Monthly Archive: April 2016

FX Daily April 27: Two Issues Loom Large Today: Soft Australia CPI and FOMC

2016-04-27

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2016-04-27

The foreign exchange market is largely quiet as the market awaits fresh trading incentives and the FOMC statement later in the North American session.  The main exception to the consolidative tone is the Australian dollar, which is posting its largest loss (~1.7%) in a couple of months. The short-term market was caught the wrong-footed when …

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Political Pundits, or Getting Paid for Wishful Thinking

2016-04-27

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2016-04-27

  Bill Kristol – the Gartman of Politics? It has become a popular sport at Zerohedge to make fun of financial pundits who appear regularly on TV and tend to be consistently wrong with their market calls. While this Schadenfreude type reportage may st...

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Getting it Wrong on Silver

2016-04-27

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2016-04-27

  Erroneous Analysis of Precious Metals Fundamentals We came across an article at Bloomberg today, talking about silver supply troubles. We get it. The price of silver has rallied quite a lot, so the press needs to cover the story. They need to expla...

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Old School Investment Lessons

2016-04-27

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2016-04-27

  Laughing at Blue Monday On May 28, 1962 – dubbed “Blue Monday” – the market fell 6%… its worst single-day slide since 1929. Peter Stormonth Darling was an investment manager at investment bank S. G. Warburg & Co. at the time. He strolled in to tell...

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Wall Street and SNB In Pain: 163 Hedge Funds Are Long AAPL Stock

2016-04-26

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2016-04-26

First it was the blow up of hedge fund darling Valeant that crushed countless funds who were long the name. Then, one month ago after the collapse of the Allergan-Pfizer deal, we showed (one of the reasons) why the hedge fund world continued to unde...

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US Economy – Gross Output Continues to Slump

2016-04-26

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2016-04-26

  The Cracks in the Economy’s Foundation Become Bigger Last week the Bureau of Economic Analysis has updated its gross output data for US industries until the end of Q4 2015. Unfortunately these data are only available with a considerable lag, but th...

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Schaeuble Channels Meghan Trainor: No

2016-04-26

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2016-04-26

Debt relief is noGerman stimulus is noECB  easing is noYou need to let it go 

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Great Graphic: Measuring Cost of Extend and Pretend

2016-04-26

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2016-04-26

There is a debate.  On one hand is Summers, who argues that modern economies have entered an era of secular stagnation.  Full utilization of the factors of production and particularly capital and labor is not possible without stimulating aggregate demand in a way that facilitates bubbles.  The broad strokes of the argument can be found …

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Greenback Mostly Softer, Sterling Shines

2016-04-26

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2016-04-26

The gains the US dollar registered in the second half are being pared, but it is sterling’s strength that stands out.  It is difficult to attribute it to Obama’s push against Brexit, but there does appear to have been a change in sentiment. Sterling is the best-performing currency not only today but for the past …

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The “Canary in the Coal Mine” for Chinese Stocks

2016-04-26

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2016-04-26

  The Largest Online Marketplace in the World This company is twice the size of Enron at its peak ($100 billion). Pharmaceutical giant Valeant, which blew up in the last year, was only $90 billion at its peak. Before I get to what the stock is, let m...

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April 2016: SNB running suicide again?

2016-04-26

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2016-04-26

snb intervention, chairman philipp hildebrand
Speculative position: Speculators are even longer CHF (against USD): +9410x 125K contracts. Sight Deposits: SNB intervenes for 6.4 bln. CHF in only three weeks. Sight deposits (aka debt) are rising by nearly 1% per month, this is 10% per year. The SNB can never achieve such a yield on investment, her yield is between 1 and 2 percent. Is the bank running suicide again?

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FX Daily April 25: Global Tensions Lessened, but Bound to Increase Ahead of June FOMC Meeting

2016-04-25

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2016-04-25

We expect the FOMC statement this week to recognize the improvement in the global conditions that have been an increasing worry for officials over Q1.  At the same, time the soft patch of the US economy is undeniable. We suspect the Fed will look past the weakness of the US economy. The strength of the … Continue reading...

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Emerging Markets: Preview of the Week Ahead

2016-04-25

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2016-04-25

(from my colleague Dr. Win Thin) EM ended last week on a soft note.  Perhaps the main driver was rising US yields, as markets become wary of a more hawkish Fed this Wednesday.  Perhaps it was technical, as the EM rally became over-extended.  Wh...

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FX Daily April 25: Dollar Pares Pre-Weekend Gains Against Euro and Yen

2016-04-25

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2016-04-25

The US dollar starts what promises to be an eventful week giving back some the gains score in second half of last week against the euro and yen.    Equity markets are extending their pre-weekend losses.   Commodities are also trading with a heavier bias.  Markets in Australia, New Zealand, and Italy are closed for national …

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Affairs of State: Erdogan and Böhmermann

2016-04-25

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2016-04-25

  Insulting Mr. Erdoğan Can Be Dangerous Most of our readers are probably aware by now that the German government finds itself in a rather awkward situation over its relations with Turkey’s government again – with which the EU has just struck a widel...

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Silver is on Fire

2016-04-25

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2016-04-25

  The Prices of Gold and Silver Drift Apart Another interesting week, in that the price of silver separated from the price of gold. The former went no nowhere, while the latter gained over 4.5%. We get the trading thesis, that if the precious metals ...

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Statistics on tourist accommodation in 2015: Significant decrease in overnight stays in youth hostels, moderate decline for campsites

2016-04-25

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2016-04-25

Statistics on tourist accommodation in 2015 Significant decrease in overnight stays in youth hostels, moderate decline for campsites Neuchâtel, 25.04.2016 (FSO) – Switzerland’s 51 registered youth hostels generated 814,000 overnight stays in 2015, i.e. a decrease of 14.4% compared with 2014. As for the 410 campsites surveyed, 2.7 million...

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Standard of living in Switzerland remains one of the highest in Europe

2016-04-25

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2016-04-25

In 2014 Switzerland was one of the countries with the highest living standards in Europe. This does not exclude financial difficulties, as 6.6% of the population, i.e. approx. 530,000 people were affected by income poverty. Roughly one person in ten cannot afford a week's holiday away from home according to the Federal Statistical Office's survey on income and living conditions (SILC).

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The Week Ahead: FOMC, BOJ and More

2016-04-24

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2016-04-24

The last week of April is eventful. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan hold policy meetings.  The UK, eurozone, and the US provide the first estimates of Q1 GDP. Japan, the eurozone, and Australia report consumer prices, while the US updates the Fed’s preferred (targeted) inflation measure, the …

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Chinese Dragon: Breathing Credit Fumes

2016-04-24

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2016-04-24

Economic forecasting, no matter how complex the underlying model may be, is essentially about extrapolating historical trends. We showed last week how economic models completely fail to pick up on structural shifts using Japan as an example. On the other hand, if an economy doesn’t really change much, as in the case of Australia over the last thirty years, model “forecast” are generally quite accurate.

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