High Yield

"The dealer market has collapsed, and all that's left are investors trading the same few bonds back and forth, leaving pricing services guessing with bigger and bigger margins of error on the real value of illiquid debt. That's the real problem. And it's not one the SEC can fix by targeting 'transcendent liquidity' in ETFs."

CEOs, Wall Street are furiously making hay while the storm moves in.

While yesterday's 2 Year auction was well stronger than expected, moments ago the Treasury sold $35 billion in 5 Years in an auction that came quite mixed: the High Yield printed at 1.67%, or the highest since June, it tailed 0.5 bps to the 1.665% When Issued. Perhaps showing the flattening of the curve on the short end, while yesterday's 2Y closed at the highest yield since May 2010, today's 5Y was only the highest since June, when a comparable auction yielded 1.71%.

It had been a relatively quiet session overnight when as reported previously, the geopolitical situation in the middle east changed dramatically in a moment, when NATO-member country Turkey downed a Russian fighter jet allegedly over Turkish territory even though the plane crashed in Syria, and whose pilots may have been captured by local rebel forces. The news promptly slammed Turkish assets and FX, sending the Lira tumbling, pushing lower European stocks and US equity futures while sending 2 Year German Bunds to record negative yields.

2015 ends with the market cap of Amazon & Google exceeding that of every single Chinese company in the MSCI China index… the US stock market a mere 107 trading days away from becoming the 2nd longest bull market of all-time, with equity leadership driven by “growth” (longest duration of outperformance ever) & “quality” (at all-time relative high)… and $6trn of negatively-yielding government bonds, $17trn of bonds yielding <1%, and the Fed expected to raise the Fed funds rates for the 1st time since 2006.

As a result of the global commodity weakness, global stocks have fallen for the first time in six days as the sell-off in commodities continued, dragging both US equity futures and European stocks lower. However, putting this in context, last week the MSCI All Country World Index posted its biggest weekly gain in six weeks: alas, without a coincident rebound in commodity prices, it will be merely the latest dead cat bounce.

Importantly, while the "bias" of the market is to the upside, primarily due to the psychological momentum that "stocks are the only game in town," the mounting risks are clearly evident. From economic to earnings-related weakness, the "bullish underpinnings" are slowly being chipped away.

There are seemingly always “good reasons” why troubles in a sector of the credit markets are supposed to be ignored – or so people are telling us, every single time. Some still recall how the developing problems in the sub-prime sector of the mortgage credit market were greeted by officials and countless market observers in the beginning in 2007. Meanwhile, the foundation of the economy continues to look rotten (the newest round of Fed surveys has begun with another bomb and other manufacturing-related data continue to disappoint as well). This isn’t going to end well, if history is any guide.

If this weekend's gruesome terrorist attack on Paris ended up being hugely bullish for stocks, then two subsequent events, a stadium-evacuation scare in Hannover (where Angela Merkel was supposed to be present) and a raid in north Paris which left several dead in the ongoing manhunt against the alleged ISIS mastermind, appear to have but some question into if not stocks then algos whether a rising wave of terrorist hatred across Europe is truly what central bankers need to unleash more QE. That said, we expect the current weakness to last only until the traditional USDJPY carry ramp pushes stocks traditionally higher.

The odds of a December rate hike have slipped in recent days from over 70% intraday to 64.0% today as, while economists remain convinced that rates will rise in December, traders appear a little less confident. One of the most outspoken - having doubted The Fed (and questioned the economy's ability to handle even a 25bps rate hike) since Spring - DoubleLine Capital co-founder Jeffrey Gundlach said on Sunday that the Fed may hesitate to raise rates given rocky economic and financial conditions making it clear, as Reuters reports, "certainly [a Fed] No-Go is more likely than most people think. These markets are falling apart."

While the U.S. equity markets, until the last few days, seemed unconcerned about the prospects of the rate hike, the so called canaries in the coal mine are once again sending troubling signals, as the consequences of a reversal of Fed policy after 7 years of crisis management are significant, and the stresses are amplified as policy change looks likely to occur while most other central banks are taking the opposite monetary policy tact.

For once, the overnight session was not dominated by weak Chinese economic data (which probably explains why the Shanghai Composite dropped for the second day in a row, declining 1.4%, and ending an impressive run since the beginning of November) and instead Europe took the spotlight with its own poor data in the form of Q3 GDP which printed below expectations at 0.3% Q/Q, down also from the 0.4% increase in Q2, with several key economies rolling over including Germany, Italy, and Spain while Europe's poster child of "successful austerity" saw Q3 GDP stagnate, far worse than the 0.5% growth consensus expected.

The recent new highs on the Nasdaq accompanying the surge off the August and September lows have been accompanied by bullish headlines, and it is true the action in some stocks is truly awe inspiring. Yet all the action has an oddly familiar ring to it and it may not be bullish. While most traders today haven't really lived through the 2000 bubble, older hats have institutional memory.

The internals were mixed with the Bid to Cover sliding from 2.460 to 2.409, which however was above the 12 TTM average of 2.356. Offsetting the slightly weaker BtC print was the jump in Indirects, which rose from 56.4% to 60.3% the second highest on record, as foreign central bankers have again decided that the safety of US paper offsets the duration risk of holding it in a rate hike environment.

The biggest event overnight came from Europe, where Draghi managed to once again jawbone the Euro lower by ober 50 pips when he told European lawmakers in a prepared testimony that downside economic risks are "clearly visible," repeating his October press conference statement, adding that the ECB will reexamine degree of accommodation in December as "inflation dynamics have somewhat weakened." And the statement that crushed the Euro: "If we were to conclude that our medium-term price stability objective is at risk, we would act by using all the instruments available within our mandate to ensure that an appropriate degree of monetary accommodation is maintained." I.e., another "whatever it takes" moment.