Archive - Sep 2010

Today the ECB completed a €104 billion 84 day liquidity providing LTRO, which saw the participation of 182 banks, receiving an allotted 1% fixed rate as part of the refinancing. Importantly, this amount was far less than was expected to be refied, as nearly €225 billion of 3, 6 and 12 month ECB loans were set to expire today and tomorrow, implying that the eurozone saw the extraction of about €120 billion in liquidity out of the system. As a result OIS has spiked on liquidity concerns, as well as expectations of future interbank borrowing to cover the lost liquidity. As per Market News: "The three month euro LIBOR/OIS spread narrowed sharply Wednesday, as a result in the spike of the OIS rate following the much weaker than expected demand at the European Central Bank's 3-month Long Term Refinancing Operation. Banks borrowed much less than widely expected, borrowing E104 billion in the 3-month LTRO, and driving predicted future lending rates sharply higher. There is E225 billion in ECB loans expiring this week, and the low take up at today's 3-month implies, on the face of it, there is going to be reduced liquidity in the euro area, although banks could use alternative central bank financing to get through the year end or wait until ECB conducts its 6-day fine-tuning operation on Thursday." The immediate result of this news pushed the EURUSD 50 pips higher, as it implied, at least on the surface, that European banks are in less need of ECB handholding than expected. Of course, it is also possible that European banks have simply found less obvious ways to use ECB backstops to prop their daily operations.

It’s all Fedspeak today after this morning’s weekly report on mortgage applications as three regional presidents weigh in…

The EURUSD was last seen well north of 1.36. The reason for this strength certainly was not based on news flow out of Ireland, where Anglo Irish just saw its Tier 2 debt downgraded to CCC, on what the rater called a "clear and present risk" of a restructuring of this debt. Yet this is likely irrelevant in the grand scheme of moral hazard things: after all, as the FT reports, Ireland is about to unveil an "additional capital injection expected to be about €5bn (£4.3bn). That would bring the bail-out costs for Anglo Irish to €30bn, shy of the €35bn forecast by credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s." Nonetheless, Ireland’s cost of borrowing on Tuesday hit record levels with yields on 10-year government bonds jumping 25 basis points to 6.72 per cent. And to make things delightfully surreal, the Irish unemployment rate was reported to jump from 13.0% to 13.7% in one month.

There goes the markets for a day, or two, or seven hundred and twenty, or however long it will take for rational and sane investors to trust these markets, ever again.

Now that the Case Shiller index has been the housing sound bite du jour, many would benefit in knowing that the index was designed to filter out the vast majority of the factors that are dragging down home prices today. That means that despite the fact that this most recent CS reading shows prices on the decline again, it in no way captures the whole picture. Even more pertinent, the parts that it doesn't capture are the worse parts. The Case Shiller index makes the housing downturn look downright rosy in comparison to the data on the streets - but you won't hear this from the mainstream financial media!

RANsquawk European Morning Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 29/09/10

For decades, public pension funds have bankrolled the private equity industry, investing billions of dollars with large firms like Apollo Global Management and the Blackstone Group. Is this about to change in a major way?

Heck of a job, boys ...

Unbeknownst to most investors, last week Ben Bernanke pumped an additional $11.05 BILLION into the system ON TOP of the $11.15 pumped via the POMOs. In plain terms, the Fed juiced the system by $20+ billion in a single week, bringing its liquidity pumps RIGHT BACK QE 1 LEVELS.

Daniel Yergin, in the prologue to his award winning book, uses the language of anthropology to describe what the human species became in the past century: Hydrocarbon Man. While the search continues for alternative fuels and millions are spent on research and development, modern man will continue for some time to come to be dependent on Persian Gulf oil: the strategic prize. This essay focuses on the terrorist threat to oil pipelines in the region.

First Meredith Whitney highlighted the insult facing the banking industry this quarter as a result of the dearth of trading volume. Now quant hedge fund extraordinaire DE Shaw, which prides itself on hiring something like one in a thousand math geniuses, and only after they sign an NDA during interviews, has added the injury, by being the canary in the hedge fund coalmine, and letting 150, or 10%, of its highly paid workforce, go. And that's not all: after finally unlocking its "gates" the fund's AUM has plunged by $7 billion to $28 billion. This can not be good, as it means that the fund has had to unwind tens of billions in hedged positions over the past weeks. And if the fund's slant was bearish previously it may well have been responsible for the rapid move in the stock market, as its semi-forced liquidation would have seen it need to cover an abnormal amount of shares in a thin market, in which players like SAC and DE Shaw already account for a material fraction of total volume.

For all those engaged in a repeat of the world's most ridiculous dash for trash, what just happened to GMCR may be a stark reminder that easy come may just as well mean easy go. The stock, which earlier closed at a fresh all time high, has plunged in the AH session after deep in the bowels of an 8-K just released, the firm disclosed the following stunner:

On September 20, 2010, the staff of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement informed the Company that it was conducting an inquiry and made a request for a voluntary production of documents and information. Based on the request, the Company believes the focus of the inquiry concerns certain revenue recognition practices and the Company’s relationship with one of its fulfillment vendors. The Company, at the direction of the audit committee of the Company’s board of directors, is cooperating fully with the SEC staff’s inquiry.

And so the computers are back to the oldest trick in the VWAP playbook: ramp stocks even as selling volume prevails, to create the perception that the mood has shifted to the optimistic. As the chart below shows, even as ES closed 4 points higher than yesterday's close, the actual Volume Weighted Average Price closed notable lower (light blue line). In other words, the institutional market today, for all those who trade blocks and need to use VWAP algos to process trades, was down, even as it closed magically up for everyone else. This is another gimmick used widely in last year's melt up, to cause people to part with their money and buy the most overvalued tech and solar companies (the latter of which have a negative EV when government subsidies are removed; if one wonders where funding for austerity will come from, there is a suggestion).

Not bottom fishing. Just fishing for a bottom.