Archive - Dec 2015 - Story

Silicon Valley has been in a food fight for about three years now. Everyone knows it’s going to end, except for the folks in Silicon Valley. Anyone who invested at these valuations will richly deserve what’s coming to them. Those prices were cuckoo.

"If you don’t provide them with good food, a good place to sleep and comfortable temperature, they won’t be able to recover and bring the A-plus product that the world is demanding. To cut the budget on athletes’ hospitality and comfort, that’s just going to cheapen the games.”

Eighty-five years after the birth of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, and the crude complex is acting suitably surreal today. As expected, rhetoric is ratcheting up out of Vienna ahead of tomorrow’s OPEC meeting, with the crude market shaken up like a snowglobe.

“Was there a link to terror?” That’s the question Americans are asking themselves the morning after a husband and wife opened fire with assault rifles killing 14 and wounding 17 at a San Bernardino County employee holiday party. The shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, left their young child with Farook’s mother in nearby Redlands on Wednesday morning before dressing in “assault clothing,” and crashing the party (literally).

"Today’s sell-off in Bund yields (Exhibit 2) and the bounce in EUR/$ rivals those seen in April and May and again puts the question of ECB commitment to QE firmly on the table. ... We are placing our forecasts under review."

November’s NFP release is in strong focus after the stellar reading in October which saw the largest increase this year at 271K additions. Additionally, unemployment is expecting to remain at 5% which will maintain the reading at the lowest level since Apr’08. Furthermore, average hourly earnings are typically in focus due to being a key indicator of wage inflation for the Fed.

From hope to nope...

According to the latest US naval map update from Startfor, the Truman is now off the Libyan coast, rapidly approaching Italy, and we expect is ahead of scheduled year-end ETA to its final destination, a few miles off the Syrian coast.

"Given the surge back towards the all-time highs in the S&P 500, we think that the best might be over for US equities and that indices might range trade more in 2016. We have downgraded US equities to neutral. This takes our overall equity weighting down to neutral, in many respects an extension of what we’ve been doing for most of this year as richer and richer asset markets, against a global background of economic risks, have made us more cautious."

After asking rhetorically "if something just blew up in junk," as CCC-yields explode to crisis-peak levels - suggesting something "spectaculor" is occurring as one trader noted, The FT reports that, according to Standard & Poor’s, companies have defaulted on $78bn worth of debt so far this year with 2015 set to finish with the highest number of worldwide defaults since 2009.

"When Russia courageously stepped into the breach we should have been applauding its willingness to confront ISIS. Instead, we continue to denigrate Russians as if they were still the Soviet Union and Putin, not Islamic terrorists, our most vicious enemy."

Researchers at Duke University and the University of California at Berkeley point to quantitative evidence that The Fed consistently leaks non-public information about its meetings, driving an investment pattern that has led to market gains.

As the USDollar plunges under the weight of short-squeezed EUR FX traders, so commodities are making gains. With OPEC right around the corner, WTI continues to bethe highest beta and has soared back to yesterday's highs on no news whatsoever (apart from comments from OPEC that they will only cut if non-OPEC cuts).

The rout beneath the relative calm of the market surface continues today as another sector has gotten crushed today in reaction to the domestic and global collapse in trade, the spreading domestic manufacturing recession and the bursting of the commodity bubble: truckers, and especially the heaviest, Class 8 trucks, those with a gross weight over 33K pounds, those which make up the backbone of U.S. trade infrastructure and logistics.

The S&P 500 (cash) index just broke back below the crucial 200-day moving-average (at 2,064) for the first time since the Paris terror attack rally began. This has dragged the index back to unchanged year-to-date with only Nasdaq holding gains in 2015.