Archive - Aug 2015

Yellen Capital is backing up the truck... as Biotechs drop 11% from the highs, officially in correction.

"We have armed investigators on the property, we're setting up covert cameras, we're documenting all license plates," the head of Global Investigative Group told NBC, referring to the "investigation" taking place in South Florida, where vandals, furious at Walter Palmer who killed a protected lion, placed marinated pigs' feet on the dentist's vacation home driveway.

The Dow is now down for the 6th day in a row (and 11 of last 13 days) as it tests 17,400 - its lowest level since January. With The S&P and Small Caps tumbling towards red year-to-date, Nasdaq remains 2015's big winner but is falling precipitously today...

A public school district in Eastern Texas is under fire amid allegations it made up quotes by famous figures in order to promote Christianity to its students, posting them to the walls of the four schools in the district. The Mount Vernon Independent School District is accused of misattributing quotes to George Washington and Ronald Reagan among others and faces demands to remove the false statements from its walls.

Can you Trump this?

Despite the ubiquitous pre-open ramp in stocks, it appears 'investors' want out in a hurry. With The Dow having fallen 150 points from its overnight highs - testing towards multi-month lows, Nanex points out that suddenly a bid arrived... the biggest buy imbalance of 2015 so far exploded into e-mini S&P futures and managed to save stocks from falling (for now). Plunge Protection Team? or dry powder dip-buyers manically trying to catch a falling knife on no news

A suicide bomb attack inside a mosque in a local security forces headquarters in Abha city in south-west Saudi Arabia killed 13 people and wounded nine on Thursday, the Saudi state news agency reported, citing an interior ministry spokesman.

Is the fitness fad fubar? It appears so. FitBit is getting hammered - down 10% overnight - and new IPO Planet Fitness is trading notably below its "no brainer" IPO price level...

Is faith in Musk fading? All the promises... all the hype hope? It appears so as TSLA tumbles over 10% - its biggest drop in 20 months - breaking below its 100-day moving average.

The three men shown left, who are not from Texas but in fact reside some 1,400 miles away from the “front lines” in North Carolina, allegedly "had a deadly plot to lure government forces into a trap," in retaliation for the Pentagon’s supposed plan to “use the armed forces to impose martial law in the United States."

All the hopes and dreams of bringing back the over-debted, over-consuming American Dream had rested upon The Fed's ability to 'stimulate' confidence via pumping equities higher to 'prove' everything is awesome. For a few years it seemed to work... until 2015. As Bloomberg's Consumer Comfort survey shows, the last 2 weeks have seen Americans views about their personal finances collapse at the fastest rate in 3 years - falling to 10 month lows (despite near-record high stock prices).

And it's far from over.

Accounts will be frozen, and funds will be shut.

WTI Crude is back below $45 again this morning - pressing towards 2015 and cycle lows -after Goldman Sachs' Jeffrey Currie warns 'lower for longer' is here to stay, with price risk "substantially skewed to the downside." His reasoning are manifold, as detailed below, but overarching is oversupply (Saudi Arabia has a challenge in Asia as it battles to maintain mkt share, the Russians are coming, andother OPEC members want a bigger slice) and, even more crucially, storage is running out. As Currie concludes, this time it is different. Financial metrics for the oil industry are far worse.

Today, following another spike in negative news, it appears that the credit markets have finally woken up, and a quick look at Brazil's CDS shows that following today's spike to 314bps, the country's implied default risk is back to levels last seen in April of 2009! We expect more credit market participants to notice the depressionary developments in brazil, and as the country's CDS continue to blow out, many will start asking themselves: is Brazil the next Argentina?