We recently noted the rise of counterparty risks in the financial system due to oil prices dropping (and leveraged derivative exposures) but as the Russia situation has deteriorated so dramatically this week, a renewed focus on bank exposures has sent stocks reeling (and credit risk soaring) among many European (and US) banks. As Bloomberg reports, Raiffeisen Bank International…
Amazon (AMZN) has had enough of the United States. Specifically, it’s had enough of the country’s strict, stifling regulations (no surprise there) on unmanned vehicles – a.k.a. drones. As you may know, a year ago, the company announced its plan to launch Amazon Prime Air – an ambitious drone-based delivery service that would fly…
Someone in comments pointed out (BABA), so I checked it out. Yeah, it’s acting awfully weird. For a triple-digit stock, it’s stuck, day after day, in a tiny price range. Word on the street that options on BABA are one of the hottest things going. Lots of smoke; not much fire.
First, let me say what you read here is going to be wrong in several ways. HFT covers such a wide path of trading that different parties participate or are impacted in different ways. I wanted to put this out there as a starting point. Hopefully the comments will help further educate us all. 1….
If you follow precious metals news, you might have seen a recent article reporting that Russia sold a big chunk of its gold reserves. The article has since been corrected, but it just goes to show how sloppy Western journalism can be, especially when it comes to the reality of physical gold investment. Laurynas Vegys…
Low oil prices are igniting vehicle sales. And those old, American favorites – sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks – are becoming popular again. Increased sale have, in turn, spurred greater demand of certain metals. I already covered the movement of palladium and platinum in catalytic converters. Now it looks like another metal is going to…
Earlier, we reported that various currency brokers such as FXCM and FxPro, would – as a result of the soaring liquidity in the USDRUB pair – suspend trading in the Russian Ruble (while other merely hiked margins to ridiculous levels). It appears things have escalated again, and as FXCM just reported, instead of just politely advising clients…
Don’t believe everything you read in the mainstream media. Especially don’t believe anything in the financial news media until you’ve looked at the data yourself. It’s no wonder investors are so often caught flatfooted in the markets. Financial “journalists” feed their readers and viewers a constant stream of misinformation and bad data. Financial reporters are so atrocious…
To say that gold is in a bear market is to misunderstand both gold and markets. Gold isn’t an investment that goes up and down. It is money in the most basic store-of-value sense. Most of the time it just sits there, and when its price changes in local currency terms that says more about…
Today’s US economic releases – housing starts and business survey data for the manufacturing sector – suggest that the macro headwinds are increasing. It’s premature to dismiss the numbers du jour, but the previously released reports in recent weeks – payrolls, retail sales, and industrial production – offer a sharply positive counterpoint. For the moment,…
