RSS feedstocks
’Pan-labyrinth
Market schizophrenia alert. The Monti put that might have triggered the Italian bond rally today seems to have inspired a rally in global stocks. Who knows how long this will last. And maybe that’s the point — it’s a game of gambling on possible outcomes rather than fundamental investing at this stage.
Eurofright
OK, volumes are seriously low and it’s Labor Day in the States. On the other hand…
Banks bore the brunt at pixel time with the Italian banks again suspended for excessive volatility. Anyone remember
More earnings confusion
Monday’s WSJ gives lengthy treatment to the scramble among analysts to work out whether stocks are cheap considering the uncertainty about the path of US corporate earnings.
There’s plenty of disagreement among the sell-siders and cheapness is itself a hazy concept.
Well played, NY Daily News
Marginally more tasteful than a hooker’s drawers anyway… (H/T Michael Roston)
Keep calm and carry on [updated]
Friday’s newspaper round-up (with a little help from Sky News and now with added Daily Mirror).
And finally the Sun…
Meltdown [updated -- to rollercoaster]
Nine days of stocks falling. Nasdaq — like the S&P 500 — is now negative for the year. Situation in crude also ugly and the 10-year Treasury yield is advancing down to 2.5 per cent:
Update — Nasdaq is back in positive territory at pixel time (the FTSE Eurofirst 300 closed down 2 per cent though.) WTI crude’s hugging $92.
Japan’s Wednesday bounce: what it says and where it goes
Japan has defied investor logic even more than usual in the past few days.
Even as the sense of crisis deepened around Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear plant, with reports of a fresh fire and radioactive leaks,
Plunge protection teams, New Egypt edition
On a less than glorious day for MENA sovereign wealth funds…
FT Alphaville’s Cairo agent sends this newspaper clipping our way:
It’s a report on the Egyptian stock exchange’s continued inability to reopen,
Peak Testosterone
An interesting application of political science to the market, from Deutsche Bank analysts:
Youth bulges in emerging markets likely to decline sharply from 2010–2020
Emerging-market youth bulges are projected to decline in the next decade (except in sub-Saharan Africa,
Gaddafi’s market
Related link:
Desperate Gaddafi clings to power – FT
‘A conscientious job’ in Chinese markets
1. Create a favorable public opinion climate for the two holidays [including Spring Festival] and “two meetings” (NPC and CPPCC). Do a conscientious job of channeling [public opinion] on such hot topics as income distribution,
Indonesian equities warning du jour
One of these is not like the others — chart from Nomura fixed income analyst Owen Job, who’s making a point about Asian inflation risk:
Here’s what Job says (link and emphasis ours):
Recent market moves in Indonesia highlight the risks that inflationary pressures and attempted management of the impossible Trinity can have on asset prices.
Shadow banks and stock bubbles, Ngram edition
Have you been using the Google Books Ngram Viewer? It lets you search for any phrase across vast corpuses of digitised literature throughout the decades.
It’s quite addictive.
FT Alphaville fed in a few of our favourite phrases de nos jours to start off.
Bonds: Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble
After this week’s mass sell-off in Treasuries, debate is still raging about whether this is a bursting bond bubble — and whether we should all be stampeding into equities and out of commodities (or even,
Send for the chimp
The S&P 500 appears to be at its highest intraday level since September 2008:
Which means it’s time for …
Equities’ (and insurers’) days of future past
There was a nifty little Morgan Stanley note recently which took on all that ’stocks are dead, long live bonds’ investor sentiment.
Nifty, because the bank did note short-term support for a return to equities (buybacks,
How not to camouflage a profit warning
Autonomy is a company that specialises in ‘meaning-based computing’ alongside other enterprise software offerings.
It’s not really a specialism they extend to their regulatory statements:
Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE:
Analysts: the good, the lucky and the unable
Some analysts are better than others. That much we know.
But how to distinguish between — and capitalise on — those who ‘get lucky’ with their last calls and those who have a genuine tendency to make ‘accurate’ recommendations?
A new academic paper,
Equities’ days of future past
You know that whole ‘stocks are dead, long live bonds’ meme?
Interesting factoid from a Morgan Stanley strategy note on Monday:
In the US, the current pace of inflows to bond mutual funds is even greater than retail inflows into equities during the TMT bubble.
Katabasis in the market
In which the Greek crisis meets the perils of indexing.
The FTSE did its annual shuffling of world stock indices on Thursday.
This process firstly involved promoting the Czech Republic, Malaysia and Turkey to ‘advanced’ from ‘secondary’ emerging markets,
Hindenburg sighted… on Bloomberg
Oh, the humanity! Oh, the HIND <GO>! Which function gets you, err, this when you tap it into your nearest Bloomberg terminal, as of Thursday:
Which are, of course, the components of the Hindenburg Omen indicator — allowing you too to watch for signs of a market crash.
Clutching at dividends
The world has become full of risk-averse investors, and stocks will suffer.
Wait — let’s edit that.
The world has become full of yield preservers, and they will suffer stocks. Or — as is current fashion — stock dividends.
C(onn)aught out for the last time
Sad to see this one go after Sir Roy Gardner struggled to turn it around.
Nevertheless, it’s tombstone time for Connaught (Ticker — CNT):
And Connaught’s statement on its suspension:
On 29 July 2010,
Why yes, August was rubbish
File this one in the (bulging) ‘no one ❤ stocks’ archives.
August in London, according to the London Stock Exchange:
In August, 15.6 million trades were carried out across the Group’s equity electronic order books,
Creating liquidity out of illiquidity
In a recent post, Felix Salmon of Reuters asks the question “Should ETFs be allowed to include illiquid stocks?” He notes:
I do think that a lot of investors like ETFs precisely because they have a certain degree of liquidity which is often missing from the underlying stocks.
Are stock prices still too high?
So long as we’re looking at long-term home values, we may as well continue the history lesson by also observing the last century-plus of stock market performance.
And, err, the lesson is roughly the same:
Steampunk chartism
Hindenburg Omens are for kids. Here’s a tip of the top hat to Barry Ritholtz for unearthing this nineteenth-century great-grand-daddy among technical cycles:
(Click to enlarge)
That’s by one George Tritch.
Worried of Webvan
To: michael.grade@ocado.com
Re: Ocado listing
Hello again Michael,
You never call, and you never write – despite our having had lots of questions about your business before its flotation in July.