In a TheStreet.com($) story with the above headline (hat tip reader MIchael), Doug Kass noted that the price increase in the Financial Select Sector SPDR was 13%, an 11 standard deviation event. According to Kass, the odds of an eleven standard deviation event is equivalent to the world ending – between three and four times. […]
Read more...Before you break out the champagne on the news that international investors like the US (or more accurately, hate its stocks less than those of other nations), the article does not address the weighting of equities relative to other asset classes (ie, total allocations could still be down due to shifting more capital to commodities, […]
Read more...Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in “Monetarists warn of crunch across Atlantic economies” in the Telegraph points to a troubling development: a fall over last few months in M1 and M2 in the US, UK and EU. Many have criticized the Fed for “printing money” of late. But the evidence suggests otherwise. First, all of the cash injections […]
Read more...The media enjoys stories of bad times in hedge fund land. It probably makes up for having to write about their managers’ over-the-top lifestyles. What is a little different about today’s hedge fund sighting from Bloomberg isn’t that certain funds or certain styles are faring poorly (remember the quant disasters of last August?) but hedge […]
Read more...Mohamed El-Erian, co-CEO of Pimco, usually strikes a cool, rational tone in his periodic comment pieces in the Financial Times. Today’s article, “Traversing wild market swings,” is a noteworthy departure. Or maybe it isn’t. El-Erian keeps to his detached, analytical style,but the guts of his message is so blunt that the packaging is secondary: Successful […]
Read more...Since I seldom am the bearer of upbeat news, I thought I’d pass along the cheery forecast from market strategists at Lehman and Deutsche Bank, namely, that the Standard & Poor’s 500 index will have its best six months since the second half on 1982 in the second half of 2008. I happen to remember […]
Read more...Bloomberg, getting a jump on next week’s news, tells us that expectations for the Commerce Department’s report on the US trade deficit, due on July 11, is that it got worse. In general, increasing current account deficits (of which trade is the biggest component) put downward pressure on currencies. But our nasty conundrum is that […]
Read more...Um, hasn’t anyone heard of the saying, “The customer is always right”? Apparently not, at least if you are a fund manager. The Wall Street Journal in “Credit Woes Lead Investors to Simplicity,” reports on a KPMG/Economist Intelligence Unit survey of investors carried out in March and April. Having gone to read the report itself, […]
Read more...The greybeards are not only chastened by the state of the economy, but as the example of Eli Broad illustrates, they are speaking up about it. That’s telling, because there is an unspoken rule in American business to stay upbeat, lest you unnecessarily scare investors and consumers who supposedly aren’t sophisticated enough to handle bad […]
Read more...A story in the UK’s Times give a recap of the gloomy forecasts for the US and world economy, including a particularly cheery prediction by a SocGen strategies that foresees that the Dow will drop to 4500 and the S&P 500 to 500. Not included in this forecast is a grim warning from Barclays and […]
Read more...Ah, just when you thought it might be safe to venture into the markets again, RBS sends out a red alert, warning private clients to prepare themselves for a full fledged rout in equities and bond markets in the next three months, with the S&P losing 300 points, or nearly a quarter of its value, […]
Read more...Faithful readers, I hope you don’t mind if I am less chatty than usual today, since I had some competing obligations, plus some of the material on offer stands on its own. In the “pets.com redux” category, a reader pointed out this Wall Street Journal story: Excitement over oil is surging in Brazil…. After creating […]
Read more...The world is finally waking up to the fact that inflation is getting to be a wee bit of a problem and inflation is very unkind to investments. Confidence in China may be fragile, since the stock market reaction seems well out of proportion to the significance of the so-called tightening via a 1% increase […]
Read more...I am clearly not wired like a large cohort of investors who clearly have some sway in the markets. As the popularity of CNBC and thestreet.com attests, for some, the stock market is a form of sport. Actually, better than sports, since in every contest someone wins and someone loses, but over long periods of […]
Read more...While George Soros today said that he believed the worst consequences to the financial system are past, he was far from bullish about the economy. The veteran investor believes that the real world impact is only beginning to be felt. Given that the last housing recession of the late 1980s-early 1990s took 15 quarters to […]
Read more...