Follow the money. Or the currency. Yesterday markets soared on queue with a Chinese currency devaluation in the form of lower bank reserve requirements (which increases money and reduces its value). For those who at the words “currency devaluation” feel…
View pageYesterday on what we call Counterparty Tuesday, stocks plunged. Every month options, futures and swaps expire and these instruments represent trillions of notional-value dollars. Using an analogy, suppose you had to renew your homeowners insurance each month because the value…
View page“Other than that, everything’s okay.” My friend Gary, a smart guy with an MBA from the University of Chicago, uses that line to herald dire situations. It’s from the old UK sitcom starring John Cleese, Fawlty Towers. In one episode,…
View pageThere’s no denying the connection between tulips and derivatives in 1636. The Dutch Tulip Mania is often cited as the archetype for asset bubbles and the madness of crowds. It might better serve to inform our understanding of derivatives risk.…
View pageEditorial Note: Happy Holidays! We’re back from travels but will share our findings in the first Market Structure Map of the new year. Ahead of Christmas, we’re re-running the most-read MSM of 2015. Market structure should rank among your top…
View pageEDITORIAL NOTE: We’re getting far away from today’s Federal Reserve decision colliding with options expirations (VIX today, with more expirations tomorrow and Friday), escaping to the elbow of the Caribbean, the divide between windward and leeward on a catamaran around…
View pageLooking around at the market, we decided the only thing to do is go to St. Maarten. Safely at sea, we’ll wait out options-expirations and the Fed meeting next week and return Dec 21 to tell you what we saw…
View pageA war of words is unfolding in our profession. In case you’ve not followed, it’s about the market for the product you manage as investor-relations officers. Many of you have read Flash Boys, Michael Lewis’s (The Big Short is soon…
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