NASDAQ

S&P FUTURES AT DAY’S LOW, FALLING 61PTS OR 3.1%
NEW LOWS FOR NASDAQ FUTURES, DOWN 195PTS OR 4.6%
NEW LOWS FOR DOW FUTURES DOWN 533PTS OR 3.2%
EUROPE’S STOXX 600 FALLS 5.3%, WORST ONE-DAY DROP SINCE 2011

Last week, in the global currency war’s latest escalation, Kazakhstan instituted a free float for the tenge causing the currency to immediately plunge by some 25%. The rationale behind the move was clear enough. What might not be as clear is how recent events in developing economy FX markets stem from a seismic shift we began discussing late last year - namely, the death of the petrodollar system which has served to underwrite decades of dollar dominance and was, until recently, a fixture of the post-war global economic order.

Perhaps the biggest surprise about the overnight Chinese stock rout is which followed the lowest manufacturing PMI since March 2009, is that it happened despite repeat sellside pleas for a PBOC RRR cut as soon as this weekend: usually that alone would have been sufficient to push the market back into the green, and it almost worked when in the afternoon session stocks rebounded after dropping as much as 4.7% below the "hard" floor of 3500, but then a second bout of selling just before the close took Chinese stocks right back to the lows with the Shanghai Composite closing at 3,507, down 4.3% on the day, having wiped out the entire 18% rebound from July 8 when the PBOC first threatened both sellers and shorters with arrest.

News That Matters...

The Nasdaq has dropped almost 3.5% in the last 3 days - the biggest drop since October 2014 collapse. This drop has pushed the all-important tech high-flyer back below its 200-day moving average for the first time since Oct 10th... just before Bullard unleashed the threat of QE4...

Small Caps hitting 6 month lows, S&P swinging red year-to-date, and Dow near 7-month lows... but remember China doesn't matter and Fed is priced in...

But Not There Yet...

The Nasdaq has once again dropped below its crucial "everything is awesome" 5,000 level. This follows The Dow losing 18,000 and The S&P losing 2,100 and is back to unchanged in 2015. Somebody do something!!

With China's currency devaluation having shifted to the backburner if only for the time being, all attention was once again on the Chinese stock market roller coaster, which did not disappoint: starting off with yesterday's dramatic 6.2% plunge, the Shanghai Composite crashed in early trading, plunging as much as 5% in early trading and bringing the two-day drop to a correction-inducing 11%, and just 51.2 points away from the July 8 low (when China unleashed the biggest ad hoc market bailout in capital markets history) . And then the cavalry came in, and virtually the entire afternoon session was one big BTFD orgy, leading to a 1.2% gain in the Shanghai Composite closing price, while Shenzhen and ChiNext closed up 2.2% and 2.7%, respectively.

The central bank has injected new capital into the China Development Bank (CDB), which provides medium and long term financing to major national projects, in a bid to reinforce its capital adequacy.

PBoC Injection Shows China Worries About Outflows- WSJ

It was a relatively quiet weekend out of China, where FX warfare has taken a back seat to evaluating the full damage from the Tianjin explosion which as we reported on Saturday has prompted the evacuation of a 3 km radius around the blast zone, and instead it was Japan that featured prominently in Sunday's headlines after its Q2 GDP tumbled by 1.6% (a number which would have been far worse had Japan used a correct deflator), and is now halfway to its fifth recession in the past 6 year, underscoring Abenomics complete success in desrtoying Japan's economy just to get a few rich people richer. Of course, economic disintegration is great news for stocks, and courtesy of the latest Yen collapse driven by the bad GDP data which has raised the likelihood of even more Japanese QE, the Nikkei closed 100 points, or 0.5% higher. 

The following map lays out the embedded, and regulator blessed, latencies between the three big New Jersey exchange centers: Mahwah (NYSE), Secaucus (BATS), and Carteret (Nasdaq) for everyone but the top tier exchange clients, the HFTs, who are greenlighted to frontrun everyone else, and generate quarter after quarter of perfect trading records.

How did Tepper do in Q2? In a word: lousy. In another word: the man who recently was on CNBC pitching a 20x P/E multiple as the new normal, may have just called the market top.

Overall, the lack of revenue growth combined with full equity valuations (unless you think +17x is cheap) is all you need to know about the current market churn... and why it will likely continue.