can no longer supply the amount needed to balance supply and demand while mine production continues to stagnate at best. It is imperative that investors ignore the volatility created by the anti-gold cartel and use every opportunity that is created by them to purchase more physical gold." Yes John is conflicted, and yes, he has said comparable things in the past... maybe, as more and more piece of the puzzle come into place, this time he will finally be right?

One of the world's most realistic people (which for some reason the permabulls take as an indication of extreme bearishness: which is fine - after all they themselves live in an imaginary world populated with market marking unicorns and benign computer programs), David Rosenberg has shared ten things that would make him bullish. Alas reading through these gives one the impression that Hades would first turn endothermic before any of these actually were to come true. And for some more practical views from Rosie, we also include his spot on interpretation of today's GDP data.

RANsquawk US Afternoon Briefing - 30/07/10

Yesterday may go down in the history books for being the only day in months in which the daily decoupling, either between risk and FX, or risk and Bonds did not occur. Alas, today the binary market hijacking mutants are back to their signal chasing momentum ploys, as a result despite the 10 year about to plunge below 2.90, stocks are flat. As either stocks are rich (no question there) or bonds are (yields are low), the intraday recoupling surefire trade is back, and promises to pay a few nickels to those willing to short stocks and short the 10 year (and pray there is no steamroller in the vicinity).

Mike Krieger, who has been a staple poster at Zero Hedge courtesy of his willingness to speak the truth no matter how gory or controversial, was on the Max Keiser show, discussing everything from trivial items such as Goldman Sachs movie casting, to far more serious issues such as Obama's failed presidency, corporatism, information oligopolies, the overturn of various core fundamental democratic principles, consumer culture, the Federal Reserve, and gold as the one true money standard. As always an objective and highly informative discussion between Mike and Max.

Turkey is among a handful of emerging nations on the cusp of joining the economic big league. How painful economic reform measures and banking controls can work. Foreign multinationals are pouring in. Suddenly, being shut out of the EC doesn’t look half bad. Does its flexing of new diplomatic muscle have a pronounced Islamic, anti American bent? (TUR), (TKC).

Dear Mr. President, You don’t know me, but I was one of the millions of Americans who voted for you in the last election. I have since been fairly critical of your Presidency largely because I, like many others, feel betrayed by the policies you have enacted upon winning said election.

The ECRI Leading Indicator has just moved further into certain recession territory, hitting -10.7 for the most recent week (the previous revised number is -10.5). The market goes green on the news, as the Liberty 33 traders have done their job for the day and are off to the Hamptons. And what is so odd about the market reaction one may ask - bad news are as always priced in, as the apocalypse is nothing that a little money printing can't fix, while minimal upside surprises (soon to be revised far lower) are sufficient to move the market higher by over 100 points intraday. Hopefully the HFT operators unionize and go on strike soon in demanding greater pay, and get the Greek trucker treatment as a result, because this market is not even a joke anymore.

After surging to a several week high, the 2s10s has plummeted to a one week low in the matter of hours, dropping back down to 236 bps. This follows a day of fireworks in the curve, in which as Market News discusses below, we saw some pretty aggressive hysteria in flattener unwinds. Oddly enough, the collapse in the curve has occurred as the 2s have hit another record low yield, indicating that no matter how much of a spin opportunity any givendiffusion index headline provides, the bond market is increasingly pricing in deflation (and in fact the yield on various classes of TIPS was negative earlier today).

Expectations at 62.3 vs consensus of 61.3 (previous 60.6), and Conditions at 76.5 vs 76 (previous 75.5). And with this latest self fulfilling prophecy report out of the propaganda bureau, expect stocks to promptly go green as the ugly GDP number is all but forgotten. This report brings today's official economic release docket to a close. The upcoming ECRI Leading Indicator report (10:30 Eastern) will also come in higher than -10 and with that we will close solidly green as the administration high fives itself over yet another horrible economic print cover up.

It appears the earlier market rumor about a Chicago PMI of 53.6 that sent the SPOOs another leg lower were incorrect. Now if only the administration can please reconcile the drop in the economy with the PMI surge all will be forgiven. In the meantime stocks keep trading from headline to headline. Categories posting improvement include Employment, New Orders, Order Backlogs, Inventories and Production, while Prices Paid decline again.

Markets in a Flash

· Asian equity markets closed down across the board last night. The Nikkei was down -1.64%, while the Shanghai index was down -0.4%.

· European equity markets are falling this morning ahead of the US GDP figures. The FTSE 100 is down -0.57% at lunchtime London time.

· Commodities are mixed in today trading session. Oil is falling back in correlation with equities while Gold is gaining as investors find safety.

Yet more pessimism from Goldman's Jan Hatzius, who sees a consistent decline in end-consumption. But how can that be when even Bloomberg now writes that Americans Buy IPads While Broke in New Abnormal Economy...From Jan: "Although the broad outlines of growth in Q2 were about as expected-large gains in residential and business investment and federal spending versus a deep setback in trade-all of these were more extreme than we had estimated. Inventory accumulation was faster than expected, contributing one percentage point to Q2 growth. This plus the unsustainability of the gains in construction-led by a nearly 28% annualized increase in the residential component-emphasizes the downside risks to growth in future quarters, especially as real consumer spending was sluggish. That said, the trade drag will also reverse. On balance, we see little in the first look at these numbers to alter our view that the economy will remain sluggish in the period immediately ahead."

Yesterday, we had our fifth circuit breaker pop since the pilot program was announced. This time the stock was CSCO and 7 trades of 100 shares priced between $24 and $26 caused the breaker to go off. All of these trades occurred on the NYSE Amex. You’ll recall that we just wrote about the NYSE Amex trading NASDAQ stocks in a recent post. It didn’t take long for that little experiment to cause problems. The question that now needs to be asked is why did the NYSE Amex allow a trade to occur through the market by such a large percentage? CSCO is one of the most active stocks, and let there be no doubt that there were plenty of offers to fill a 700 share buy order at competing venues. It appears that rather than route to another venue, NYSE Amex routed the buy order to their own best offer first (which was far away from the NBBO). Wait a minute, stop right there, we are throwing a flag and asking for some instant replay. In addition to being a clear violation of Rule 611 of Reg NMS, this smells of internalization. Is the NYSE Amex experimenting with some sort of “flash” order? Inquiring minds would like to know. We haven’t seen the data feed spec yet for the NYSE Amex but you can count on us to take a look and report back to you if we see something funny going on there.