Archive - 2010

Three weeks ago when we noted the 30th consecutive outflow from US-based equity mutual funds (now at 33 straight weeks), we said: "America's love affair with stocks is over, has bypassed the marriage stage and gone straight to the bitter divorce." Today, we are happy to see that the the NYT's Floyd Norris for repackaging our metaphor in a slightly more palatable fashion: "The love affair of American investors with the stock market appears to have ended." His piece in today's NYT "For U.S. investors, the glow is off domestic stocks" will not be news to anyone who follows our weekly report on ICI data: "The year now ending will be the fourth consecutive year in which mutual funds that invest primarily in American stocks experienced net outflows of funds, meaning that investors as a group withdrew more money than they put in." And yet stocks continue to ramp higher, in big part due to the rapid increase in NYSE margin interest which means the bulk of investors are buying stock increasingly on leverage, but still the question to just who continues to do the actual holding remains unanswered. Indeed, only a few people, Charles Biderman among them, have answered with the response that everyone knows is true, yet most are afraid to utter.

Promptly after those two cuddly bears explained how the JP Morgue is manipulating the silver market, and the xtranormal video went viral, forcing the FT to release an indemnification that "according to sources" JPM had covered a major portion of its silver short (only to subsequently end up with 90% control of other metals markets), here they are back, explaining in Part 2 of the series just what the next steps in the unwind of the biggest metal manipulation scheme will look like. The kicker: a JPM insider has told one of the bears that there is no commercial silver left, "it's all smoke and mirrors, and the CFTC can do nothing about it other than pray." Other topical items explained: silver backwardation, that there are two commissioners at the CFTC on the JP Morgue's payroll, the BIS' fractional gold system and the usage of side pockets for sovereign gold, and pretty much everything that ties the loose odds and ends in the PM manipulation story.

Individuals do not always, if ever, exercise their freedoms so as to promote order in everyone’s lives. On the contrary, in seeking order in their own lives, individuals tend to impinge upon the lives of at least some others, if only because, in their efforts to cooper-ate with one party – i.e., to exchange one or another good or service to their mutual advantage – they inadvertently compete with another party, in which case one or the other must accordingly lose. But insofar as this process of exchange promotes the division of labor, resulting in the provision of a wider variety of goods and services that in turn improves individuals’ lot in life, the gains far exceed the losses. For how else could the human species have advanced at all, much less to a stage that was inconceivable little more than a century, or even mere decades, ago? How else could it have harnessed electricity, for example – or invented the locomotive, the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the computer, the cell phone, email, the World Wide Web, etc. – if not but through this cooperative, if inevitably competitive, process?

RANsquawk Christmas Update - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 24/12/10

RANsquawk European Morning Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 24/12/10

Are you the Ghost of Crashes Yet to Come?” asked E-Benron Scrooge, “I fear you more than any other spirit.”

As the rest of the world celebrates Christmas, blissfully pretending all is good, and the Fed can manipulate markets to infinity without at least one of the numerous violated laws of physics being reasserted in the process, things in China are once again reminding those who care that just as liquidity giveth, so does liquidity taketh away. We pointed out a week ago that the 7 day Repo rate in China recently hit a post-Lehman high, as banks are increasingly concerned that following 3 RRR hikes, the PBOC has no choice but to resort to some tightening measure that actually works. As a result excess liquidity has suddenly become rares than hen's teeth. Today we get a first hand lesson of why this was material: Dow Jones reports that the Chinese MoF has failed to attract sufficient interest in its 3 Month 20 billion CNY auction. The result: SHCOMP is now down 1.2%. Bottom line: as the world is sleeping, China just had a failed bond auction. If news mattered, this would be a very disturbing event. Luckily for Ben, it doesn't. For the time being. It will soon. Then Montier's mean reversion meme may just strike with great deferred vengeance and furious accrued anger.

The ideologies that condone unloading fiscal costs onto future taxpayers and savers clearly suppress default rates and default vol. But it creates seriously nonlinear returns: there may be massive upside as a result of nuclear fusion research subsidies, but there can be equally massive downside. What you get in exchange for control of fundamental laws of motion is asymmetry in outcomes and a much higher probability of extreme outcomes. Complexity and interconnectivity within the financial system—crowded trades and herd behavior—create fundamental asymmetric instabilities. Asymmetry implies a false sense of security. The result can be massive concentrated positions in either paying or receiving on a swap because “an adverse unhedgeable move can never happen”. Such positions are great when the good times roll, but under stress performance collapses.

Just in time for Christmas, On Wednesday, Dec. 22, U.S. gasoline prices hit an average $3 a gallon for the first time in more than two years, according to AAA's Daily Fuel Gauge Report. Meanwhile, U.S. stocks and oil also climbed to the highest levels since 2008.

From New Jersey to Canada, the pension pot is boiling and many will soon find out that there are no irrevocable rights to benefits...

Update: Charles Biderman sends us an addendum to his earlier CNBC appearance...

A year after Charles Biderman's provocative post first appeared on Zero Hedge, in which he asked just who is doing all the buying of stocks as the money was obviously not coming from retail investors (and came up with one very notable suggestion), today Maria Bartiromo invited the TrimTabs head once again (conveniently in CNBC's lowest rated show, during Christmas Eve eve, at a time when perhaps 5 people would be watching) in an interview which disclosed that after more than a year of searching, Biderman still has no idea who actually buying. In response to Bartiromo's question if the retail investor, who left after the flash crash (thank you SEC), Biderman responds what every Zero Hedger has known for 33 weeks: "Retail investors are not coming back to the US. Those investors that are investing are buying global equities and are buying commodities. We are seeing lots money going into commodity ETF funds: gold, silver..." and the even more unpleasant summation: "individuals have been selling, companies are net selling, insider selling and new offerings are swamping any  buyback and any cash M&A activity since QE 2 was announced. Pension funds and hedge funds don't really have that much cash to invest. So what nobody's asking is what happens when QE 2 stops: if the only buyer is the Fed, and the Fed stops buying, I don't know what is going to happen...When I was on your show a year ago I was saying the same thing: we can't figure out who is doing the buying it has to be the government, and people said I was nuts. Now the government is admitting it is rigging the market." Cue Bartiromo jaw dropping.

Don't leave it to the experts ... economics and financial stuff is easy to understand!

A bet.

In his latest letter, "In Defense of the 'Old Always'" GMO's James Montier takes PIMCO's trademark "New Normal" to task, and argues that the "Old Always" with its ever trusty mean reversion strategies work as well now as they always did. Summarizing his disagreement with what the investment implications of the New Normal are, Montier says: "For instance, Richard Clarida of PIMCO wrote the following earlier this year, “Positioning for mean reversion will be a less compelling investment theme in a world where realized returns cluster nearer the tails and away from the mean.” This certainly isn’t the first premature obituary written for mean reversion. During pretty much every “new era,” someone proclaims that the old rules simply don’t apply anymore … who could forget Irving Fisher’s statement that stocks had reached a “permanently high plateau” in 1929? Mean reversion is in some august company in being well enough to read its own obituary." The key defense for mean reversion Montier says, is the market itself: "we have witnessed some quite remarkable, and quite appalling, things – the deaths of empires, the births of nations, waves of globalization, periods of deregulation, periods of re-regulation, World Wars, revolutions, plagues, and huge technological and medical advances – and yet one thing has remained true throughout history: none of these events mattered from the perspective of value!" Which means: is this time really different? Have we passed some rubicon at which time not even the otherwise spot on observations of traditionally sensible analysts like Montier make sense? The answer is so far elusive. Yet in a universe in which true asset fair value can no longer be derived, and all valuations are wrapped in the enigma of trillions of monetary and fiscal stimuli, whose stripping is virtually impossible in a world in which everything is centrally planned, we just may have entered... the non-"old always" zone.

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 23/12/10