Archive - Aug 2015 - Story

Damn It Janet!

During Monday's flurry of tripped circuit breakers and flash crashing mayhem, ETF investors learned the hard way that Howard Marks was precisely correct when he warned that ETFs "can't be more liquid than the underlying and we know the underlying can become highly illiquid." The question now, is whether subsequent flash crashes will trigger even more spectacular divergences between fair value and ETF unit prices on the way to proving, once and for all, that ETFs may indeed be the new financial weapons of mass destruction.

Courtesy of Evercore ISI, which using its own GDP equivalent index - the Synthetic Growth Index (SGI) - we get a vastly different China GDP result from the official one, namely Chinese growth of -1.1% annually. Or rather, contraction.

In spite of all the attention the nation has received in recent years, SCMP reports that thousands of so-called "politically exposed persons”, or PEPs - a category that includes heads of state and other top officials - hold Swiss bank accounts, a Swiss foreign ministry official said. But, perhaps not for much longer as Bern aims to finalize a law aimed at simplifying the process of freezing and unblocking such funds.

... or why the number 119.00 is the most important in the world right now...

Presenting: the biggest bond implosion yet in the unfolding EM crisis...

Cofirming that China is clearly out of the market for the time being, was the Indirect take down, which at 50.1% was the lowest since October and with Directs of 7.3% not stepping up, it meant Dealers were stucking holding 42.5% of tthe auction, the lowest since January 2014.

Vester Lee Flanagan - aka Bryce Williams - the gunman who killed two journalists during a live broadcast in Virginia has attempted suicide and is "in a very critical condition", media report.

In a stunning update, the disgruntled employee gunman - has tweeted the moment he killed the two news people... (video has been removed from his twitter and facebook account which are now suspended). While Americans are becoming numb to inner city violence, shooting sprees, and lone gunmen at military installations, the following stunning clip - from live TV at the Bridgewater Plaza in Bedford County, Virginia - of a reporter and photographer being shot and killed is likely to raise the public's awareness of the underlying chaos occurring under the surface in America every day...

Lost in all the stock market focus is the renewed disaster being signaled across credit markets, “inflation” expectations in particular. Here oil prices and the “dollar’s” darkening intersect with credit and broad financial settings. Quietly, market-based measures of the anticipated future “inflation” path have crashed. It can no longer be transitory, which extrapolates nowhere good for monetary policy, orthodox economics and the actual global economy. The theme for several years now has been that “they don’t know what they are doing” and once more we find that proven by “unexpected” events that were perfectly predictable outside the orthodox bubble.

For the third day in a row, VXX - the VIX ETF - is suffering a dramatic short squeeze (which makes sense given than short interest is 64.08mm shares against 68.1mm shares outstanding). This surge is weighing on stocks which just hit the low of teh day - with Small Caps now in the red.

Not satisfied with having arrested a reporter and a prominent investment banker, China is also looking into alleged improprieties at CSRC, the regulator which runs the CSF equity plunge protection team. Meanwhile, CSRC is conducting its own investigations into multiple brokers. 

The size of Paulson's stake is unknown, however we do know that the top 20 shareholders top out at about $150 million in SYNN holdings. Assuming a $200 million Paulson stake, that means that Paulson's paper losses were likely $30-40 million today (depending on the price he build up his stake), losses which may have been booked if Paulson decided to cash out.

Iran’s oil minister says his country supports calls for an emergency OPEC meeting to explore ways to shore up the price of oil, but even without such an effort, Tehran is willing to regain its market share “at any cost.”

Google delivers its verdict...

Once again the HFTs appear to be signaling market direction, this time in VIX.