Price Action

Who would have thought terrorism is so good for stocks.

· The tragic events in Paris are set to dictate price action at the beginning of the week in Europe

· The US sees an increase in tier 1 data this week as well as the release of the minutes from last month’s Fed meeting

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.

It is important to note that the current weakness of gold is primarily in dollar and sterling terms. For investors in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the EU gold is once again acting as a hedge.

For the third day in a row, China dominated the overnight newsflow with the latest industrial output data, which printed at 5.6% missing expectations of a 5.8% increase, and was tied with March for the lowest print since late 2008.

The ongoing failure of China to achieve any stabilization in its economy, after already cutting interest rates six times in the past year, and the prospect of a U.S. interest rate hike in December, had made markets increasingly jittery and worried which is not only why the S&P 500 Index had its biggest drop in a month, but thanks to the soaring dollar emerging market stocks are falling for a fourth day - led by China - bringing their decline in that period to almost 4 percent, and the global stock index down for a 5th consecutive day.

Once again, the two major macroeconomic announcements over the weekend came from China, where we first saw an unexpected, if still to be confirmed, increase in FX reserves, and then Chinese trade data once again disappointed tumbling by 6.9% while imports plunged 18.8%. So how did the market react? The Shanghai Composite Index rose for a fourth day and reached its highest since August 20because more bad data means more easing from the PBOC, and just to give what few investors are left the green light to come back into the pool, overnight Chinese brokers soared after Chinese IPOs returned after a 5 month hiatus. Elsewhere, Stocks and currencies in emerging markets slump on prospect of higher U.S. borrowing costs before year-end and after data underscored slowdown in Asia’s biggest economy. Euro strengthens.

While the stock market had one of its best months in years, it was, like the jobs report, uncorroborated by almost everything else. The junk bond bubble, in particular, stands in sharp and stark refutation of whatever stocks might be incorporating, especially if that might be based upon assumptions of Yellen’s re-found backbone. As noted on several prior occasions, swap spreads have been sinking fast and to unprecedented levels. Though mainstream commentary will provide plausible-sounding excuses, mostly about corporate or even UST issuance, that is only because these places will not even consider that Janet Yellen has it all wrong; thus, they only search for possibilities that allow that narrative to remain undisturbed even though that narrative itself can never account for negative spreads.

As DB so well-puts it, "Welcome to random number generator day also known as US payrolls." Consensus expects 185k jobs to have been added in October but it’s fair to say that the whisper number has edged up this week with slightly firmer US data. It is also fair to say that even if one knew the number beforehand, it would be impossible to know how the market will react.

Anyone who thinks that somehow this will not impact the rest of the globe is out of his or her mind.

Dennis Gartman, author of the institutionally well followed ‘The Gartman Letter,’ has asked questions about gold’s peculiar price action last week and raised the question as to whether there was official central bank manipulation of gold prices.

Back in September we explained why, contrary to both conventional wisdom and the BOJ's endless protests to the contrary, neither the BOJ nor the ECB have any interest in boosting QE at this - or any other point - simply because with every incremental bond they buy, the time when the two central banks run out of monetizable debt comes closer. Since then the ECB has jawboned that it may boost QE (but it has not done so), and overnight as reported previously, the BOJ likewise did not expand QE despite many, including Goldman Sachs, expecting it would do just that.

Those were just excuses, it’s not like any of those factors suddenly changed and were fixed magically on October 1^st.

Based on the overnight market prints which are an oddly reddish shade of green, it took algos about 12 hours to realize that the reason they soared for most of October, namely hopes of an easier Fed which were launched with the terrible September jobs report and continued with increasingly worse US economic report in the past month, can not be the same reason they also soared yesterday after the announcement of a more hawkish than expected Fed statement which envisioned a stronger US economy and a removal of foreign considerations, which even more curiously took place on even worse data than the Fed's far more dovish September statement.

Every day when you flip on the media, there is someone telling you that now is the time to "buy" into the market. Of course, if you are buying, then who is selling? The only "net buyers" of equities this year have been "individuals," while "professional" firms have been "net sellers." This is the epitome of the classic "smart money/dumb money" analysis where individuals are used by institutions to offload positions that are no longer optimal. The question is with corporate profits and earnings declining, weak economic data, and the threat of tighter monetary policy - will individuals once again be left "holding the bag" while institutions derisk portfolios in advance of the next decline?