Archive - Jan 2013 - Blog entry

Cogito Ergo Doom...

I would expect that much more energy had to be used, and that much more electricity would be required just to keep regular business operations going, and keep the Chinese people from freezing to death.

Biggest loser? China.

 I used to like DealBreaker, I really did. Alas that was in my younger years before I made a (very) small name for myself and before I took the red pill offered to me by ZeroHedge's Tyler Durden. Now I realize that sarcastically apologizing for the nefarious character of the financial world is pretty much the same as just plain-old apologizing for it... except funnier. Case in point, here is an excerpt from an article published on DealBreaker a few hours ago entitled "Regulators Close Aquarium Door Behind Escaped Whale":

I know margins have come down, but are still too high relative to the volatility and price in the contract.

Pleasant insider trading dreams...

Over the past few months, the perception has been that the risk of a meltdown in Europe (characterized by the loss of market access for Spain and Italy) has grown increasingly remote. The relative calm comes courtesy of the ECB which conventional wisdom has it, began acting "like a real central bank" in September when it announced it was willing to throw eurozone taxpayers' wallets behind theoretically unlimited purchases of Spanish and/or Italian bonds. This promise of course, was meant to discourage so-called "bond vigilantes" (otherwise known as investors who know a bad deal when they see it) from "speculating" on rising periphery bond yields. As it turns out, the effect of the as yet untested Draghi put has been dramatic. Spanish and Italian 10s have tightened by a ridiculous 240 basis points since late July. 

It’s all a money game on Wall Street.

The groupthink for investors today is predicting three major outcomes for 2013. Unfortunately, they will likely all prove to be popular delusions.

“Here we go again”

Fresh off the printers today comes a new release from Haim Bodek titled The Problem of HFT.

1.  We came to understand that our government is powerless over its spending - that our nation's debt had become unmanageable.

Finance maybe?

US politicians have opted to begin mimicking their EU counterparts when it comes to dealing with our debt issues. What could go wrong?

The US dollar is trading firmly. The official verbal commentary this week by Europe's Juncker and Japan's Amari were more disruptive noise a true signal. These mis-directional cues whipsawed short-term participants and served to obscure what was really happening. One of the most important take aways, it seems, from this week's action is the narrowing of the breadth of the dollar's decline. It is really limited to only the euro...