Archive - Jan 2011

Some very bad news for the former Obama head henchman:according to NBC Chicago, the mayoral candidate has just been bounced from the mayoral ballot after an appellate court has overturned a previous decision to allow Emanuel on the mayoral ballot. One can only imagine the firestorm of profanity that has erupted upon Rahm's learning of the news...

According to PhysOrg.com, two Italian scientists from the University of Bologna have taken on one of physics' historically most discredited concepts, cold fusion, and have actually succeeded in creating a sustainable reaction. Aside from the major implications of the energy market should this be validated and recreated (an issue that buried the original Cold Fusion discovery by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann), one of the more economically important side effects of this purported rediscovery is that one of the byproducts of the reaction is none other than recently uber-bubbleicious copper. One wonders what the implications for the copper supply and demand curves (and equilibrium price) would be should the reaction documented by Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi be proven to not be a hoax. Is modern day alchemy the only thing that can dethrone copper from its historic price highs?

After last week we actually saw some volume participation for the first time in 2011, today the no-volume meltup has resumed. The chart below shows the relative to average volume in the ES. Which ironically shows the Catch 22 the banks find themselves in: the higher they run up the market, the less participation there is, the less trading volume, the lower commissions, and the lower the profits from the traditionally biggest contributors to bank P&L over the past 2 years: flow and prop trading (as confirmed recently by Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JPM, Jefferies and everyone else). Which simply means that banks will have to increasingly rely on the Treasury curve trade (and of course, fudged accounting) to make their bottom line. This would work if consumers had actually stopped deleveraging. Which they haven't. Meaning simply that banks will need to make all their trading profits on market distributions and other crashes that see volume spike. But that as we now know, is contrary to the Fed's third mandate. A curious bind indeed.

RANsquawk US Afternoon Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 24/01/11

The Fed's blatant "Flip That Bond" criminal reality show, funded entirely by you, dear taxpayer, continues, and is in fact accelerating. Over the weekend we provided a list of the 10 cheapest bonds that the Fed should monetize based on their relative position on the spline, in terms of cheapness/richness (link) and implied that should the Fed veer away from this list, it would be engaging in what is certainly non-fiduciary activity, by merely facilitating taxpayer rape on behalf of the Primary Dealers who "put" to Sack Frost whatever issue they want, and certainly not the cheapest ones to be monetized by the US taxpayers (i.e., an act that would at least pretend to save some money). Specifically, we said: "The just auctioned off 2.75% of 12/31/2017  is not even among the top 10 cheapest bonds, which means that if on Monday the PN4 makes up for a material percentage of the $7-9 billion buyback, then something is very, very wrong." Well, one look at the final completion list of Today's POMO indicates that it is preciseley the just auctioned off PN4 due 12/31/2017 that made up over half of the entire bloody operation! At 4.551 billion (out of a total $8.869 billion in bonds monetized), the Fed actively conspired with PDs to defraud taxpayers by engaging in monetization not of bonds that were cheapest and thus bonds the Fed should have been buying, but merely was taking the other side of the trade in today's version of "Flip That Bond." And so the criminality continues unabated.

Following the earlier terrorist attack on Moscow's Domodedovo airport, which has left more than 30 people dead, videos of the attack have started coming in. Caution: not for the faint of heart.

Bob Janjuah was interviewed by Bloomberg TV's Erik Schatzker earlier in which the famous former RBS and now Nomura contrarian who predicted the 2008 crash shares his "skeptically strategic" and tactical outlook on the market: in a nutshell he joins technicians such as Tom DeMark in calling for a 10% correction in the market. Among the three key themes underlying his skeptical views are the following: i) Asia slow down (hard or soft) which will have implications on US markets; ii) Is Europe closer to the endgame; and iii) the US recovery, and the question of how sustainable it is especially following the elimination of the ES boost courtesy of now-daily POMO operations. In terms of asset allocations, Janjuah believes that a reallocation out of EM and into DM makes sense (time for reverse reverse decoupling already?). And just to clarify what Bob's personal position is, for those who may have missed his last two years of letters and memos, he says "I think we are going to have a deeper and harder slowdown in Asia, I think the European situation is closer to the endgame, my biggest doubt is on the US recovery...I think in Q2 and Q3 the grow slowly weakens, and much like last year we are going to be looking for QE3, and my concern is that the hurdle rate for further policy, fiscal and monetary, is much much higher." But most importantly, as Schtazker points out: "Effectively the Fed was the bid. If the Fed's hadn't been in the market, flooding investors with liquidity giving them cash to buy risk assets, the S&P would have declined." Finally people get how central planning works...

Just headlines for now. And so after the great subprime debacle, the latest yard winner for JP is piggybacking on the government's at all costs rescue of the biggest financial zombie in the American financial hierarchy. As a reminder as of the last publicly filed 13F, Paulson held 424 million shares of C, a drop from just over half a billion shares at June 30. In other words, the $2 pick up in Citi shares is the monetary equivalent of having Goldman tell ACA that Paulson was long the equity tranche of something or another.

The WSJ reports that The Central Bank of Russia, which seems to have missed Doug Kass' Friday Fast Money appearance, plans to buy 100 metric tons of gold from domestic banks a year in order to replenish the country's gold reserves, Deputy Head of the bank Georgy Luntovsky said Monday, according to the bank's press service. In 2010 Russia's gold reserve increased 23.9% to 790 tons, or 25.4 million Troy ounces. As a reminder China has just over 1,000 tonnes in official holdings. Which means the PBOC will most certainly not be late to get on the bandwagon, although unlike the CBR, will unlikely issue a press release to announce its plans.

A Zero Hedge reader writes from the ground in China, and shares his first person perspective on just how real inflation has become in the world's most populous and thus most price margin sensitive, country. The unpleasant conclusion: "Perhaps if the gov hadn't been handing out free money to people for the last 10 years to boost growth and raise living standards at such a lightening speed pace, inflation wouldn't be quite as bad as it is today."

Minutes ago a suicide bomber exploded at Moscow's main domestic airport Domodedovo, killing at least 20, and according to some reports, up to 70 people, forcing a security crunch at the country's two other major airports: Sheremetyevo and Vnukovo. The Russian stock market is sharply lower following the news, in a glaring reminder of that now forgotten event of bad news being bad news. Interfax news also reports that in the aftermath of the blast, the Police is checking subways and other places of congestion of people. Elsewhere, an Etihad airlines jet was escorted with fighter jets to Stansted airport. Follow all the developments via Sky News after the jump below.

A must have Wall Chart for Super Dole 2011...

Something scary this way comes from Morgan Stanley's Quantiative and Derivative Strategies: "market conditions over the last two weeks are somewhat reminiscent of that during the August 2007 ‘Quant Crisis’. In only a few days, a number of quantitative long-short equity funds experienced unprecedented losses in seemingly ‘normal’ market conditions. We do not suggest here that the magnitude of hypothetical losses match those from 2007, however, there is little question that the rotation has drawn attention of many quant investors." In other words, the massive groupthink trade that we have been warning about for months may be about to claim its first mass casualties. The just released report by author Charles Crow elaborates what many have been suspecting, yet few dared to voice: "Recent substantial factor movements in Europe have contributed to portfolio volatility and, in some cases, abrupt performance degradation. Portfolios positioned to take advantage of prevailing factor trends may have suffered substantially over the last two weeks." Is the groupthink trade about to end? If so, does that mean the funds will be forced to stop "not fighting the Fed" as this is really the only factor-driven trade that has made sense. If so, we have reached the critical point where being aligned alongside the Fed has no incremental marginal returns, at least for the non-Primary Dealers. This could promptly transform to a watershed event, especially since as Morgan Stanley adds, the market currently has "relatively low liquidity" to absorb the fringe moves.

Gold Options activity took a turn towards the bizarre late Friday. Between the hours of 2pm and 4pm Eastern, put buyers came out of the woodwork. We are almost certain that Doug Kass's interview on Fast Money was the sole cause of this activity. He was interviewed at 5pm. The put buying frenzy came in a full 2 hours beforehand on a Friday....What we are focusing on is the option activity that occurred before his interview.

Last week the S&P 500 experienced its first weekly decline in eight weeks. On January 19th the index fell by more than 1%, something it hasn’t done in 37 trading days. The technology heavy Nasdaq was down 2.4% as AAPL was a big drag, falling 6% on the week. Smaller stocks, captured by Russell 2000, underperformed large caps in their second weekly decline since mid-November, down 4.26%. Further, transportation index diverged from the Dow, sometimes a harbinger of less than optimistic technicals of sorts. Earnings per share reports that beat estimates are coming in at 68%, below the past four quarter average of 74% and risk premiums are too low as VIX indicates complacency which can be seen by the routing in financial stocks last week. In each of the past three years, the stock market has weathered serious January selloff and has never experienced four down Januaries in a row. Pending on the outcome for this week, we will learn if this precedent upheld.