Category: Financial Markets 2012
The analysis published under this category are as follows.Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Jackson Hole: Make Or Break For The Markets 2012 / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
Investors, speculators, traders and fund managers alike will be glued to their flat screens at the end of August, hanging onto every word that the Chairman Ben Bernanke utters. They will be looking for some positive action on behalf of the Fed in terms monetary stimulus or Quantitative Easing Part Three. Every angle, inference, real or perceived meaning, will be analyzed to the fullest extent with the view to positioning ones portfolio accordingly.
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Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Stock Market Running On Empty! / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance. –Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC); Roman Statesman
It becomes harder and harder to find the truth and that certainly holds true with respect to government statistics. The investment world was pleased with the recent jobs report claiming 163,000 posts were created in July. It was a small step, but at least it was in the right direction. Or was it? When I tell you that the numbers are fudged I realize that doesn’t carry a lot of weight, but here’s what the Washington Post had to say about how the Bureau of Labor Statistics processes data:
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Monday, August 13, 2012
Credit Crunch Fifth Anniversary / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
We are coming up to the fifth anniversary of the financial crisis, at least for the UK’s banking system, because it was five years ago that anxious depositors were queuing up to withdraw their money from Northern Rock, leading to its inevitable rescue by the tax-payer.
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Sunday, August 12, 2012
Gold, Silver, Stocks and U.S. Dollar Markets Outlook / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
This week saw consolidation in the markets as they moved within the confines of tight ranges seeking direction. The direction has not yet been confirmed, but there are some insights we may be able to see in the technical picture that will help us understand what the markets want to do. There was a sell signal in the SP500, gold and silver that was triggered on Thursday and it was the first since August 3rd, but by the time friday morning had rolled along the market reconfirmed its bullish bias by closing higher. This behavior confirms that these markets are currently in confirmed up trends and may be setting up for higher prices. Let’s take a look at the market’s behavior.
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Saturday, August 11, 2012
Protecting Democracy And Profits From The Globalist Threat / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
“If governments allow themselves to be entirely bound to the decisions of their parliament, without protecting their own freedom to act, a breakup of Europe would be a more probable outcome than deeper integration.”
Italy’s unelected prime minister Mario Monti, 8/6/2012
Shocking but not surprising, is that attitude of Italy’s unelected Prime Minister Mario Monti that “Governments” should not be bound by the decisions of their democratically elected parliaments and should be free to act without regard to the decisions of their citizens.
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Wednesday, August 08, 2012
Financial Algorithmic Trading and Knight Capital Calamity / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
Once all the rage was arbitrage trading. High frequency trading then became the catchphrase. Now the latest scheme to insert financial nanotech - rage against the machine – practices called algorithmic trading created an automated loss of historic proportions. The Knight Capital calamity gave rise to rogue mathematics gone amuck. What a surprise! Removing buy or sell decisions from human hands is the quickest way to destroy a company that took years to build. How the euphemism "TRADING" applies to the upheaval of computerized speculation, could only make sense in the weird world of Wall Street accounting.
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Monday, August 06, 2012
Could Speed-of-Light Market Trading Trigger The Next Systemic Crisis? / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
Computers don't sleep, don't get tired, don't care about politics and don't go on holiday in August -- but they can wreak havoc in the global financial marketplace by amplifying moves on the up- and down-sides as we recently saw with the "Dark" Knight fiasco involving 140 stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange of which nearly 40 moved more than 10% in less than an hour. The "Knightmare on Wall Street" has cast new doubts on the automated High-Frequency Trading (HFT) systems that now totally dominate global exchange trading, despite multi-million-dollar lobby groups proclaiming from rooftops that HFT is not only safe and stabilising but beneficial to humankind. Powerful algorithms -- “algos” in industry parlance -- execute millions of orders per second and can scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously. They can not only spot trends before other investors can blink, changing orders and strategies automatically within milliseconds, they can also choreograph and co-ordinate strategies across geographies and asset classes.
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Sunday, August 05, 2012
Market Outlook for Metals, Stocks and U.S. Dollar / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
This past week saw a number of headline driven news as central banks attempt to intervene in the global economic fiasco. They have pledged to goose the monetary supply by instituting bond purchasing programs in their respective nations, but all we have is talk and the action is yet to come. So, let’s take a step back and examine the technical picture outside of any promises to act.
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Saturday, August 04, 2012
Keynesian Investors Being Ground into Euro Dust / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
Occasionally, I read something in the mainstream financial media whose degree of delusion takes my breath away. This is such a sentence (August 2, 2012).
Read full article... Read full article...U.S stock index futures pointed to a higher open on Wall Street on Thursday, with investors hoping the European Central Bank will signal further measures to aid growth and prevent the euro zone collapsing.
Saturday, August 04, 2012
Fed Hits Kill Switch On Market Liquidity / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
Lately investors have been worried about liquidity, specifically the central bank's willingness (or unwillingness) to continue providing it, and with good reason. Without periodic injections of liquidity, investors eventually lose interest as financial markets begin to languish. And in a financial economy like the U.S., the death of a bull market means the death of the economic recovery.
Bull markets are to a large extent liquidity driven affairs. Without an abundance of excess monetary liquidity sloshing through the financial market, stocks and commodities have little hope of developing the necessary ingredient of forward momentum. Momentum is what attracts an ever-growing number of investors to participate in a bull market, which in turn is what keeps the bull market going. When liquidity dries up, momentum perishes and investors quickly lose interest. This, in a nutshell, is how bull markets turn into bear markets, viz. the absence of liquidity.
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Friday, August 03, 2012
Knight Capital and High Frequency Trading Making Markets Skittish / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
Dinakar Singh, founder of $4 billion hedge fund TPG-Axon Capital, spoke with Bloomberg TV’s Erik Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle on “Market Makers” today, saying that investors are scared and are paying a lot for safety. Singh said that the commodities “super cycle” is over because of falling Chinese productivity and profits—and that profits are improving the most in Japan.
Singh went on to say that he sees growth in the chemical, health-care and aerospace industries and likes Sirius XM and W.R. Grace. He also said “we are bearish on some financials, U.S. regional banks especially” and that he is betting against telecom stocks.
Friday, August 03, 2012
Euro Crisis - What Crisis? / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
"The European Central Bank indicated on Thursday (2nd. August) it may again start buying government bonds to reduce crippling Spanish and Italian borrowing costs but the conditions it set and the dissenting voice of its key German member disappointed markets.In the latest move to contain the eurozone crisis, ECB President Mario Draghi indicated that any intervention would not come before September - and only if governments activated the euro zone's bail-out funds to join the ECB in buying bonds.
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Friday, August 03, 2012
Lose $10 Million Per Minute for 45 Minutes Non-Stop, Computerised Trading losses Mount at the Dark Knight / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
Algorithms Rule This Asymmetric Brave New World
Welcome to this asymmetric brave new world ruled by computerised algorithms that are causing more chaos in minutes than what human-beings were previously able to bring about in decades. The Knight Capital Group, the Jersey City, New Jersey-based brokerage firm -- one of America’s biggest market makers -- announced on Thursday that it lost $440 million because of a mis-firing computer program, which carried out nonsensical trades for three quarters of an hour on Wednesday before it was shut down. The losses caused by computerised trading malfunction are greater than the company’s consolidated revenue of $289 million in the second quarter of this year, never mind its earnings or profits. Knight’s automated high frequency trading algorithmic computer program ran out of control for about 45 minutes, which means the company lost $10 million for each minute the new software was running. A non-human employee of Knight Capital -- not a human rogue trader on this occasion -- executed the crippling damage in less than one hour on one of America's largest brokerage houses which had been going strong for nearly two decades.
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Friday, August 03, 2012
World Economies In Uncharted Financial Territory, Hold Cash and Gold / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
Bill Bonner stakes out “uncharted territory” in an interview with The Money and Wealth Show…
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Thursday, August 02, 2012
Systemic Upheaval, Economic Recovery Vs Propaganda Reality Check / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
Some extremely powerful differentials in power are setting themselves up, in a manner never seen before in modern history. Those who dismiss the uniqueness of the situation are those who continually are surprised by events as they unfold. The pressure features the managers of the system, complete with corruption and fraud with official coverups in a never-ending sequence of crime scenes, pitted against the forces of justice and fair markets. Not a single fair market exists in USDollar terms. In pure Orwellian style, every single market has a US-based or London-based financial engineer at a control panel doing duty in price intervention. The Western defenders of the syndicate do not wish for the price structure to reflect the reality of physical shortage or the bounty of paper-based surplus, for the currencies to reflect true toxic value, and for the discovery price systems to reflect the raids of private accounts. The system is broken, and the pressure is building.
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Tuesday, July 31, 2012
The Federal Reserve, Gold, Oil, and U.S. Dollar’s Demise / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
“We have, in this country, one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board. This evil institution has impoverished the people of the United States and has practically bankrupted our government. It has done this through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it”. ~ Congressman Louis T. McFadden in 1932 (Rep. Pa) ~
The above quote coming from the Honorable Louis T. McFadden is a quite prescient statement as it relates to arguably the most evil enterprise in American history.
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Friday, July 27, 2012
SP500, Russell 2K, Dollar Index and Gold’s – Fake out or Shakeout / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
Today has been quite a trading session with risk assets rocketing higher after Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank reiterated what has already been stated. The S&P 500 Index (SPX) is posting some nice gains, but price has not taken out the recent ascending trendline illustrated in the daily chart of SPX shown below. Until that ascending trendline is taken out, the bears remain in control of the price action.
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Monday, July 23, 2012
Financial Markets Forecasting is Looking Bleak / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
I hope you had a great summer weekend.
This week could be a huge one for stocks and commodities. This morning the dollar index is taking another run at our weekly chart resistance level. If it can break out and start to rally this week then a possible 4-6 week sell off in stocks and commodities may be just starting.
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Friday, July 20, 2012
Why Won't Fine Art Market Collapse? / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
What were once merely baubles are now being touted as investment necessity...
The ODDEST THING thing about today's Great Depression? asks Adrian Ash at BullionVault. The lack of a collapse in the art market.
Previously a bellwether for the global economy, turnover in fine art sank by three-fifths in the early '90s. It tanked again in the early Noughts, taking the revenues (and equity valuations) of the big auction houses down with it.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Markets Kicking and Screaming, Gold Bottom in Place / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2012
With summer doldrums well and truly upon us markets have been drifting lower on low volume and trying to hold their May lows. Most metals and certainly gold have performed better and seem to have bottoms in place.
After such a long bear run it's not likely we will get a huge bounce during the summer when so many are trying not to think about the market. Not every stock is falling however. As we note in the updates there are three companies on the HRA list that have been getting a lot more attention from traders and several others that are getting traction based on results to come. That isn't much but it is an improvement. We don't know yet how "real" any of these discoveries are, but new finds are the shortest route to renewed investor interest in the sector.
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