Archive - Jul 2011 - Story

Remember one simple truth, 91.8% of ES Futures daily volume is attributed to day traders and computer algorithms. And since not one single person within that group uses macro data for their intraday trades then it is safe to say the market in the short term has little to do with pricing in macro economic data. Remember how the SPX peaked two months before the great recession actually began. That is not forward looking. Market participants are already analyzing today's afternoon rally as a sign that this market is resilient, that the economy is still headed for a soft patch and that the bull is alive and well. I beg to differ but instead would rather highlight two important aspects of this market I suspect is dictating price. Shorts are scared and longs are delusional. Bernanke not only taught investors to buy every single dip he even has them convinced the removal of the Bernanke put (i.e. QE) has no downside risk to the market. The move the past two weeks was foreseen by no one and hurt a lot of shorts while making longs feel smart yet again. Even a lot of macro bears were capitulating on the economic data the past two weeks. That is until today.

Much hollow rhetoric has been uttered about the vast existential threat presented by Greek CDS. As we have reported, Greek CDS is the least of Europe's problems. When it comes to the stability of the European dominoes, it is and has always been about Italy, which is not only the second worst country in Europe after Greece on a debt/GDP basis, and also the country with the largest amount of nominal debt, but more importantly has the largest amount of net CDS outstanding. All this is summarized on the Bloomberg chart below.

A snapshot of the US Afternoon Briefing covering Stocks, Bonds, FX, etc.

Market Recaps to help improve your Trading and Global knowledge

Now that every carbon-based trading life form has long since left the building, and only the robots and Brian Sack's NYU interns are left loading up bags, the good old ES-RISK divergence has once again opened up to the same 10 point spread which prompted us to advise for a compression trade yesterday. Sure enough, like clockwork, the vacuum tubes come crawling with limited dry powder, and can only bid up ES while leaving everything else in the dust.A compression bet here will likely close the same way it always closes once some rationality returns and the PPT steps back.

Folks… you just can’t make this stuff up. On July 6th, just two days ago, at least a dozen busybody Congressmen sponsored the introduction of HR 2411, the “Reduce America’s Debt Now Act of 2011.” They always come up with fantastic names for these pieces of legislation… and rest assured, the better/more patriotic the name, the more ominous the bill. This one follows the pattern. HR 2411 states that every worker in America should be able to voluntarily have a portion of his/her wages automatically withheld and sent directly to the Treasury Department for the purposes of paying down the federal debt. “Every employer making payment of wages shall deduct and withhold upon such wages any amounts so elected, and shall pay such amounts over to the Secretary of the Treasury…” That’s right. Uncle Sam is so broke that he wants to give all the good little Americans out there the opportunity to contribute an even greater portion of their paychecks to finance government largess. Desperate? Hmmm…. Don’t worry, it gets better.

Despite the endless din from the clueless economist brigade attempting to couch the impact of the Birth Death adjustment on actual non farm payroll numbers, there is a workaround which confirms that of the 1 million "job gains" in the past year, well over 50% of these have come from the statistical fudge factor known as the Birth Death Adjustment. We wonder when anyone in the administration will mention that of the 1 million jobs "created" in the past year, 606,000 have been purely the product of overzealous excel models.

The Bernank has already gone too far and there is no turning back. There will be QE to infinity until the point where the system collapses on itself, which is probably not too far off once the next round of official QE is started. What form this may take is anyone’s guess but as I mentioned in a recent email, the whole rate cap idea makes the most sense since it will allow infinite QE to occur without having to announce subsequent iterations. The simple fact that they tried to pretend QE would end and then tried to raid commodities to create the justification for it later on demonstrates to me how much trouble we really are in. If The Bernank had merely gone ahead and continued the program he had a CHANCE of perpetuating Disneyland for a little longer at least. Instead, he is praying that the economy can stand on its own, which of course it can’t and so then when he launches into QE3 after the economy weakens and proves QE1 and QE2 did nothing to create a self-sustaining recovery the entire mindset and understanding going into the next money printing party will be entirely different from a psychological standpoint. QE3 will not lead to confidence or anything even similar to the last rounds. Rather it will be used to basically “keep the lights on.” More than anything it will serve as that proverbial “bell” that will ring and in the minds of the savviest and wealthiest people on the planet to get the hell out of the system while they can. This is inevitable. It is already happening. The stampede is yet to come. But come it will. It is time for everyone to take additional steps whatever that may mean for you personally. I know I am. Don’t get gorged.

Yesterday I laid out why the U.S. will inevitably experience The Great Reset. What comes after that systemic devolution/crisis is unknown, but we can speculate on the shape of things to come. Though we cannot know the outcome, we can certainbly discern the outlines of the crisis itself. These destabilizing conditions will force a crisis at some point and will be resolved one way or another. The resolution of these brewing instabilities could be orderly or disorderly. In an orderly scenario, a new Constitutional Convention is convened, and a leadership backed by an enlightened public hammers out a consensus to limit the political and financial dominance of Financial Power Elites and corporate cartels. The new consensus reorients the Central State to its original purpose of limiting predation of the citizenry by Elites and criminals, defending the nation and imposing the rule of law as defined by the Constitution. The Savior State would be dismantled in an orderly process. In a disorderly resolution, the Status Quo and the public both refuse to deal with reality and instead cling to the Titanic, demanding magical solutions that will keep the doomed ship from sinking. There is no such magic, of course, and so the ship will go down, and disorder will reign. It might take the shape of a financial crisis such as a devaluation or hyperinflation, or it might take a political crisis such as a "Quiet Coup" by Elites or an outbreak of resistance to the heavy-handed Central State.

Zero Hedge has been warnings about the scourge of High Frequency Trading long before most in the general public had even heard about the concept. Over the past 2 years, and culminating with the Flash Crash it became all too clear that HFT is nothing but a parasitic phenomenon which churns volume in stocks providing the best liquidity rebates, while pretending to be adding liquidity. Recently the best we can do is to provide glaring examples of HFT algos gone wrong in hopes that some regulator somewhere will finally take the long overdue step to establish a minimum bid/ask time delay and thus put virtually the entire HFT frontrunning math Ph.D. crew out of business. The latest development in the ongoing saga against these parasites comes from none other than the Bank of England's Andrew Haldane who prepared a speech to the International Economic Association Sixteenth World Congress in Beijing China, titled "The race to zero" which essentially recaps the hundreds if not thousands of posts we have written on the matter of risks posed by High Frequency Trading, and blasts the concept, as well as the toothless captured regulators who continue to exist in their zombie, porn-addicted state, and refuse to move one finger to finally end this next Flash Crash-in-waiting.

A snapshot of the US Afternoon Briefing covering Stocks, Bonds, FX, etc.
Market Recaps to help improve your Trading and Global knowledge

Every time we update the projection chart of how many jobs have to be created by the end of Obama's now improbable second term, the number goes up.  First it was 245,500 in April, then 250,000 in June, now it is 254,000: it seems to increase by 5,000 each month. As a reminder this chart looks for the breakeven number that has be attained to restore (not surpass) the jobs that the US economy had back in December 2007 as the Depression started, when accounting for the natural increase of 90,000 people/month in the labor force. Needless to say, there is no way in hell the US economy can create a quarter million jobs per month from now for the next 65 months, as long as the president continues to pander to Wall Street's "wealth creation" via asset returns instead of directing capital into actual economically viable projects that focus on wealth creation through labor.

Update: the president is now 30 minutes late. Either the guy on the 18th is taking his sweet time or the teleprompter has been hacked.

The much expected TV appearance, which made waves earlier today with everyone expecting Obama to proudly announce a +200K NFP number is about to start. Watch it live here as the scapegoating begins in 5...4...3...

Today we got another confirmation that the only "growth" in the economy comes courtesy of inventory stocking for that eventual day when the economy picks up and inventory can be sold at an actual profit, after wholesale inventories printed at 1.8% on expectations of 0.6%, up from 1.1% previously. We get it: economic growth now comes at the assumption that there will be economic growth in the future, thank you I in the GDP calculation. But the only chart that matters, and in keeping with our observations of pervasive channel stuffing at GM, is the following: the inventory to sales ratio for the car industry, which just surged to 1.62, or a level not seen since the summer of 2009. This is a 16.55% rise in the ratio or the biggest ever relative jump in the auto inventory/sales ratio in history. Translated: nobody is buying already built cars. But yes, keep blaming the collapse in auto "production" on Japan.

Joe LaVorgna, who yesterday raised his NFP estimate from 100,000 to 175,000 was off only by a factor of 972% (and who can forget his 300,000 NFP forecast from last month two days before the final number ended up being a revised 25,000). Here is his, uh, "explanation."