In a year in which stock prices mostly have been driven by news rather than fundamentals, three things stood out last week. First, terrorism has taken on an unsettling new face — the stay-at-home mom down the street or your long-time co-worker at the plant — as the dark side of the exponential growth in…
Chinese CPI and PPI During the session on Tuesday, we have Chinese CPI and PPI numbers coming out. While this won’t move a specific market, it could very well define whether or not we have any interest in taking risk as a market. This quite often will have an effect on commodities, as well as…
When the PBoC reported the change in Chinese FX reserves for October, some were surprised to learn that apparently, Beijing’s warchest actually grew by $11 billion. Why was that surprising? Because over the preceding three months, China had liquidated some $300 billion in USTs as Beijing struggled to contain the fallout from the “surprise” August 11 deval. As it…
I don’t want to come across as some industrial complex crony here but I have to call a spade a spade. Just because you’re a pollution control company doesn’t mean I have to like your stock. It’s not a popularity contest, otherwise instead of oil companies and big tech being at the top of the…
As an active portfolio manager, I’m often asked if my goal is to achieve absolute returns. Meaning to strive for positive results no matter what the stock or bond markets are doing. On the surface this seems like an obvious goal that everyone should be trying to achieve. I mean who wants to ride out…
One of my many shorts, and a personal favorite: Caterpillar:
I was on vacation last week and it seems the correlation between my holidays and big moves in EUR/USD remains incredibly high. I was actually not that surprised to see the reversal in the euro as it coincided with the 61.8% extension of the time elapsed between this year’s low and the late August spike high. Fibonacci…
There was a good piece in the WSJ today discussing potential “flaws” in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). ETFs are a relatively new product that have amassed huge quantities of assets in the last few decades but are still dwarfed by the mutual fund space (roughly 2.1 trillion in assets vs 12.6 trillion in mutual funds). The SEC…
Stocks are indicated in today’s session modestly in the red on an otherwise light-news day. This would follow the strong Friday session in response to the solid November jobs report. The strong jobs report removed the last potential hurdle that could have held the Fed back from announcing a rate hike at its mid-December meeting….
Written by Ray Dalio, LinkedIn Market participants and markets have shown themselves to be erratic while Mario Draghi and the ECB have shown themselves and their policies to be steadily in the right direction. As a result, it has been the norm for markets to swing to extremes on both sides of the trend (which has…
