On Tuesday global equities were down a very modest amount. The U.S. DOLLAR continued it move higher as the growth story and positive nominal yields is enough to push global investors into the U.S., the center of complacency. Commodity prices started off weak but OIL, grains and even COPPER found some buyers.
Archive for the ‘Emerging Markets’ Category
Notes From Underground: And the Concerns Continue
February 18, 2020Notes From Underground: Do You Hear What I Hear?
February 16, 2020First, the news on the coronavirus continues to be buffeted by media outlets’ urge to be the first to report. The need for speed creates a rash of questionable stories that later get retracted or certainly get less sensational when context is added. When trading around this, I urge caution as opportunity knocks for those traders who can remain patient. There seems to be scientific interest in the failure of the VIRUS to have impacted children. While it is in the early stages of a potential pandemic, according to my source on all things infectious diseases, it is an outcome to watch in an effort to measure the potential impact.
Notes From Underground: Coronavirus Trumps Unemployment Data
February 9, 2020Friday’s unemployment report was firm on job creation but soft on average hourly earnings. The work week remained unchanged. Further north, the Canadian jobs report was very robust as jobs increased by 34,500 versus an expected 16,000. The real strength was that all the jobs growth was full-time with hours worked experiencing a healthy gain of 0.5%. The unemployment rate dropped from 5.6% to 5.5%. And yet the Canadian dollar could not sustain a rally for more than five minutes.
Notes From Underground: For What It’s Worth
February 4, 2014“There’s something happening here
But what it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it’s time we stop
Children,what’s that sound?
Everybody look ,what’s going down? [Buffalo Springfield]
Notes From Underground: The Power of Big Data In the Time of Correlative Investment
January 30, 2014First, bravo to the Bernanke Fed for staying the course and learning from its September mistake: Don’t mislead the markets with a sudden change of direction. It appears that the Fed will provide investors with enough “forward guidance” if they wish to alter the market’s perceptions. FOMC members had plenty of time to dissuade traders if the recent slew of tepid data was going to steer Bernanke and Company away from another cut in QE purchases. The FED erred on the side of consistency rather than swerving to avoid the skidding emerging markets. Again, a FED pause would have further roiled a very nervous global financial market.
Notes From Underground: Taper Impact on Emerging Markets (Santelli Exchange)
January 30, 2014
Click on the image to watch Rick Santelli and I discuss the selloff in emerging markets, as well as the U.S. government’s myRA plan.
Notes From Underground: This Market Is a Tribute to Rudyard Kipling’s “IF”
June 25, 2013“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”
The opening stanza of Kipling’s poem about British stoutness is not to say others are blaming but rather an admonition from Notes From Underground about keeping your wits about you and trying to make quality decisions in trying times. In a financial world that is steeped in excess leverage, nanoseconds and algorithmic trading programs ,being a fundamental/technical trader seeking relative value becomes a daunting task. I am not one who favors catching “falling pianos” and have been more content to let trades come to make rather than force the action. As the markets unwind leveraged trades that causes massive selling across all asset classes.
Notes From Underground: Awaiting the FOMC
September 20, 2011The media has made the idea of a TWIST by the FED a sure thing. Okay, can’t argue with consensus, but of course that is why this blog exists: To question the thought process of the purveyors of conventional wisdom and to try to profit in a real-time world from challenging the status quo. If the FED TWISTS will the markets turn? BUT TURN TO WHAT? What will a lowering of the rate on the 10-year note do to a stalling economy with zero interest rates? Bernanke himself alluded to the BALANCE SHEET REPAIR taking place in the private sector, which was holding back consumer demand. Even though corporate balance sheets are healthy, capital investment lags as the corporations fear lackluster demand so there is no rush to create new supply.
Notes From Underground: Hello? Central Casting, we need experts in market and political hieroglyphics–STAT
January 30, 2011All eyes have turned to Egypt as the political situation has caught the world’s financial markets off guard. The turmoil in Tunisia was merely a blip on the radar screen but the significance of Egypt is an entirely different matter. So much capital has been thrust at maintaining the status quo in Egypt that many financial analysts have been lulled into a pre-Minsky complacency: Stability breeds a false sense of comfort. The emerging markets have been the repository of the Bernanke QE2 program as low rates have led to the search for higher yields and let potential risk be damned or rather rationalized away by dusting off the models of Long Term Capital Management.