CDS

One of the more useful information items in Goldman's periodic filings is granular disclosure on the firm's CDS holdings, and specifically segregated data by maturity bucket and by spread as pertains to "maximum payout and notional amount of written credit derivatives." In essence, due to the firm's monopoly in CDS inventory and, therefore, trading, this is the squid's beating heart: between buying and selling (hopefully offsetting positions) CDS in billions of dollars worth of notional daily, and being able to capitalize on wide spreads, courtesy of the extinction of such traditional competitors as Bear and Lehman, the firm will continue to make hundreds of millions in profits every day, month and quarter, due to its newly found monopolist exposure when it comes to trading CDS, both as principal and as agent.

Below are the heatmaps for the North American components of IG, as of November 3 intraday and Month to Date. We will provide today's update as soon as we have it. Notable yesterday was that not only 5 Yr AIG widened even as the stock was melting up ever higher, the curve was flattening, with 7 and 10 years of both AIG and ILFC (right AIG column) tightening. The days of flat (or, heaven forbid, inverted) curves, so ubiquitous a year ago, just may make a come back yet. The widening in financials was all of the place, with only Black and Decker, Clorox, MOT, Constellation and CBS moving tighter. It is still too early in the Month to Date category to extract any trends.

AIG speculative mania has gripped the markets. not only was AIG stock up more than 15% on nothing really, but AIG CDS was also the biggest mover wider today, hitting 780 bps, 15 bps wider close to close. Additionally, GE, which we discussed earlier as having some pretty notable balance sheet issues, was wider by the same amount, as was yesterday's top mover Sempra. In the opposite category were Anadarko and ERP, as well as Buffett's latest stamp of approval, mentioned roughly 800 times on CNBC today, Burlington Northern, which tightened by 4 bps to 55.

Today's top CDS movers wider were almost all health insurers, likely still reeling from the potential adverse fallout of any new health bill. Additionally, Sempra Energy was the day's biggest mover at +16 bps. In the tightening camp, VNO and CEG lead the pack, with old Zero Hedge favorite NRUC making the top five list as well.

Zero Hedge is starting a presentation of credit heatmaps, specifically CDS: easily the most liquid product in the market currently (unfortunately still not for retail consumption but give it 12 months...)
Our first such heatmap just so happens to coincide with a day in which it may as well be called a redmap. We hope to make this a daily feature on Zero Hedge (the heatmap, not the bloodbath).

Securities Industries News discloses that the SEC has requested it be granted authority to have "direct access to real-time data" on CDS and other derivatives. One wonders how the SEC was operating up until this point without this information. Yet of course, this is merely just another pretext for the SEC to deflect allegations about its utter uselessness, with claims that "lack of such information hampered its efforts to investigate potential fraud and market manipulation in the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives markets during last fall’s financial crisis." Well, duh. The SEC is finally realizing that the credit market is, oh, about 10 times bigger than equities, and that virtually everyone trades CDS now over cash products. CDS is, incidentally, also where all the insider trading occurs these days, a fact abused all too well by CDS traders, who have known about the SEC's inability to closely track the action in the credit market. This is also why if the SEC were to look at CDS buying action of LBOs names in 2006/2007 it may actually find some amusing results. In the meantime, the SEC should spend $10,000 a year and get a MarkIt subscription.

A week after the roll into new indices (HY13 and IG13) there was quite notable action in CDS land. Net notional change across all sectors was substantially negative to the tune of $282 billion, which however consisted primarily of matured transactions accounting for $330 billion of this number, implying the adjusted number was around positive $50 billion and a notable derisking. There likely has been a corresponding netting out on the New Transaction side over the past month as accounts were rolling existing positions.

The summer doldrums had hit the CDS market hard last week, with a barely noticeable rerisking across industries, for a total of $21.8 billion decrease in net open interest, on 7,014 contracts. The action was asymmetric with just two sectors accounting for the bulk of the action: Basic Materials and Consumer Services, at $28.7 billion and $30.7 billion, respectively. These were offset by derisking primarily in Financials ($16.8 billion) and State Bodies ($11.7 billion).

After several consecutive weeks of equity market mimicking and rerisking, the CDS market finally saw a net derisking in the week ended August 14, across virtually sectors, with the biggest action concentrated in the financials arena. Total net notional change was substantially higher than last week's -$14.5 billion, increasing to $66.1 billion, with a marked derisking in financials at $62.6 billion. Other notable derisking spaces were Consumer Services at $27.6 billion (again) and Utilities at $20 billion.

The below chart sorts the over 350 names that make up the DTCC most liquid index, sorted from most risky to least risky.

Bank of America stock up 2% at last check, while CDS is 5 bps wider. Someone please explain that one to us.

Continued substantial rerisking continued in financial last week, however at a slightly moderated rate. From the $96.2 billion net notional decline in the week ended July 31, the last week saw a $54.4 billion decline. Total net notional change was one tenth that of the previous week at -$14.5 billion, with a marked derisking in consumer services at $25.1 billion. Other notable derisking spaces were Industrials and State Bodies.

Analyzing CDS open interest data since the March 6 lows demonstrates a troubling trend: there has been over half a trillion in net derisking across various industries, with financials leading the pack with over $130 billion. The global tightening in the CDS universes across all sectors is one direct consequence of this substantial shift to derisking.

Due to popular demand, Zero Hedge is happy to bring back the weekly DTCC CDS gross/net open interest recap. The primary reason we dropped coverage of CDS data over the past month was/is our belief that both fundamental and technical analysis, in the face of a rapturous market is pointless, and the only thing that matters is the ticking sovereign debt timebomb, as indicated by various Federal Reserve disclosures such as the H.4.1, H.3, and Z.1. If you don't believe me, please call any fundamental analyst at either a sell or a buy side firm at 4:00:01 pm. Nine out of ten times you will get voicemail (which, all else equal, is better than a vibrating dildo). Nonetheless, for the sake of completeness, it is useful to see what this formerly very useful data point from the world of CDS indicates: so here is what the latest out of 55 Water street says.

One of Wall Street's biggest whipping boys since the post-Lehman days, culminating with the insanity in credit markets in early March, have undoubtedly been correlation desks. These trading outfits, which hit their heyday in 2004-2005, when CDS spreads were nice and tight, and negative convexity would at most bring a 20-30bps widening, would repackage securitization tranches whereby usually they kept the senior and equity wrap around a mezzanine piece, which was in turn sold to investors. Buyers of mezz tranches, whose junior and senior layers would become impaired after a 15% and 30% cumulative losses, respecitvely, saw what the definition of a world of pain is first hand recently, and effectively shut down the correlation business at many major banks. But not all.