NASDAQ

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.

Who could have seen that coming?

Not since October 2008 (cough post-Lehman cough), has The Nasdaq Biotech index dropped for 7 straight days. The 18% close-to-close drop in the last 7 days is the largest since Lehman.

With Biotechs in a bear market, and Nasdaq having dropped back into negative territory for 2015, the year's leading equity index has now joined the rest of the majors and completed its "death cross."

It was all about China once again, where following a report of a historic layoff in which China's second biggest coal producer Longmay Group fired an unprecedented 100,000 or 40% of its workforce, overnight we got the latest industrial profits figure which plunging -8.8% Y/Y was the biggest drop since at least 2011, and which the National Bureau of Statistics attributed to "exchange rate losses, weak stock markets, falling industrial goods prices as well as a bigger rise in costs than increases in revenue." In not so many words: a "hard-landing."

With NKE almost single-handedly holding The Dow up, the rest of the US equity market is rapidly giving back any gains from a hawkish Yellen and 'fixed' European automaker market. Notably, Dec rate-hike odds were 41% pre-Yellen, jumped to 49% earlier this morning, but have now fallen back to 42%... so the 'market' is not "embracing" a rate hike environment as one supposed expert said this morning...and the Biotech bloodbath is weighing everything down...

Now that concerns about a biotech top are in play, biotechs just can't seem to catch a bid, and as of moments ago were down over 3% dragging the Nasdaq just barely positive for the day even with the S&P up 0.8% One reason for the continuied weakness may be that, as Bank of America points out, there are signs the dreaded head and shoulders top has appeared in the Nasdaq Biotech Index.