DE Shaw

All one can say is: "LOL"

A peculiar trading session, in which the usual overnight futures levitation has not been led by the BOJ-inspired USDJPY rise (even as the Nikkei225 rose another 0.6% more than offset by the Shanghai Composite drop of 0.86%), which actually has slid all session briefly dipping under 99 moments ago, but by the EURUSD, which saw a bout of buying around 5 am Eastern, just after news hit that the UK would avoid a triple dip recession with Q1 GDP rising 0.3% versus expectations of a 0.1% rise, up from a -0.3% in Q4 (more in Goldman note below). Since the news that the BOE will likely delay engaging in more QE (just in time for the arrival of Carney) is hardly EUR positive we look at the other news hitting around that time, such as Finland saying that the euro can survive in Cyprus exits the Eurozone, and that Merkel has rejected standardized bank guarantees for the foreseeable future, and we are left scratching our heads what is the reason for the brief burst in the Euro.

Brian Sack, he who held the fattest finger on the Fed's green buy button until Simon Potter and his young protege Kevin Henry stepped into those prodigious shoes, has landed a role at mega quant fund D.E.Shaw. As Reuters reports, the former head of the Fed's Market Group will be the co-Director of Global Economics. The fund, with its reputation for mathematical modeling and computer-driven trading over short-term horizons will, we are sure, benefit from Sack's empirical ability to stomp on the throat of the VIX and tinker with VWAPs, though we hope he lasts longer than Larry Summers did. Of course, this almost guarantees that former-D.E.Shaw alum Jeff Bezos' Amazon.com share price will continue to surge as its fundamental performance plunges. The Plunge Protection Team, it appears, is in strong demand, though we hope someone explains that maybe D.E.Shaw does have a MtM policy (and not unlimited balance sheet).

The most cartoonish stock of all time just came out with results that can only be characterized as ugly. To wit:

• Q4 revenue of $21.27 billion missed expectations of $22.23 billion
• Q1 EPS of $0.21 missed expectations of $0.27;
• The firm guided top-line lower, seeing Q1 sales of $15-$16 billion, below the estimate of $16.5 billion
• The firm guided operating income much lower, seeing Q1 op income of ($285)-$65 Million on expectations of $261.4 MM
• The firm said the its physical books sales had the lowest growth in 17 years
• Total employees grew by 7,000 in the quarter and 32,200 Y/Y to a record 88,400
• Worldwide net sales Y/Y growth was the slowest in years at 23%, down from 30% in Q3 and 34% a year ago
• And, last and certainly least, LTM Net Income is now officially negative, or ($49) meaning as of this moment the firm with the idiotically high PE has an even more idiotic N/M PE.

... And the stock is soaring in the after hours. Thank you DE Shaw.

The ECB's original bond monetization program (the SMP) may now be defunct, having been replaced with the mythical OMT which will work as long as it never has to be used (see Spain), but its aftereffects linger on. Specifically, the aftermath of the SMP manifests itself in the weekly sterilization of accrued SMP bond purchases, which at last check amounted to some €208.5 billion. Why do we bring this up? Because a few hours earlier, the ECB failed, for the first time, to find enough demand and interest to sterilize the full amount of rolling peripheral bond purchases, and was instead able to find only enough bidders, 43 of them or the lowest in a year, to "sterilize" just €197.6 billion of the total weekly allottment. The last time the ECB failed in a sterilization action? November 29, 2011, one day before the coordinated global central bank bailout of 2011.

Instead of uttering one more word in a long, seemingly endless tirade that stretches all the way to April 2009, we will this time let such dignified members of the credible, veritable status quo as Credit Suisse, who have released a two part primer on everything HFT related, with an emphasis on the broken market left in the wake of the "high freaks", which is so simple even a member of congress will understand (we would say a member of the SEC, but even at this level of simplicity its comprehension by the rank and file of the SEC is arguable). As Credit Suisse conveniently points out "market manipulation is already banned", but that doesn't mean that there are numerous loophole that HFT can manifest themselves in negative strategies that have virtually the same impact on a two-tiered market (those that have access to HFT and those that do not) as manipulation. Among such strategies are:

• Quote Stuffing: the HFT trader sends huge numbers of orders and cancels
• Layering: multiple, large orders are placed passively with the goal of “pushing” the book away
• Order Book Fade: lightning-fast reactions to news and order book pressure lead to disappearing liquidity
• Momentum ignition: an HFT trader detects a large order targeting a percentage of volume, and front-runs it.

After tumbling to lows of 1.2735, and dragging the entire 100% correlated risk complex down with it, the EUR has since seen a straight line push higher despite the sad reality that for all expectations, Europe was embarrassingly simply unable to come to a resolution over Greece and has kicked the can to November 26, leaving Greece with zero cash to fund obligations to European banks, and if anything is left over, to fund domestic operations. The reason for the move up? The market, in all its wisdom, hopes  that 6 short hours after saying "9", Merkel has already softened her stance and that a deal in 5 days is inevitable. Of course, these are the same people who said a deal last night was inevitable. These are the same people who also said that Washington is this close from a reconciliation on the Fiscal cliff, despite this thing called reality (see Rough start for fiscal cliff talks from Politico). Adding to the surrealism was a French spokesman who said the country would "do everything to reach a Greek accord." Since a recently downgraded France will "do" nothing (that's Germany), but will "say" everything, it is safe to say that France is now the comic relief typically attributed to Jean-Claude Jun(c)ker. Finally, and wrapping up the bizarro surreality of central planned markets, the recent spike in Brent on Gaza re-escalations has been interpreted by those uber-complex DE Shaw algorithms as a risk on move, and pushed all risk indicators to overnight highs. With volume today set to be abysmal as trading desks will be empty around noon, expect some more absolutely insane zero volume moves in the SkyNet battleground formerly known as the "market."

By unanimous vote, the ISDA determinations committee (which also includes such hedge funds as DE Shaw, Citadel and BlueMountain...and Goldman Sachs) has agreed that Allied Irish Banks PLC has officially experienced a Restructuring Event. CDS settlement to proceed next. And yes, thanks to daily variation margin on CDS this means absolutely nothing, and should the cash/physical settlement auction clear tight of prevailing prices depending on where CTD bonds trade, it means CDS sellers will (gasp) receive daily margin cash at the end of the day. Yes, contrary to AIG-related stigma, selling CDS on an entity does not mean an automatic default for the sellers of protection. But that won't prevent those who have no idea how the CDS market operates to spread more BS stories, especially as relates to Greek, then all other PIIGS, CDS.

The man who probably more so than anyone else can be singled out as the person (behind the scenes) responsible for the destruction of America, first with his successful drubbing of every vestige of regulation, then his isolation of Brooksley Born and her all too prescient concerns on structured products and derivatives, and finally, with carrying over his debilitating management practices from Harvard over to the US in general for the past two years, just had his farewell speech, which in typical fashion can be summarized as follows: "I am smarter than you peasants, go to hell." For a more official summary of his valedictory, here is WaPo's Dana Milbank: "Summers's final performance was very much in character. He arrived 10
minutes late for the speech, his suit jacket open, his shirt pulling
tightly at the buttons, his suitpants stained on one of the knees. His
hair showed signs of bedhead, but it could have been mussed by Summers
during one of his morning meetings. He jiggled his legs while listening
to the introduction by EPI President Larry Mishel, who had some edgy
words for his guest. Although both men grew up in Philly, Mishel said,
"when he moved to Boston, he adopted the Boston Red Sox as his baseball
team. Me? I'm still a fan of the Fightin' Phils." Summers rushed to rebut this point - by insulting the home team. "If I
lived in Washington, I might still be a Phillies fan, too." There were
groans in the audience." And of course, it is not like it was Summers fault for doing anything to bring unemployment down even as total US debt under his watch increased by over $2 trillion: "On Monday morning, he went to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal
think tank, to give his "perspectives on the past two years." But in his
remarks, he spoke of not a single wrong decision he made." So now that the disastrous, and hopefully final, reign of this distant Tatooine descendant is over, here are the three finalist to fill his extra wide chair, two of whom promise to do absolutely nothing to break Wall Street's stranglehold over the White House, and thus increase the odds for a widespread populist mutiny with each passing day.

The current divergence in the AUDJPY-ES pair is reminding us of the great divergences seen in the during the summer just after the temporary DE Shaw stat arb desk unwind threw every correlation pair out of whack for hours. And with the telecom and commodity subsectors of the CSI undergoing a drubbing, we are confident that the AUD, especially following the earlier lack of action by the RBA, will continue to face ongoing weakness. And sooner or later that means that dollar funded shorts (USDJPY/AUDUSD) which have been the primary source of purchasing power in the US market, will need to be unwound. In the meantime, a compression trade here seems quite attractive.

It appears Paolo Pellegrini, the brains behind Paulson & Co. most profitable trade, is coming back... as a quant. As we reported in August, the billionaire manager's former fund - PSQR - had decided to return all capital to investors citing "challenging market conditions." It only took Paolo 3 months to realize that money is no longer to be made in a macro world dominated by central bank infighting, in which a schizophrenic market goes up or down by several percentage points on a daily basis depending on what word feels out of place in any given central banker's speech, and instead will focus on "quantitative disciplines" along the lines of DE Shaw and RenTec. And why not: the only ones left making money in this market are momentum chasing strategies which have millisecond frontrunning arbitrage over the rest of what is left of the heard. As to the visionary's current market views, his mantra is "don't fight the Fed" even as he sees bond trading at ridiculously high levels, although with a caveat: "of course you don’t want to fight the Fed, until the Fed loses control which is what happened obviously in the sub-prime and financial crisis.  That is very difficult, though, to predict." As we predicted earlier in the year not only are macro funds soon going to be extinct but the same fate lies in store for the traditional long/short 130/30 group. Very soon every fund will need to have their own quant/HFT group (SAC has already quietly amassed almost 20 HFT pods) just to be able to attract outside investors. After all why else is the woefully underpaid SEC admitting it has no idea how to fix the market now entirely dominated by HFT, and will merely extend its completely worthless "circuit breaker" model for another three months, then another three months, and so on.

Now that DE Shaw and Citadel are pretty much without a stat arb desk, daily divergences are likely to become the norm. To wit: after we highlighted the complete breakdown in correlations earlier, this afternoon's sell off in the AUDJPY has left the S&P/ES roughly 7 points rich. For those who are still stupid enough to actually trade, a pair trade convergence may make some sense here: buy AUDJPY, sell ES. And use lots of leverage: after all, becoming TBTF is every schoolboy's dream. If going down, make sure you drag the entire system with you.

While nobody gives a rat ass what assorted Stuxnet-infected vacuum tubes are doing with equities any more, the real drama is in the 2s10s30s, where the butterfly has just plunged by over 10% in this morning alone! This is a massive move, driven by the collapse in the 10 year, which at last check was trading at 2.37%, as the only trade is and continues to be the frontrunning of Benny and the Inkjets. The last time we had a move as dramatic and rapid as this was in the November 2008 equity plunge, and the March 2009 decade low. In other words, the bond market is now trading only based on what Pimco says the Fed will do, while stocks are pricing in mild to quite mild hyperinflation, as some administration idiot has floated the idea of $7 trillion in QE. To quote W, make no mistake - $7 trillion in QE would be the proverbial Shazam moment, where D.C. can officially change its name to Harare.

In a market where the Fed has assured that up is always and forever, or at least until such time as Primary Dealers can take down 99.9% of any given bond auction, down, it is no surprise that even monthly and seasonal patterns are completely inverted. The traditionally weak September market performance, has been flipped on its head in an attempt by all those involved to rescue the vast majority of underperforming hedge funds which would otherwise see an influx of redemption notices and terminations (ref: DE Shaw). So now that September is in the books, what does conventional knowledge tell us about October, so that in this Fed-induced bizarro world traders can come in and do the opposite. We look to Art Cashin for the answer.

First Meredith Whitney highlighted the insult facing the banking industry this quarter as a result of the dearth of trading volume. Now quant hedge fund extraordinaire DE Shaw, which prides itself on hiring something like one in a thousand math geniuses, and only after they sign an NDA during interviews, has added the injury, by being the canary in the hedge fund coalmine, and letting 150, or 10%, of its highly paid workforce, go. And that's not all: after finally unlocking its "gates" the fund's AUM has plunged by $7 billion to $28 billion. This can not be good, as it means that the fund has had to unwind tens of billions in hedged positions over the past weeks. And if the fund's slant was bearish previously it may well have been responsible for the rapid move in the stock market, as its semi-forced liquidation would have seen it need to cover an abnormal amount of shares in a thin market, in which players like SAC and DE Shaw already account for a material fraction of total volume.