DEEP THOUGHTS FROM DAVID ROSENBERG
by ilene - November 27th, 2010 9:11 pm
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
Via WealthTrack:
“On this week’s Consuelo Mack WealthTrack, a Financial Thought Leader who called the credit and housing bubbles way ahead of the pack. Gluskin Sheff’s prescient Chief Economist, David Rosenberg shares his economic and market outlook, plus advice on how to invest in it.”
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The Whites of Their Eyes
by ilene - November 4th, 2010 7:31 pm
Strategies for Junior Mining Investors: The Whites of Their Eyes
Courtesy of Louis James, Senior Editor, Casey’s International Speculator
“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”
Most Americans were taught in school that William Prescott, commander of the colonial forces on Bunker Hill, gave this order to his men on the morning of June 17, 1775, just before the British attacked them.
Some may even remember that while the British took the hills, they did so at such great cost, it wasn’t much of a victory. The American forces repelled the British twice and were finally overwhelmed when they ran out of ammunition – an outcome that obviously concerned Prescott and provoked his order to conserve ammunition. It was vital to use each shot as effectively as possible.
I think of this often when contemplating investing, because I sometimes feel an urge to get all of my investment cash deployed NOW. I might miss the next big uptick! And even if not, modest double-digit gains are still better than money sitting in the bank. This urge gets strong when the market gets hot, as it has been over the past months – look at all the gains I missed!
But the best speculations, as Doug Casey likes to remind us, are when the perfect pitch comes sailing across home plate, cheap and with great upside. There are no called strikes, so it only makes sense to wait and swing only when it’d be hard to miss, hard to get hurt, and there’s clear out-of-the-ballpark potential.
- Key Point: Missing out on a winning pick may wound pride, but it doesn’t cost any cash. Placing hasty bets can cost dearly on both accounts.
Or, as Doug also likes to say, you can’t kiss all the girls. Nor should you try; the consequences in real life of attempting to kiss every girl you meet would be… nasty, brutish, and short.
Returning to my original metaphor, I don’t want to pull the trigger on a deal until I see the whites of their eyes – i.e., until everything is lined up for maximum effectiveness.
Or, as I’ve put it before: “Buy Low, Sell High” is a much better strategy than “Buy High, Sell Higher.”
Strategy vs. Tactics for Speculators
Speaking of military metaphors, I frequently refer to strategy and tactics in my writing. Last June, I gave a talk on strategy…
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Writing Calls on Volatility
by revtodd64 - October 14th, 2010 8:34 pm
I picked up this idea from Jeff Augen’s book, "Trading Realities: The Truth, the Lies and the Hype In-Between." Augen has written a fine series of books on trading options and I have bought and sampled from all of them. He notes the favorable risk/reward profile on buying VXX, which is a ETN attempting to track the short-term futures on the VIX, and selling at-the-money calls on it while the VIX is low. Augen notes that theoretically you could lower your cost basis in a year’s time to almost zero using this method every month. But it gets even more interesting using weekly options. I bought VXX ETN at $14.92 today and sold the $15 strike on the October 22 weekly options for $.58. That is about 3.8% profit if VXX does not move at all.
That is what I’m trying to average on a trade per month!
Let’s take a look at the one year chart on VXX:
You can see how low VXX has dropped. Unlike a stock you know this chart is not going to drop to zero. Volatility cannot disappear or go bankrupt. There will always be some level of volatility, so there is a limit to downside risk. The VIX, which is a measure of put buying, closed at 21.68 today, which is fairly low volatility. If you had to say which way volatility is moving right now, is it more likely to go up or down in the next month? I’m voting for up, since we have earnings season, elections and a rally that looks like it could roll over at any time. With a low VIX and higher expected volatility events, doesn’t it make sense to sell covered calls on volatility at least until the VIX clears 25.
I’m planning to sell the weekly at-the-money calls up to that point, which may only be one week if the market drops. I’m sure speculators could arrange more profitable trades, but I am looking for income and retirement investments, so I’m not getting greedy and buying calls or some other idea. I am considering selling at-the-money puts in my margin account. Let me know what you think of the idea. The risks I can foresee are poor tracking of the VIX by VXX and that volatility is driven into oblivion. But the VIX rarely drops below 15, which would be a 25%…
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Meredith Whitney Sees A 10% Drop In Wall Street Headcount And “Dramatic” Declines In Payouts In 18 Months
by ilene - September 9th, 2010 3:09 am
Meredith Whitney Sees A 10% Drop In Wall Street Headcount And "Dramatic" Declines In Payouts In 18 Months
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
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And you were wondering why the SEC and certain politicians with extensive connections to the financial services lobby are starting to stir now that it is common knowledge that every single hedge fund and trading desk’s woes are a function of HFT run amok (which is exaggerated BS of course, but from Wall Street’s darling, HFT has now become the one thing everyone loves to hate, and blame their own underperformance on).
And as we suspected, there is a far more structural issue underlying the recent faux-move to restore confidence in markets, namely imminent pain for Wall Street headcounts… and bottom lines. According to Meredith Whitney, who had been relatively quite in recent weeks, Wall Street faces the departure of about 80,000 staffers, or 10% of all, within 18 months, not to mention a major drop in Wall Street compensation. The reason is the same as the one we pointed out earlier: slowing revenue growth, primarily due to the complete collapse in trading volumes, as computers have used their binary elbows to push everyone else out of the markets, and with Wall Street’s primary revenue model now being exclusively reliant on trading, this is equivalent to a partial extinction event as many trading firms will have to close. This also means that the New York City economy is facing another major solvency crisis as tax receipts are sure to plummet.
More from Bloomberg, citing Whitney:
“The key product drivers of Wall Street’s revenues and profits over the past decade have been in a structural decline over the past three years,” Whitney said in the report. “2010 marks the first year in many in which Wall Street-centric firms will go through structural changes.”
Barclays Plc, Credit Suisse Group AG and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc may lead a slowdown in hiring in Europe as the fixed-income trading boom fizzles out, recruiters said last month. Barclays Capital’s income from trading bonds and commodities fell 40 percent in the first half amid the sovereign debt crisis. Fixed-income, currencies and commodities trading was the biggest revenue contributor at investment banks from Deutsche Bank AG to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
While regulatory reform, including higher capital requirements, will force some of these shifts, there will
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VOLATILITY REVERTING TO THE MEAN
by Chart School - September 3rd, 2010 10:20 pm
VOLATILITY REVERTING TO THE MEAN
Courtesy of Surly Trader
It is fortunate that I wrote my previous article about stagnant volatility the day before a strong ISM number came out which created a robust equity rally and a precipitous decline in implied volatility. The VIX has decline nearly 15% this week. VIX futures have fallen rapidly across the curve, but if this rally can be sustaining it seems that the futures have a long way to fall:
The front part of the curve fell quickly along with the VIX, but the months further out remain stubbornly high
The gap between the VIX Index and the 2nd month of VIX futures is at 6.86%, which is just off the absolute 6 year high of 7.46% established on August 6th. This gap cannot persist forever:
The gap has to narrow, one way or the other
If the equity markets are able to hold onto their ground, then this looks like a great time to bet on a decline in VIX futures by shorting the October and months further out on the curve (over 32% for Jan 2011?!). If instead we believe that September and October are going to be rotten months, then it would be wise to make a pairs trade through a delta hedged long option straddle in the S&P 500 along with a short position in the VIX futures.
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IMF Eliminates Borrowing Cap On Rescue Facility In Anticipation Of Europe Crisis 2.0; US Prepares To Print Fresh Trillions In “Rescue” Linen
by ilene - August 30th, 2010 11:28 pm
IMF Eliminates Borrowing Cap On Rescue Facility In Anticipation Of Europe Crisis 2.0; US Prepares To Print Fresh Trillions In "Rescue" Linen
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Back in April, when we discussed the inception of the IMF’s then brand new New Arrangement to Borrow (NAB) $500 billion credit facility, we asked rhetorically, "If the IMF believes that over half a trillion in short-term funding is needed imminently, is all hell about to break loose." A month later the question was answered, as Greece lay smoldering in the ashes of insolvency, and the developed world was on the hook for almost a trillion bucks to make sure the tattered eurozone remained in one piece (leading to such grotesque abortions as Ireland, whose cost of debt is approaching 6%, funding Greek debt at 5%).
Well, if that was the proverbial canary in the coalmine, today the entire flock just keeled over and died: today the IMF announced it "expanded and enhanced its lending tools to help contain the occurrence of financial crises." As a result, the IMF has as of today extended the duration of its existing Flexible Credit Line (FCL) to two years, concurrently removing the borrowing cap on this facility, which previously stood at 1000 percent of a member’s IMF quota, in essence making the FCL a limitless credit facility, to be used to rescue whomever, at the sole discretion of the IMF’s overlords. Additionally, as the FCL has some make believe acceptance criteria (and with countries such as Poland, Columbia, and Mexico having had access to it, these must certainly be sky high), the IMF is introducing a brand new credit facility, the Precautionary Credit Line (PCL), which will be geared for members with "sound policies [which just happen to need an unlimited source of rescue funding] who nevertheless may not meet the FCL’s high qualification requirements." In other words everyone. In yet other words, the IMF as of today, has a limitless facility to bail out anyone in the world, without a maximum bound in how much is lendable. One wonders who would be stupid enough to take advantage of the gullibility of IMF’s biggest backers (the US), to borrow an infinite amount of money for any reason whatsoever… And just what all this means for the imminent explosion of the amount of money in circulation…Not to mention the brand new Ben Bernanke smokescreen of…
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Myths about stock market myths that just won’t die
by ilene - August 27th, 2010 1:25 am
Baruch actually likes stocks, embraces the HFTing-bots and thinks that now is a good time to go long. Share his George Constanza moment… except this is serious. Baruch makes a compelling argument that stocks are the best investment around, the "asset class of the future." He takes on bond apologists, Brett Arends, Felix Salmon and the myths. – Ilene
Myths about stockmarket myths that just won’t die
Courtesy of Ultimi Barbarorum
[Watch George Costanza Does The Opposite]
Baruch hasn’t stopped blogging. He’s just been busy at work. To be fair, there also hasn’t been that much he has wanted to write about.
That changes here! A recent and growing animus in the econoblogoverse to, of all things, equity markets, has woken him up. Baruch finds this fairly incredible. Equities, he is fairly convinced, are the asset class of the future. This anti-equities movement, led by jealous journalists and winking, cackling bond apologists with axes to grind, needs to be nipped in the bud, as it is dead wrong. The WSJ’s otherwise reasonable Brett Arends is Baruch’s immediate target among the evil-thinkers, for his (last week’s top read on Abnormal Returns) The Top 10 Stock Market Myths that Just Won’t Die. And that Felix Salmon is also guilty as sin in this, for many offences against shares committed over the past few years.
Myth 1: stocks don’t generally go up
Wronngggg! Try shorting for a living and see how long you last. I’ve tried it. It is *really* fricking hard. Actually this year my shorts have made me more money than my longs, but I am an investing genius, and you are probably not. To those bond apologists who claim that this “stocks for the long haul” stuff is bullshit, I urge you to actually count the number of 10 year periods since 1950 where stocks have not made you a net percentage gain. I can only see 1963-64 and 1999-2001 as periods with evident losses (check out the S&P log chart from 1950). So around 90% of the time in the past 50 years, stocks have made you money on a 10-year investment horizon.
It’s not like you lost lots of money when they did go down, either. At worst, if you had been unfortunate (or dumb) enough to invest in January 2000, by 2010 you had lost about 20%. You would have faced the same, a 20% loss, in 1964…
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David Rosenberg Vindicated
by ilene - August 11th, 2010 10:51 am
David Rosenberg Vindicated
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
From today’s Breakfast with Rosie
NOT IN KANSAS ANY MORE
Well, it took some patience but it looks like the economic environment I was depicting this time last year just shortly after I joined GS+A is starting to play out. Deflation risks are prevailing and a growing acknowledgment over the lack of sustainability regarding the nascent economic recovery. Extreme fragility and volatility is what one should expect in a post-bubble credit collapse and asset inflation that we endured back in 2008 and part of 2009.
History is replete with enough examples of this — balance sheet recessions are different animals than traditional inventory recessions, and the transition to the next sustainable economic expansion, and bull market (the operative word being sustainability) in these types of cycles take between 5 to 10 years and are fraught with periodic setbacks. I know this sounds a bit dire, but little has changed from where we were a year ago. To be sure, we had a tremendous short-covering and a government induced equity market rally on our hands and it’s really nothing more than a commentary on human nature that so many people rely on what the stock market is doing at any moment in time to base their conclusions on what the economic landscape is going to look like.
So, we had a huge bounce off the lows, but we had a similar bounce off the lows in 1930. The equity market was up something like 50% in the opening months of 1930, and while I am sure there was euphoria at the time that the worst of the recession and the contraction in credit was over, it’s interesting to see today that nobody talks about the great runup of 1930 even though it must have hurt not to have participated in that wonderful rally. Instead, when we talk about 1930 today, the images that are conjured up are hardly very joyous.
I’m not saying that we are into something that is entirely like the 1930s. But at the same time, we’re not in Kansas any more; if Kansas is the type of economic recoveries and market performances we came to understand in the context of a post-World War II era where we had a secular credit expansion, youthful boomers heading into their formative working and spending years and all the economic activity that…
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Morgan Stanley On Why The US Will Not Be Japan, And Why Treasuries Are Extremely Rich (Yet Pitches A 6:1 Hedge In Case Of Error)
by ilene - August 8th, 2010 9:14 pm
Morgan Stanley On Why The US Will Not Be Japan, And Why Treasuries Are Extremely Rich (Yet Pitches A 6:1 Deflation Hedge)
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
We previously presented a piece by SocGen’s Albert Edwards that claimed that there is nothing now but to sit back, relax, and watch as the US becomes another Japan, as asset prices tumble, gripped by the vortex of relentless deflation. Sure enough, the one biggest bear on Treasuries for the past year, Morgan Stanley, is quick to come out with a piece titled: "Are We Turning Japanese, We Don’t Think So." Of course, with the 10 Year trading at the tightest level in years, the 2 Year at record tights, and the firm’s all out bet on curve steepening an outright disaster, the question of just how much credibility the firm has left with clients is debatable.
Below is Jim Caron’s brief overview of why Edwards and all those who see a deflationary tide sweeping the US are wrong. Yet, in what seems a first, Morgan Stanley presents two possible trades for those with access to the CMS and swaption market, in the very off case, that deflation does ultimately win.
Morgan Stanley’s rebuttal of the "Japan is coming" case:
There are many arguments that suggest the US is going the way of Japan, and while UST yield valuations may appear expensive, a regime shift has occurred and we should use the deflation experience of Japan as a guideline. We respect this point of view, and our colleagues in Japan provide some compelling charts.
In Exhibit 3 we show how the richening in the JGB 5y led to a significant flattening of the curve. Ultimately CPI turned negative and Japan did in fact move into a period of deflation. It makes sense for the 5y to outperform, as investors believed in a low rate and inflation regime for an extended period. Most money is managed 5 years and in, which thus makes the 5y point so attractive in low rate regimes because it represents the greatest opportunity for money managers to own duration, yield and return. The same is happening in the US as the 5y point is richening extensively as investors seem to be surrendering to a low rate and low return environment. But this may be premature.
Note that it took ~2-years before the
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Scientific Proof That High Frequency Trading Induces Adverse Changes In Market Microstructure And Dynamics, And Puts Market Fairness Under Question
by ilene - July 13th, 2010 12:46 am
Scientific Proof That High Frequency Trading Induces Adverse Changes In Market Microstructure And Dynamics, And Puts Market Fairness Under Question
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Up until recently, any debate between proponents and opponents of High Frequency Trading would typically be represented by heated debates of high conviction on either side, with discussions rapidly deteriorating into ad hominem attacks and the producer screaming ‘cut to commercial’ to prevent fistfights. Luckily, all this is about to change. In a research paper by Reginald Smith of the Bouchet Franklin Institute in Rochester titled "Is high-frequency trading inducing changes in market microstructure and dynamics?" the author finds that he "can clearly demonstrate that HFT is having an increasingly large impact on the microstructure of equity trading dynamics. Traded value, and by extension trading volume, fluctuations are starting to show self-similarity at increasingly shorter timescales. Values which were once only present on the orders of several hours or days are now commonplace in the timescale of seconds or minutes. It is important that the trading algorithms of HFT traders, as well as those who seek to understand, improve, or regulate HFT realize that the overall structure of trading is influenced in a measurable manner by HFT and that Gaussian noise models of short term trading volume fluctuations likely are increasingly inapplicable."
In other words, the author finds ample evidence that during the past decade (on the NASDAQ) and especially since the 2005 revision of Reg NMS (on the NYSE), stock trading increasingly demonstrates "self similar" fractal patterns, resulting in volatility surges, recursive feedback loops, and a market structure which is increasingly becoming a product of the actual trading mechanism. In the process, as demonstrated by a Hurst Exponent gravitating increasingly further away from 0.5 (i.e., Brown Noise territory), the Markov Process nature of stock trading is put under question, and thus the whole premise of an efficient market has to be reevaluated. Simply said: HFT has been shown to affect the fairness of trading.
The paper is, needless to say, a must read for everyone who has an even passing interest in stock trading and market regulation (alas, yes, that would mean the SEC, and Congress). And while one of the key qualities of the paper is presenting the history and implications of High Frequency Trading, and its rise to market dominance primarily as a result of the revision…
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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
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site