Archive - Apr 2015

“Sometimes the side effects outweigh the benefits"...

Stunned hypocrisy...

It has been a very disturbing 24 hours for Greece.

The trio of macro-prudential policy, the onset and evolution of shadow banking, and the nebulous concept of financial stability may have become a toxic cocktail which can be instrumental in moving forward the Federal Reserve’s timeline for lift-off zero bound rates.  The intuition here is stooped in concepts of volatility and how market structure evolution may contribute or detract from asset volatility. Volatility is the square root of time. Financial repression times time equals volatility. Financial repression and/or macro-prudential policy times time equals the inverse of financial stability. Financial stability inverted equals volatility squared.

We live in a world with limits, yet our economy needs growth. How can we expect this scenario to play out?

October 15^th, 2014 wasn`t a market crash!

Are foreign investors buying into China's world-beating, self-feeding equity rally or is it a classic case of domestic banana merchant-driven multiple expansion? JP Morgan weighs in.

The picture of this very old telephone reminds of our “esteemed” Federal Reserve. They really seem incapable of any modern thought. Their parallels to, and fears of, the Great Depression [Former Chair Bernanke], seem to drive 2009-2015 monetary policy. It reminds me of incredibly stale thinking... sort of like their incredibly stale personalities. I suppose it’s a good match for them but not for the citizens of the world subjected to their currently ineffective and intellectually lazy policies... rooted in very ancient [just like most of them] history.

"If 47% is the final percentage for the quarter, it will mark the lowest percentage of companies reporting sales above estimates since Q1 2013 (also 47%). Since Q3 2008, the percentage of companies reporting sales above estimates has finished below 50% only 6 times," FactSet notes. In a world where buybacks are king and capex is now a four letter word in more ways than one, this is not surprising.

A little over four years after the devastating Japanese earthquake led to a tsunami that triggered the biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, overnight Asia was once again the epicenter of a massive, 7.9 magnitude earthquake, this time not on the Pacific Rim but deep in the Himalayan mountain range, striking the small country of Nepal and sending tremors deep in Northern India, resulting in at least 449 deaths, countless injured, toppling a 19th-century tower in the capital Kathmandu and triggering avalanches on Mount Everest.

All problems, all crises, have at least one solution, if not many solutions. There is no such thing as an unwinnable scenario. Some may not be smart enough or courageous enough to see it, but the solution is always there, waiting to be discovered. The only fight that cannot be won is the fight in which the enemy makes all the rules and we foolishly abide by those rules. Life is not a game of chess, and a man can choose to be more than a pawn anytime he has the guts to do so. Collapse is already upon us; now we must decide who will determine what happens next.

Today, we find precisely how and why Sarao was singled out: he not only ratted out the parasitic trading strategies of the real culprits behind the broken market, the massive HFT firms (such as Virtu which just went public just a day before the Sarao charges were filed) which gave the "regulators" no choice: one of them had to be put away for good, but found a way to capitalize on the algos' stupidity, and actually make money by beating them at their own game.  As such, regulators and exchanges such as the CFTC and CME had no choice but arrest him and prevent him from trading ever again!

With the Nasdaq having finally eclisped its bubble-era record, the weight of the tech investing world now rests on the shoulders (or should we say "wrists") of just one company...

Presented with no comment... ok well one! WTF!?

Claiming to own X quantity of gold is one thing, and reporting how many times the gold has been pledged as collateral is another.