Tag Archives: Featured

Under Kuroda’s leadership the BOJ has surprised the market a number of times, most recently with the move to negative rates at the end of January.   It is not that such a move, which has been tried by several European central banks, was without merit.  After all, growth and inflation prospects are not very encouraging.  The Bank of Japan’s one mandate, to raise inflation pressures, has remains as elusive as ever.  The BOJ has already pushed out the time that the inflation target will be...

Nice sentence: Tears won’t be confined to Wall Street however: let’s not forget that none other than the Swiss National Bank is also long some 10.4 million shares of AAPL. First it was the banks reporting horrendous numbers — largely, we were told, because of their exposure to recently-cratered energy companies. Now it’s Big Tech, which is a much harder thing to explain. The FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) own their niches and not so long ago were expected to...

The foreign exchange market is largely quiet as the market awaits fresh trading incentives and the FOMC statement later in the North American session.  The main exception to the consolidative tone is the Australian dollar, which is posting its largest loss (~1.7%) in a couple of months. The short-term market was caught the wrong-footed when Australia reported an unexpected decline in Q1 CPI.  The 0.2% decline contrasts to expectations for an increase of the same magnitude.  The...

Bill Kristol – the Gartman of Politics? It has become a popular sport at Zerohedge to make fun of financial pundits who appear regularly on TV and tend to be consistently wrong with their market calls. While this Schadenfreude type reportage may strike some as a bit dubious, it should be noted that it is quite harmless compared to continually leading people astray with dodgy advice. To answer the question posed in the picture with the benefit of hindsight: not really…. (look at the...

  Erroneous Analysis of Precious Metals Fundamentals We came across an article at Bloomberg today, talking about silver supply troubles. We get it. The price of silver has rallied quite a lot, so the press needs to cover the story. They need to explain why. Must be a shortage developing, right? At first, we thought to just put out a short Soggy Dollars post highlighting the error. Then we thought we would go deeper. Here’s a graph showing the price action in silver since the beginning of...

The Wild 1990s Not so long ago, during 1990’s, the connecting world of the connected world we now know was literally and comprehensively in the development stage during those wild crazy go go years before the crash in technology stocks in 2000. Nasdaq Composite, 1995 – 2003, The technology bubble and crash The infamous tech bubble of the 1990s – to this day the greatest stock market bubble ever seen in the US (in terms of multiple expansion, intensity, public participation, speed and...

  Laughing at Blue Monday On May 28, 1962 – dubbed “Blue Monday” – the market fell 6%… its worst single-day slide since 1929. Peter Stormonth Darling was an investment manager at investment bank S. G. Warburg & Co. at the time. He strolled in to tell his boss, Tony Griffin, how much the market had fallen. Dow Jones Industrial Average, 1961-1962 The DJIA in 1961 – 1962. March – June 1962 delivered quite a scare to investors – in May the decline accelerated, as panic began to spread –...

First it was the blow up of hedge fund darling Valeant that crushed countless funds who were long the name. Then, one month ago after the collapse of the Allergan-Pfizer deal, we showed (one of the reasons) why the hedge fund world continued to underperform the broader market: Allergan was one of the most widely held hedge fund stocks. And now, following the biggest Apple debacle in years, here is the reason why the hedge fund community is about to see even more redemption requests and...

  The Cracks in the Economy’s Foundation Become Bigger Decay… Photo credit: bargewanderlust Last week the Bureau of Economic Analysis has updated its gross output data for US industries until the end of Q4 2015. Unfortunately these data are only available with a considerable lag, but they used to be published only once every few years in the past, so the current situation represents a significant improvement. As Ned Piplovic summarizes in his update on the situation on Dr. Mark...

My name is noMy sign is noMy number is noYou need to let it goDebt relief is noGerman stimulus is noECB  easing is noYou need to let it go  German Finance Minister Schaeuble appears to have taken on a new role:  chief obstructionist.  Schaeuble seems to be reveling in the fact that due to Chancellor Merkel’s immigration stance, and perhaps also because of her accommodation of Turkey, her public support has fallen below his.   According to a recent ZDF poll, Merkel is now the fifth most...