Observing what happened in the past 72 hours was very fascinating, to say the least. First, pretty much no one gave credit to Iran’s threats, then no one gave credit to US administration warnings and ultimately, when Iran pulled the trigger, everyone quickly dismissed the risk of a retaliatory strike…
Category:Markets
NOW THAT THE JAPAN MAGIC MONEY TREE IS DEAD, EXPECT BANKS TO JUMP AT EACH OTHER’S THROATS
The answer to any problem Japan faced in the past 3 decades was “let’s just print our way out of it” and every time the global financial system was more than happy to swallow every drop of freshly printed #JPY. What were banks doing with all that money that “magically”…
WHILE YOU WILL BE WAITING FOR THE US-ELESS CPI, IT LOOKS LIKE “SOMEONE” IS AT RISK TO BLOW UP (AGAIN)
What the hell happened at 10:22 AM Eastern Time? Something snapped, and you can see that without a shadow of a doubt in the #VIX chart. However, as you can see, I highlighted a smaller snap that occurred right at the start of US #stocks cash trading. At the very…
IS IT FINALLY VIX SHOWTIME?
Yield harvesting through options selling, a trade now popular even with grandmas growing pumpkins in their backyard is one of those “sure things” that the more popular it becomes, the more it creates price distortions. These distortions can end up giving a false sense of safety to many people while…
AFTER LOSING THEIR GRIP ON GOLD, ARE THE FED AND THE US GOVERNMENT ABOUT TO LOSE THEIR GRIP ON OIL PRICES TOO?
Was anyone surprised to see #FED chairman Jerome Burns walking on stage today and saying out loud all those buzzwords that for a while have been pretty effective in feeding investors’ euphoria? I wasn’t, after all, it was already pretty clear after the last #FOMC that the real fed mandate…
NOW MORE AND MORE PEOPLE REALISE WHEN YOU CHASE UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS, YOU ARE INVESTING IN HALLUCINATIONS.
In December, people were literally salivating, dreaming of the flood of liquidity six #FED rate cuts would have delivered to the market in 2024. Fast forward 3 months into 2024, the expectations now are for 2 rate cuts and falling. Was the expectation of six #FED FF rate cuts unrealistic?…
HOW LONG CAN THE FED DELAY JAPAN’S (INEVITABLE) ECONOMIC IMPLOSION?
The USD dollar keeps strengthening and currently, the $DXY index is trading again above 105 or up ~0.77% in the past 5 days. What about the $USD / $JPY exchange rate? It’s only up ~0.14% while, instead, it should already be trading above 152, also considering the move in US…
WHY IS #JAPAN SO SCARED ABOUT $JPY CROSSING 152 AGAINST THE $USD?
Crossing a specific FX level isn’t usually a “big deal”. What would be the difference for a country between settling payments at 151.95 or 152.05? Intuitively, it’s quite small. However, there are 2 specific markets where a “round number” can be a very big deal: derivatives and margin lending. Why?…
CAREFUL ABOUT RECEDING TIDES, A TSUNAMI MIGHT BE ABOUT TO HIT (#STOCKS)
On Monday, the overall volume traded on the S&P500 was about 50% of the average daily volumes of the past 3 months. What about the Nasdaq100? Incredibly, the volume traded on the index on Monday was ~14% of the average traded volume of the past 3 months. Let’s look a…
WHY A HISTORICAL $JPY CURRENCY CRISIS IS AT THE DOORSTEP OF #JAPAN
Imagine you hold an asset of any type. At the moment, the asset XYZ is worth 1M$ according to the price quoted on the exchange. Now, what would be your instinctive reaction if you suddenly discovered that your asset XYZ is instead worth 100k$, but you can still go to…