Nikkei

Japan's nuclear crisis has deepened and we deeply regret to say that there is now the real possibility of a nuclear catastrophe. Investor panic has set in with the Nikkei down over 16.5% in two days and the Topic index down by 17% - its worst two-day loss since the 1987 Wall Street stock market crash. The cost to insure Japanese debt has surged to a record with credit-default swaps protecting Japanese government debt for five years soaring 27 basis points to a record of 125 basis points. One UBS trader said that the deteriorating nuclear crisis had led to "near panic across local credit-default swap markets." While most equity indices and commodities have fallen, some sharply, gold has remained resilient and is down 1% in US dollar terms and is higher in Australian dollars which like other so called 'commodity' currencies has come under pressure in recent days. Gold remains marginally higher in all currencies since the tragedy began last Friday.

All hell is currently breaking loose following an explosion at reactor #2 and a another hydrogen explosion at reactor #4 per Kyodo, leading to a 16% drop in Nikkei futures as blind panic grips Japan. Kyodo essentially confirms there was a reactor meltdown as radiation levels at Fukushima 3 are now 400 times legal levels. And topping it all Japan's warning that all people within 30 kilometers from Fukushima should stay indoors and that the radioactive winds may reach Tokyo in as little as 8-10 hours. The BOJ has just intervened to prevent the yen from surging, as the following chart shows. Our prayers are with the people of Japan.

The latest example of selling not being actually "selling" comes courtesy of a Deutsche Bank oven mitt. Bloomberg reports that "Deutsche Bank AG sent a spate of erroneous sell orders for Japan’s Nikkei 225 Stock Average futures contracts because of a system malfunction. The erroneous orders sent stocks on the Nikkei 225 into a brief plunge seconds after the market opened at 9 a.m. The average sank as much as 1.1 percent to 9,658.44 before rebounding to about 9,743. The gauge was at 9,691.08 as of 1:54 p.m. in Tokyo." We are trying to remember when the last time that a "fat finger" was responsible for panic buying. But when every single HFT algo is programmed to only buy on no volume, the possibility of that happening is slim to none.

The Nikkei just wiped out all gains for 2010 in less than 3 hours. Elsewhere it is not much better: Shanghai down 1.52% and Hang Seng down 1.63% at last check. Furthermore, in taking a page from the rating agency playbook, the Hang Seng Index broke earlier as a result of excess selling.

As Zero Hedge presented previously, the sharp divergence between the Nikkei and the S&P indexed in gold continues. The two reindexed indexes, which have correlated 0.91 since March, have diverged sharply in the past three weeks, and now stand at an over 11% divergence in performance since the year lows. Whether this is due to the "shocking" recent realization that Japan is caught in an ever increasing deflationary vortex (which the US likely will not avoid, at least not in the near term), or simply due to momo quants deciding that the Nikkei is no longer fun to chase, a convergence trade on the two broad indexes (long Nikkei, short S&P) seems like a rather painless way to pick 10%. Then again, ask Boaz Weinstein about "surething" convergence trades.