Greenlight

Cynical short-sellers are targeting some of Wall Street's most famous short-sellers. Amid plunges in the stock prices of David Einhorn's Greenlight Capital and Dan Loeb's Third Point reinsurance entities, Bloomberg reports that bearish investors have piled in pushing short interest (as a percent of shares outstanding) to its highest since 2009.

"we moved to generally “neutralize” our positions by taking on derivative positions to hedge ourselves. We did so mid-morning yesterday and now are comfortable sitting through the Fed’s decision… or “non”-decision as the case may be… later this afternoon."

As one hedge fund favorite long crashes (Chipotle is down 9% in the pre-market), so another hedge fund favorite short is about to spike (once it reopens for trading). JAB Group has decided that now is the time to offer a 78% premium to current prices to buy Keurig Green Mountain for $92 (note that is still down over 40% from its highs a year ago). The stock is currently halted at $51.51 leaving the 12% short interest biting their nails at the prospect of major losses and a good 'volkswagen-ing'.

Why are the worlds’ most successful investors having so much trouble lately? The short answer is that the markets they used to understand have been replaced by something very different. In this new, post-market world, money managers can’t separate signal from noise and end up on the wrong end of wild swings in commodities, currencies and interest rates. And now their clients are figuring this out.

As previously noted, it has been a bad year for some of the marquee hedge fund names, with Einhorn's Greenlight Capital down 21% YTD, and as reported last night, Ackman's Pershing Square is not doing much better and as of November 30, was down 20.8%.  On the weekly table one can clearly see when Pershing's fortunes turned in mid August when the fund dropped from being up 11% for the year to going negative for the year on the heels of the collapse in Valeant shares.

There was something for everyone in last night's much anticipated Chinese PMI data, with the official number sliding to the lowest in over 3 years, suggesting the PBOC will need to do more stimulus and is thus bullish, while the unoffocial Caixin print rising to the highest since June, suggesting whatever the PBOC is doing is working, and is also bullish. Not unexpectedly, global stocks decided to take the bullish way out, and have risen across the globe led by Asia, where stocks rose as much as 1.8%, Europe also green and US equity futures up 10 points as of this writing.

If you had any confidence in your ability to understand The Fed's future course of action, Fed vice-chair Stanley Fischer just destroyed it in a speech in San Francisco that beggars belief in its CYA hedgedness...

Editors Note: GoldCore believe that blockchain technology will revolutionise the world of finance, payments and money and may have an impact on the world on a scale of that of the internet. If you thought the “internet” was disruptive, well you ain't seen nothing yet ... the blockchain cometh!

The just concluded 13-F bonanza shows that "some of the world’s top hedge fund managers scaled back their U.S. stock investments last quarter as markets tumbled." Below, courtesy of Bloomberg, is the full summary of what the most prominent hedge fund names did in Q3...

Where did Europe's Q3 weakness come from? It was broad based and pronounced led by Germany, the currency area’s exporting powerhouse, while Italian economic growth also eased. There were fresh contractions in Greece, Finland and Estonia, while Portugal’s economy stagnated.

We just got a confirmation that Ackman may not only not have been "brazenly intelligent" but was downright stupid when moments ago we learned that a District Judge in Santa Ana, California, David Carter, has said Valeant and Ackman must both face a lawsuit accusing them of insider trading in Allergan before making an unsuccessful takeover bid for the maker of Botox.

The torrid October, with its historic S&P500 point rally, is finally in the history books, and at least for a select group of hedge funds such as Glenview, Pershing Square and Greenlight and certainly their L.P.s, a very scary Halloween couldn't come fast enough, leading to losses between 15% and 20%. How did everyone else fare? Below, courtesy of Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid, is a summary of what worked in October (and YTD), and what didn't.

"In recent weeks and months we’ve seen reversals in the equities markets time after time and far, far too often. They have become common rather than uncommon events and this is the problem we confront today. We are growing weary of doing so and we are making that weariness evident here this morning. Flipping back and forth does no one any good, but flip we must if history’s lessons are to be heeded."

After yesterday's dramatic late day market rout catalyzed by the tumble in the biotech sector in general, and Valeant in particular, and foreseen in its entirety by Gartman who went bullish just hours before, this morning US equity futures and European stocks have recouped some losses on the recursive, and traditional, hope that Mario Draghi will say something to push risk higher when he speaks in 2 hours at the ECB's press conference in Malta. And yet, just like Yellen a month ago, Draghi faces the paradox of reflexivity that after years of being ignored, is the "new thing" in town: how does he intervene and demonstrate he is readier than ever to set up stimulus, without panicking investors over euro area’s health.