Second Hindenburg Omen Confirmation In As Many Days, Third H.O. Event In One Week
by Zero Hedge - August 20th, 2010 4:39 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Longs may be forgiven if they are sweating their long positions over the weekend: not only did we just have a second, and far more solid Hindenburg Omen confirmation today, with 82 new highs, and 94 new lows, but the Saturday is the day when Iran launches its nuclear reactor, and everyone will be very jumpy regarding any piece of news out of the middle east. As for the H.O., the more validations we receive, the greater the confusion in the market, and the greater the possibility for a melt down (or up, as the case may be now that the market is unlike what it has ever been in the past). Furthermore, with implied correlation at record levels (JCJ at around 78), any potential crash will be like never before, as virtually all stocks now go up or down as one, more so than ever before. And should the HFT STOP command take place, the future should be very interesting indeed (at least for the primary dealers, and the Atari consoles which are unable to VWAP dump their holdings in the nano second before stuff goes bidless).
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DiggINNOVATION: What made America great is now Killing her!
by ilene - August 12th, 2010 8:20 pm
INNOVATION: What made America great is now Killing her!
"Creative Destruction is Secular not Cyclical"
Courtesy of Gordon T. Long
What made America great was her unsurpassed ability to innovate. Equally important was also her ability to rapidly adapt to the change that this innovation fostered. For decades the combination has been a self reinforcing growth dynamic with innovation offering a continuously improving standard of living and higher corporate productivity levels, which the US quickly embraced and adapted to.
This in turn financed further innovation. No country in the world could match the American culture that flourished on technology advancements in all areas of human endeavor. However, something serious and major has changed across America. Daily, more and more are becoming acutely aware of this, but few grasp exactly what it is. It is called Creative Destruction.
It turns out that what made America great is now killing her!
Our political leaders are presently addressing what they perceive as an intractable cyclical recovery problem when in fact it is a structural problem that is secular in nature. Like generals fighting the last war with outdated perceptions, we face a new and daunting challenge. A challenge that needs to be addressed with the urgency and scope of a Marshall plan that saved Europe from the ravages of a different type of destruction. We need a modern US centric Marshall plan focused on growth, but orders of magnitude larger than the one in the 1940’s. A plan even more brash than Kennedy’s plan in the 60’s to put a man of the moon by the end of the decade. America needs to again think and act boldly. First however, we need to see the enemy. As the great philosopher Pogo said: “I saw the enemy and it was I”.
THE PROBLEM IS NOT CYCLICAL, IT IS SECULAR.
The dotcom bubble ushered in a change in America that is still reverberating through the nation and around the globe. The Internet unleashed productivity opportunities of unprecedented proportions in addition to new business models, new ways of doing business and completely new and never before realized markets. Ten years ago there was no such position as a Web Master; having a home PC was primarily for doing word processing and creating spreadsheets; Apple made MACs; and ordering on-line was a quaint experiment for…
ZeroHedge: Richard Russell Slams Robert Prechter, Praises Gold, Tells Readers Get Out Of Stocks.
by ilene - August 11th, 2010 1:49 pm
Excellent analysis by Jesse covering a number of items, including Robert Prechter’s successes and failures, the contraction in credit, gold, the Federal Reserve, the financial elite, and the sad truth that America’s dominant industry is financial fraud. - Ilene
ZeroHedge: Richard Russell Slams Robert Prechter, Praises Gold, Tells Readers Get Out Of Stocks.
Courtesy of JESSE’S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN
First, Richard Russell does not ‘slam’ Prechter because he is a gentleman and doesn’t really ‘slam’ anyone. Fights between pundits can be fun in a voyeuristic way, but they are largely unproductive and generally used as a means of gaining attention, and providing distraction from what really matters, in the manner of panem et circenses. And sometimes people use provocative headlines to garner interest as well, in the manner of the New York Post and Daily News.
What Russell is saying is that Prechter is wrong in his interpretation of how deflation will play out, and what the endgame will look like. And he is saying almost the same thing that others, including Eric Janszen and myself, have been saying for quite some time, but in a slightly different ways.
Second, what Bob Prechter does not realize is that a contraction in credit does not imply a one for one decrease in ‘money’ just as an increase in credit these days does not result in a one for one increase in money. That is because credit is not money, it is the potential for money. Why more people don’t get that is beyond me. They trumpet the diminishing returns of money production for each marginal dollar of credit, but they don’t admit that this credit is vaporous, and as it dissipates it does not reduce money supply one for one either.
Third, and probably most importantly of all, even as the credit contracts, and the money supply contracts at some lesser rate as show in the money supply figures, the ‘basis of value’ of the money is also contracting. Since the US dollar is not based on gold, we have to look at what is providing the basis of its value. And what are those things, and what is happening to THEIR value.
And finally, there is a huge overhang of eurodollars out there, that are largely parked in Treasuries mostly of a moderate duration of three to ten years. By buying the Three and Ten year notes the Fed is ‘monetizing them’ and taking…
Artist’s Rendering of Lloyd Blankfein’s Desktop
by ilene - August 3rd, 2010 4:02 pm
Artist’s Rendering Of Lloyd Blankfein’s Desktop
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Continuing the series of artist impressions of (in)famous desktops (Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke), today we bring to you the proposed desktop of one Lloyd Blankfein, courtesy of Sancho P. If nothing else, it explains where all the physical is.
“It’s Not A Market, It’s An HFT ‘Crop Circle’ Crime Scene” – Further Evidence Of Quote Stuffing Manipulation By HFT
by ilene - July 31st, 2010 6:40 am
"It’s Not A Market, It’s An HFT ‘Crop Circle’ Crime Scene" – Further Evidence Of Quote Stuffing Manipulation By HFT
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Recently we posted a required reading analysis by Nanex in which the market trading analytics firm presented irrefutable evidence of quote stuffing by HFT algorithms in tens of stocks, in which thousands of cancelled quotes would reappear each second with a definitive periodicity and regularity, around the time of the May 6 flash crash. Aside from the fact that it is illegal to indicate a quote without a trade intent, this form of quote stuffing is in fact manipulative when conducted by HFT repeaters in specific "shapes" as it actually moves the NBBO actively higher or lower, in cases pushing the bid/offer range up to 10% higher without even one trade ever having occurred, simply by masking a big block order which other algos interpret as bid interest and pull all offers progressively or step function higher (or vice versa, although we have rarely if ever seen the walking down of a stock over the past 18 months). It is as if the HFT lobby has been given the green light by the powers that be that it is safe to activate merely the bid-size quote stuffing algorithms, and not worry: the fact that the market is so one sided in its quote stuffing patterns is sufficient reason to worry of a concerted effort to push stocks higher, initiated from the very top, and effected by not only the Primary Dealer community but by the end-market "liquidity providers."
Today, courtesy of Nanex we demonstrate that this type of illegal stock manipulation continues rampant to this very day, and the SEC still fails acknowledge that it is precisely the HFT market participants that persist in destabilizing stock prices, which have given up responding to fundamentals and merely move up or down based on quote stuffing interventions by those who plead innocence and claim to only be providing liquidity. Well take a look at the millions in fake, and thus illegal, bids demonstrated below and tell us just how any of this manipulation is "providing liquidity" – the second the patterns break, the algos responsible for the churn pattern disappear, thus eliminating numerous levels of so called bid liquidity below the NBBO: break enough patterns and you have another flash crash…
Rosenberg: Fade The Volumeless Rally As “The Market Is Completely Unprepared For 500K Claims And Sub 50 ISM”
by ilene - July 27th, 2010 3:42 pm
Rosenberg: Fade The Volumeless Rally As "The Market Is Completely Unprepared For 500K Claims And Sub 50 ISM"
Courtesy of Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge
Rosie’s market commentary from today is quite colorful, taking on both Barton Biggs (why bother) and Richard Russell as inflection point contrarians (we fully expect Barton Biggs who has now generated enough commissions for his broker to kill his entire P&L for the decade, to go bearish in about two weeks in keeping with his latest standing wave oscillation from one extreme to another). Rosie discusses a topic near and dear, namely that bonds continue to not buy the equity rally, and that the market is really not only stupid and inefficient, but wrong and overshooting most of the time. The only question is for how long can it remain wrong. And courtesy of the Fed, the answer is long, long, long. Not surprisingly David ridicules the constant lack of volume to the upside, and concludes that the rally should be faded, and that "this market is completely unprepared for 500k claims and sub-50 ISM." Obviously, he expects both to occur shortly (and just in time for Shiller to say he believes the chance of a double dip is more than 50%).
MARKET COMMENT … WE’RE ALL CHARTISTS NOW
We’re 142 trading days into the year – 52 days (37%) have seen 1% or greater moves. And the S&P 500 is now flat as a beaver’s tail on the year. I call this the meat-grinder market. Again, a huge rally into yesterday’s close – and now the S&P 500 is sitting right at the 200-day moving average. This is starting to get interesting. Again, the lack of ratification from Mr. Bond as the 10-year note yield came back and closed the day a smidgen below 3%.
Today is a critical day. The interim peaks since the April 23rd peak have been progressively lower but a three-point rally in the S&P 500 today would break that pattern:
April 23rd: 1217.3
May 12th: 1171.7
June 18th: 1117.5
July 26th: 1115.0
We should add that we are at a new post-April high in the Dow and the NYSE (the latter is not yet at the 200-day m.a.). We’re not there yet on the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq (13 points off) but we are getting close. While everyone is fixated on the 200-day moving average, we add…
So Just What Happened On July 15?
by ilene - July 22nd, 2010 2:28 pm
So Just What Happened On July 15?
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Now that the market is back to mirroring the melt up from last summer where bad news drove the market higher, and rare good news drove it to the moon, and every day’s closing price is more or less predetermined in the prior premarket session, is it ok if those handful of people who still give a ratus gluteus about market structure understand just what happened last Thursday, July 15 (incidentally the day Goldman announced its settlement, and just pre the infamous OpEx), when the ES-SPY relationship blew up, as the chart below shows. Where futures and SPY have traditionally correlated to 0.999*, on July 15 something snapped.
OK – we realize that with the Fed out of bullets, land mines, grenades and bazookas, and just a nuclear bomb or two left in the arsenal (not to mention countless lies), and the administration set to suffer a historic loss in November, it will be Bernanke and Obama’s only hope to ramp the market at least several hundred points over the next few months. That’s fine – nothing would surprise us anymore. After all, mutual funds have a few more billion in redemptions to face before they are all tapped out so the market must illogically surge. But little market abnormalities like the one above still entertain and amuse, and if maybe Liberty 33 could release a press release, blink in Morse Code, or send some other signal as to what happened, we can all go to bed knowing that the abnormal is now officially perfectly normal. And we simply ask, because there was a time, a whopping year or two ago, when such a sudden and violent shift in correlation would mean someone certainly blew up. Of course, with trading now being executed by a handful of counterparties, it would make an answer to such a question all the more interesting, if completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of all things Ponzi.
h/t Credit Trader
11th Sequential (& Massive) Equity Outflow Reignites Speculation Market Terminally Broken
by ilene - July 22nd, 2010 1:18 pm
11th Sequential (And Massive) Equity Outflow Reignites Speculation Market Terminally Broken
Courtesy of Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge
ICI reports that the week ended July 14 saw another massive outflow from domestic equity mutual funds of $3.2 billion, bringing the July total to $7.3 billion, and year-to-date equity outflows to a stunning $37.5 billion. Yet neither liquidations, nor redemptions, nor mutual fund capitulation, nor lack of liquidity, nor lack of human traders, nor rumors that it is all one big scam, can tame the market’s most recent bout of irrational exuberance: in a time when equity funds had to redeem over $7 billion in stocks, the stock market surged by 90 points!
Just like last week, despite huge order blocks of selling pressure, the fact that volume is so light and liquidity so tight, the market succeeds in ramping ever higher, now that the few remaining carbon-based market participants have reverse engineered the key algo "predictive" frontrunning mechanisms, and manage to fool them that there is bid side interest, into which all domestic equity mutual funds manage to sell en masse. Soon enough there will be little left to sell, which will, paradoxically cause a much overdue market crash. (It is a bizarro market for a reason). And even as equity mutual funds are running on fumes (explains Bill Miller’s call of desperation yesterday), all the money in the world continues to rush into credit funds: the past week saw inflows into every single bond category, with a total of $5.8 billion going into all taxable bond funds. We are gratified that behind the fake equity facade of "alliswellishness", everyone is pulling their money out of stocks with an increased sense of urgency. Retail has had it with this pathetic shitshow of a market: the computer can front run each other for all anyone cares. We are fairly confident that the Obama administration will not have a soft spot in its heart to bail out the quant community… unless, of course, Rahm Emanuel discovers some way to unionize algorithms and give them voting rights.
Hugh Hendry: “If There Was A Way To Short Obama, I Would”
by ilene - July 19th, 2010 11:08 pm
Hugh Hendry: "If There Was A Way To Short Obama, I Would"
Courtesy of Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge
In his traditionally curt and to the point way, Hugh Hendry proclaims his "love" for the president, in this rare profile piece on the Scottish fund manager by the NYT. While none of his opinions will come as a surprise to Zero Hedge regulars ("The euro? It’s finished, Mr. Hendry proclaims. China? Headed for a fall."), we do recommend the article to those still unfamiliar with one of the truly iconoclastic fund manager still left in the open.
While Hendry does not run a fund nearly as large as some behemoths out there (his Ecletica is less than $1 billion, John Paulson is $30), it does afford him a nimbleness that JP (whose recent rumored liquidations in the gold market are destined to create feedback loops that further accelerate liquidations) or, much more blatantly, Pimco (with its $1 trillion + in Treasuries, Corporates, Sovereigns and Mortgages) which is the market in all its verticals, can only dream about. It also affords him the opportunity to say what is on his mind, and on those of many others, who however dread the political consequences for being a little too honest. It is this forthrightness and honesty that has reserved Hendry a sterling place within the Zero Hedge community, his candor regularly scoring posts receiving well over 20k reads (and at 60k hits, his "I recommend you panic" is among the Top 20 most popular Zero Hedge posts of all time).
Some snippets from Julia Werdigier’s profile of Hendry:
Mr. Hendry runs the successful hedge fund firm Eclectica Asset Management. It is an old-school macroeconomic fund company with a big-think, globe-straddling style more akin to the Quantum Fund, of George Soros fame, than to the high-tech razzle-dazzle of Wall Street’s math-loving quant analysts.
“Hugh is an anachronism,” said Steven Drobny, a founder of Drobny Global Advisors. “He reminds one of the original hedge fund managers from the ’70s and ’80s.”
At 41, Mr. Hendry is also emerging from the normally secretive world of hedge funds to captivate fans and foes with a surprising level of candor.
And speaking of "I recommend you panic" which is must watch for everyone…
Last May, on British television, he verbally sparred with Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the
…
Artist’s Rendering Of Tim Geithner’s Desktop
by ilene - July 15th, 2010 5:41 pm
Artist’s Rendering Of Tim Geithner’s Desktop
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
As America slowly digests the empirical evidence that both our judicial (SEC settlement) and legislative (FinReg farce) branches are now dead and buried (we all know how the executive branch is faring), the only thing left is humor. In continuing with our deep throat screen captures of executive level individuals (Ben Bernanke here previously), we present Tim Geithner’s desktop next, courtesy of a Zero Hedge reader.
[click on image to enlarge]
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
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