Archive - Dec 14, 2011 - Story

As has been demonstrated time and time again, anyone wishing to make money should allign themselves with Goldman's flow desk, which by definition does the opposite of what Goldman's clients are doing. The most recent indication of this came last Friday when Goldman told clients to sell buy European banks to entertaining results. Today, we get the latest Stolpering, following Goldman's all too glaringly obvious initiaition of Groupon with a "buy" and a $29 price target. From the reprt: "We are initiating coverage on Groupon with a Buy rating and a $29 12-month target. We view Groupon as the key to unlocking the massive local advertising market with which the Internet has long struggled. We believe the size of the addressable market (conservatively the $100 bn local advertising market, but potentially over $10 trillion in global advertising, goods, and services markets), new business models like Groupon Now! in mobile, and the advantages of scale more than offset the considerable risks from competition, margin pressure, and deal fatigue." That's sufficient, we get it...

And so the inevitable has happened: the European currency finally fell below that strange attrractor level of 1.3000 following an Italian 5 year auction that despite the "technical" clarification that it would be of Off The Run bonds, still ended up being the highest rate ever paid for a 5 Year piece of Italian paper. As Reuters explains, the euro slipped versus the dollar on Wednesday after Italy paid a euro era record yield of 6.47 percent to sell five-year debt, adding to concerns that an EU summit last week had made little progress in tackling the region's debt crisis. More: "Italy paid a euro era record yield of 6.47 percent to sell five-year paper at its first auction of longer-term debt after the EU moved towards greater fiscal integration at last week's summit, but failed to convince markets it can solve the debt crisis. The average yield at Wednesday's sale compares with an auction rate of 6.29 percent Italy paid a month ago, which was also a euro lifetime record high. Rome sold 3 billion euros of the Sept. 2016 BTP bond, the top of an unusually small range of 2 billion to 3 billion euros for the sale. Italy has trimmed the size of its auctions in reaction to market pressure but it will have to step up issuance in coming months if it is to meet a gross funding goal of around 440 billion euros next year." And result: EURUSD < 1.3000 which means bad things for the record high correlated stock market... and the Christmas Rally.

It is often useful to learn from one's mistakes, or in some cases from one's successes, and as they prepare for their 2012 Blueprint, Deutsche's FX research team focuses in on lessons they learned from the travails of an asset class that was at times chaotic and at others baffling in its stagnation. Digressing from the high levels of uncertainty accompanied by strange periods of low volatility to a recognition that emerging markets did not decouple and there are no more safe havens, the five key insights offer practical views on what worked and what didn't and critically going forward to focus on the flows emanating from the Euro-zone as opposed to monetary policy.