NASDAQ

News That Matters

A huge build in crude inventories started the ball rolling but a sudden "spoofer from above" sent US equities slumping this morning. The Dow and S&P have now joined the Nasdaq in the red...

For the first time since Spetember 2011, the Nasdaq Biotech Index has triggered a "death cross" as its 50-day moving average crosses below its 200-day average...

The big overnight story was certainly the BOJ's announcement at 11pm Eastern whether or not the Japanese central bank would boost QE. This is how we previewed it: "now all eyes to the BOJ when tonight around 11pm Eastern, Japan's central bank is expected do and say precisely... nothing." Sure enough, nothing is precisely what the BOJ delivered, leading to a big, if brief tumble in the USDJPY suggesting many were expecting at least a little tip from the BOJ.

News That Matters

It was just a matter of time before the market realized that the happy days for biotechs are now over. Sure enough, a quick glance at the Nasdaq Biotech Index reveals that after a modest drop yesterday when mostly Valeant was punished, the weakness today is widespread and is hitting the entire biotech sector which moments ago was down a whopping 6.4%, and just over 3,000, the biotech sector is once again not only red for the year, but danger of taking out the 2015 lows hit in the last days of September.

News That Matters

If you don’t think financial markets have been utterly destroyed by central bank intrusion then how can you explain Friday’s 460 Dow point reversal higher after the post-NFP low? It was pure machine rage triggered by another implied “lower for longer” Fed policy signal. In short, we are now in an exceedingly dangerous phase of the central bank end game. They continue to pour gasoline on the first of financial speculation, yet smugly insist all is clear.

How many of us are bored to tears with the Fed’s Hamlet act on raising rates, and yet have been staring at this debate for so long that we have convinced ourselves that we have a meaningful view on what will transpire, even though it’s a decision where we have zero investing edge and unknowable risk/reward odds. The hardest thing in the world for talented people is to avoid turning a low edge and odds opportunity into an unreasonably high conviction bet simply because we want it so badly and have analyzed the situation so smartly. In both poker and investing, we brutally overestimate the edge and odds associated with merely ordinary opportunities once we’ve been forced by circumstances to sit on our hands for a while. Investment discipline suffers under the weight of dullness and low conviction in at least four distinct ways here in the Golden Age of the Central Banker...

News That Matters

News That Matters

It takes ignorance on an almost unbelievable level to try to claim that “nothing is happening” in the financial world right now.

News That Matters

When you tell people in self denial the market could drop 40% in a few months, they think you are crazy. They declare this could never happen. They would get out of the market before it would fall vertically. Their memories are conveniently short as their normalcy bias and cognitive dissonance blind them to what happened over three months in 2008/2009. We wonder how many willfully ignorant investors can handle a 50% to 70% haircut in their 401k, especially if they are over 50 years old. We wonder how much angrier the populace will become when the current recession results in more job losses, bankruptcies and revelations of Wall Street malfeasance. Beware of the bear.