Equity Markets

Multiple choice time.

Interest rate derivatives certainly help many individual businesses control and hedge their costs.

But when a bunch of individuals all attempt to reduce their risks at the same time in the same way, it can increase the risk to the overall system.

Apologies for the lack of color for the past 24 hours. We pick up first with a quick update on equities following our call on Friday: Equity markets did rebound to test out the break-out level between 1,198 and 1,203. Tactical players or people interested in initiating short positions for the longer run but with a tight cost of entry should look at selling the market here, with above 1,207, to play 1,180 first, and then a drop that if we believe our signal from last Monday on the Vix should be a least 5%. It is probably also a good level to reload on long VIX and volatility positions with an excellent risk reward. - Nic Lenoir

Spreads ended the day modestly wider, underperforming stocks from Friday's close, as despite notable swings intraday, credit markets tracked equity markets almost perfectly, ending at the day's best levels. HY outperformed IG by the close (with its higher beta to stocks) but single-name breadth in credit was very negative.

A former Goldmanite who failed to bail out the world and was called a Chump by Elijah Cummings, proceeded to chopped down trees for kindling and fight off bears in the backwoods, is now stuck peddling a second-tier equity product for a bond fund. The world sure is messed up.

Crude futures ended at their lowest point this month Friday, as investors fled riskier assets after regulators charged Goldman Sachs with fraud. Nonetheless, industry insiders are fully expecting this still intact seasonal pattern: a rise in gas prices in the months ahead during the summer driving season (from April 1 to Sept. 30).

Hmmm! Greek bonds and banks are getting battered after the Greek rescue package was announced. To think, some actually thought this would help. Giving a highly indebted country more debt at a rate that it can't afford while everybody lies about the state of its indebtedness does absolutely nothing to aid said country. See, I encapsulated this entire post in 1 sentence...

The SEC has finally acknowledged it is hopeless at regulating the latest generation of market forntrunning specialists, in the form of various iterations of High Frequency Traders. We are happy that one year after starting our campaign against the complete travesty to market efficiency that is HFT (yes, they frontrun and scalp and subpenny and generate artificial momentum, but they bring liquidity!.... in five bankrupt stocks while raising slippage costs everywhere else) the SEC has realized that there is so much more than meets the eye, and that no matter how many conflicted Op-Eds are publish in Advanced Trader, that will not change the nature of what HFT is.At a meeting today, the Securities and Exchange Commission voted unanimously for a plan to tag high-frequency traders with ID numbers and give the SEC access to information on their trades. Branding sure is an appropriate act for all these parasitic market participants. Hopefully the SEC will tear itself away from the terabytes of kiddie and tranny porn available on the internet to actually analyze and compile the data it receives (we realize that releasing it to the public would be far too much in keeping with Obama's initial and soon forgotten promise of unprecedented transparency), instead of just dumping it in the shredder as it has done in the past with Madoff, with Greenspan, and with other masters of the ponzimonium.

The only primary driver to market movements, the carry trade, especially as visualized by the JPYEUR, just got poleaxed. Equities, which operate in a universe of their own when they so choose, are not following. Yet. Gold is rallying as all "carried" currencies suddenly feel weak.

Delinquency rates up, Cap rates up, Macro outlook down, CRE REIT equity prices up. Sounds about right!

Following our alert last Friday, we have reached some key support levels in US Fixed Income. Keep in mind the sell-off on Friday and Monday was driven by leveraged fast money accounts, and not real money flow. Therefore, the auctions this week will be key. From these levels, 10 year yields can move up maybe 10 to 15 bps more, but that is as far as we would see them going for now. A close below 114-16 in the future would clearly lead us to revise this outlook, but for now we have a bullish outlook. Everybody knows the supply argument, but nobody ever worries about demand. Following the same principle, Japan rates have failed to blow out higher for 20 years now... Not saying it cannot happen in the US, but higher rates would probably panic equities and in turn bring back a bid in fixed income. Baby boomers are going to be more and more conservative with their portfolio allocation from now on as they age and stop working, and every bump in equity and pick up in yield gives them a reason they don't already need to try and protect their capital from equity markets which have not done them any favors the past decade. A simple change of 5% of their portfolio allocation would be enough to absorb a lot more supply than we have coming. Worth keeping in mind. Without trading on such a big picture argument, the supports here will hold we believe. - Nic Lenoir

Mr. Hoenig dissented because he believed it was no longer advisable to indicate that economic and financial conditions were likely to warrant “exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.” Mr. Hoenig was concerned that communicating such an expectation could lead to the buildup of future financial imbalances and increase the risks to longer-run macroeconomic and financial stability. Accordingly, Mr. Hoenig believed that it would be more appropriate for the Committee to express its anticipation that economic conditions were likely to warrant “a low level of the federal funds rate for some time.” Such a change in communication would provide the Committee flexibility to begin raising rates modestly. He further believed that making such an adjustment to the Committee’s target for the federal funds rate sooner rather than later would reduce longer-run risks to macroeconomic and financial stability while continuing to provide needed support to the economic recovery.

Time to update our "Mutual Fund Monday" analysis: since December 7, there have been 17 Monday, during which there has been just one down day. Statistically, this is even nuttier than Goldman's Q2/Q3 2009 profitable trading days. At 94%, we are two standard deviations away from statistically probable distributions. Furthermore, since the beginning of September, when the Mutual Fund Money phenomenon became especially pronounced (read our initial observations here), there have been 27 out of 31 profitable Mondays. There is no spoon. And this is considered perfectly reasonable market performance? It is time for Nassim Taleb to denounce the statistical wackyness that equity markets have become.

Once upon a time, Western opinion leaders found themselves both impressed and frightened by the extraordinary growth rates achieved by a set of Eastern economies. Although those economies were still substantially poorer and smaller than those of the West, the speed with which they had transformed themselves from peasant societies into industrial powerhouses, their continuing ability to achieve growth rates several times higher than the advanced nations, and their increasing ability to challenge or even surpass American and European technology in certain areas seemed to call into question the dominance not only of Western power but of Western ideology...

Bob Doll, Vice Chairman of BlackRock (BLK), the world's biggest money manager, appeared at CNBC on March 29 sharing his latest views with Ken Langone.