High Yield

Here comes today's main event, the July non-farm payrolls - once again the "most important ever" as the number will cement whether the Fed hikes this year or punts once again to the next year, and which consensus expects to print +225K although the whisper range is very wide: based on this week's ADP report, NFP may easily slide under 200K, while if using the non-mfg PMI as an indicator, a 300K+ print is in the cards. At the end of the day, it will be all in the hands of the BLS' Arima X 12 seasonal adjusters, and whatever goalseeked print the labor department has been strongly urged is the right one.

The #1 question we get after we review correlations every month is “Why are they so high relative to long term historical norms?” Our answer is that Federal Reserve policy has been an unusually important factor in asset prices since 2009. The unusually easy monetary policy since that time (and its planning, implementation, and effect on the economy) has been a powerful unifying story in capital markets. Now, as the Federal Reserve moves to return the economy to a more “Normal” policy stance, correlations should drop. That they have not yet moved convincingly lower is a sign that equity markets may want to see the Fed actually pull the trigger.

WTI Crude is back below $45 again this morning - pressing towards 2015 and cycle lows -after Goldman Sachs' Jeffrey Currie warns 'lower for longer' is here to stay, with price risk "substantially skewed to the downside." His reasoning are manifold, as detailed below, but overarching is oversupply (Saudi Arabia has a challenge in Asia as it battles to maintain mkt share, the Russians are coming, andother OPEC members want a bigger slice) and, even more crucially, storage is running out. As Currie concludes, this time it is different. Financial metrics for the oil industry are far worse.

It has been more of the same in the latest quiet overnight session where many await tomorrow's NFP data for much needed guidance, and where Chinese markets opened weaker, rose during the day, then went through a mini rollercoaster, then sold off in the afternoon.  The Shanghai Composite and HS China Enterprises indices finished down .9% and .3%, respectively. Trading volume continued to be very subdued, running at half the thirty day average as some 20 million "investors" have pulled out of the market to be replaced with HFTs such as Virtu.  But while stock action has been muted, the story of the night so far is oil and the energy complex broke out of a tight overnight range early in the European session to continue yesterday's downward trend, seeing WTI Sep'15 futures fall below the USD 45.00 handle after yesterday's DoE crude oil inventories saw US crude output rise by 0.552%. As of this moment oil was trading at $44.72, just pennies above the low print of 2015.

Debt is a fickle witch. When left to its own devices, which it has been for nearly seven years with interest rates at the zero bound, it tends to get into trouble. Unchecked credit initially seeps, and eventually finds itself fracked, into the dark, dank nooks and crannies of the fixed income markets whose infrastructures and borrowers are ill-suited to handle the capacity. Consider the two flashiest badges of wealth in America - cars and homes...

The reality might just be that the collective "we," and quite possibly sooner than we think, really will need a bigger boat. That is, as it pertains to the global debt markets, which have swollen past the $200 trillion mark this year rendering the great white featured in Jaws which can be equated with past debt markets as defenseless and small as a small, striped Nemo by comparison. The question for the ages will be whether size really does matter when it comes to the debt markets...

"If circumstances cause these price-insensitive buyers to turn around and become price-insensitive sellers, there are not a lot of candidates to take the other side. Be prepared for the possibility that some of the same assets that have again and again risen to prices that many investors said were impossible show more downside volatility than investors have bargained for."

"In the wake of the commodity price swoon one of the recurring questions is will the stress in commodity markets spillover to other sectors?," UBS asks. Spoiler alert: the answer is "yes."

With a When Issued trading at 2.013%, traders were looking for a high yield to print well inside of that. Instead they got a nearly 1 basis point, or 0.8 bps to be price tail, to 2.021%, even though the Bid to Cover was nominally above last month's 2.384, printing at 2.468. The reason for this almost certainly was the steep drop in the Indirect take down, which dipped from 56.64% in June to just 49.15%, which was the lowest foreign central bank demand since October. And with Directs relatively unchanged, at 12.01%, it mean that Dealers had to step up and take 38.8% of the issue, the most since September of 2014.

Having exposed the reality that the world's capital markets are a manipulated shell game, Janus' Bill Gross has a message for the perpetual bulls in his latest letter to investors - "say a little prayer." Gross continues, "low interest rates are not the cure – they are part of the problem," warning that ZIRP has enabled, "a host of zombie and future zombie corporations now roam the real economy. Schumpeter’s 'creative destruction' – the supposed heart of capitalistic progress – has been neutered. The old remains in place, and new investment is stifled." As he previously warned, when the central bank manipulation is removed the likely trajectory of prices is downward...

If yesterday's 3 Year auction was far stronger than expected, then today's 5 Year auction was an absolute whopper, printing moments ago at a high yield of 1.625%, 0.5bps through the When Issued, but it was the internals that were most impressive, not so much the Bid to Cover which jumped from 2.39 to 2.58, the highest since November, but the real stunner just like in yesterday 3Y auction, was the central bank, aka Indirect, interest because while the foreign central bank bid in yesterday's 3 Year auction were the highest since 2009, today's 67.5% Indirect takedown was the strongest on record!

The U.S. economy is growing at a painfully slow pace. Greece still threatens the euro. Chinese stocks have just pulled out of a frightening free-fall. Big companies in the U.S. are struggling to boost profits. You might think it's been a rough year for investors, but it's mostly been a smooth ride - and a profitable one. "Things have worked out," scoffs one analyst "and that has emboldened investors." Maybe too much...

"Central bank quantitative easing drove traditional investors seeking mid-to-high single digit yields out of investment grade/ crossover credit into high yield, loan and emerging market debt to satisfy yield bogeys. The problem, however, is some of the tourists underappreciate the exponential loss and mark-to-market functions for low quality high yield assets."

"If investors want complete safety, they can't get much income, and if they aim for high income, they can't completely avoid risk. It’s much more challenging today with rates being suppressed by governments. This is one of the negative consequences of centrally administered economic decisions. People talk about the wisdom of the free market – of the invisible hand – but there’s no free market in money today. Interest rates are not natural."

Because of their credit issues, these bonds often trade more closely with equities than they do with base interest rates. Occasionally, however, junk bonds and stocks will diverge with one another. Such a divergence is occurring at the moment. It is often suggested that when the bond and stock markets diverge, the bonds typically prove to be correct, i.e., the stock market usually ends up going the way of the bonds. Is there evidence to back that up? According to our research there is, and with junk bond yields at s-x month highs while the S&P is within 1% of record highs, for stock bulls, that isn’t necessarily good news.