Archive - 2010

Would the nearly two days of "scheduled maintenance" for Goldman 360 include installing some anti-Shanghai IE bugs perchance? Wouldn't it be ironic if the Chinese could sell just-purchased Treauries using a hacked, third party REDI account.

InTrade's latest market on Bernanke reconfirmation is 77.5x79, better bid, with some serious bid interest below 72. There is a size seller at 85. Yesterday, the market closed at 93, and was at 95 since the contract inception. The question is if Harry Reid's last minute endorsement will push the odds higher yet again. However, things are not so certain: Democrats have a busy agenda for next week - they have to make a vote on America's bankruptcy first (the whole $1.9 trillion debt ceiling extension), and then there is the whole state of the union address... And the real question - when will Proshares and BlackRock start selling a qunituple leveraged ETF that will decay 99% by the time it hits Cede & Co.

Japan's $1.36 trillion public pension fund, the world's largest, is seeking higher returns...

While many pundits will obsess over the markets' gyration in this past week, and make it into a major headline in the quest for eyeballs, the truth is that the S&P turning negative for the year was merely a sideshow (the next real market crash will be much more memorable). No - the real story was the advent of Paul Volcker to his rightful place on the, well, right of President Obama, coupled with the now imminent departure of Geithner and Summers, and the massive question mark that now hangs over Goldman Sachs. Who could have believed that the implications of one Senatorial election could be so profound, yet that is precisely the stuff black swans are made of. The new regime is here, and like it or not, it brings with it a new framework of variables. Yet shifting from the past and looking at the future, the question now becomes what should investors focus on? Just who is this Paul Volcker who will now be the President's seemingly primary economic advisor, and more importantly, what will his policies be like? Luckily, an extensive blueprint already exists, and Zero Hedge readers should be quite familiar with it by now.

Precious metals are going to be attractive to con artists, just like anything else of real value. No question about it. But there are some decent safeguards already built into the system. If you supplement them with your own knowledge and common sense, it shouldn’t be difficult to avoid becoming a victim. And for goodness sake, look after your own interests and don’t fret about what’s in Fort Knox. If it truly is full of tungsten, so much the better for your own holdings.

Politico has obtained the phone log of conversations performed by then FRBNY President Tim Geithner during the period of the financial crisis, or specifically September 14, 2008 through the end of the year. Some of the people called include (many of them repeatedly) pretty much all the usual suspects... And who is mysterious ex-Goldmanite Dan Jester and why was he, together with another ex-Goldmanite, Hank Paulson, the first two people called the day Lehman filed?

New measures by Chinese authorities to curb bank lending reversed a rally in energy prices early in the week, bringing West Texas Intermediate futures down more than 4% in the second half of the week to below $75 a barrel by Friday. China continued its efforts to slow down its economy and prevent overheating, and told some banks to stop making certain kinds of loans. The Chinese move on Wednesday hit all commodities across the board, from gold to lead, with the prospect of slower economic growth in the country.

Whether this week was THE turning point or A turning point we will not know for a while (though we have our suspicions) but it was the largest week-over-week widening since JUN09 in absolute and relative terms for IG credit. IG has not closed a week above 95bps since 12/4 and HY still has some room to go to revert empirically back to same date levels of risk.

As the attached chart indicates, the primary support trendline is here. The robots that have been pushing the market higher on diminishing volume need to reverse the massive volume surge that has wiped out over 3 week of profits in 2 days (yes, that's why we show those VWAPs over and over). Even more troubling is that the support line and the 100 DMA intersect, and we are right on top of it. Should we drop below current levels on higher volume, the next major resistance is over 80 points below.

All my pre-hybrid sketchy experiences with NYSE have left me with a sour taste. If you were to sit at my desk, you would hear how I’d pay higher ECN fees to EDGX or get worse fills rather than to give any business to NYSE. I refuse to send any orders through them. And it is not like my 50Mln shares a year would really make a huge difference. Call me loco but I just don’t give them my business.

Just in case you needed a good analogy to the Predator recommending an acid-dripping Alien as your next house pet, here comes the one and only Maestro saying Bernanke is doing a swell Job. In the meantime James Inhofe (R.OK) is the latest vote against Bernanke. Most recently updated table below. In the meantime, and much more importantly than what some discredited, incompetent fossil says, Tennessee's Lamar Alexander is a Yes. That bring the "nays" to 14.

I'm just here to help you blow your money.

Markets were roiled once again today as the mouseclickers were busy selling giant baskets of stocks. That's the beauty of stock investing, instantaneous liquidation or position reversal. Now we need to figure out if fear has "gone too far, too fast", or if this is simply another ruse to offload more bonds at 2%, 300% oversubscribed.

This was at 17 last on Tuesday, a 60% rise in one week.

9 months of "who wants to be short over the weekend?" Time to flip that one around. This has now been the fastest correction in the bear market rally. Where are the HiFTers providing the bids and liquidity? But the biggest question: why are treasuries unchanged? The Fed's biggest nightmare is slowly materializing...