The Fed now spends over 1/3 of its time talking about financial markets in the minutes. That’s more than trade, monetary policy & employment combined. This unhealthy obsession is a distraction – and it’s guiding the market in a dangerous direction.
Tag: Expectations
Currency Krav Maga
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about $ strength preventing risk assets from making new highs. I don’t dispute the fact – it’s pretty obvious that we’re losing badly in the battle for competitive devaluation that global central banks have embarked upon. But it’s even worse than the headlines might suggest: where the real damage is being done is in FX forward markets. In some cases, 12mth $ funding has more than doubled in the last two months alone. #China #Europe #Canada, etc.
“Impossible” Events are on the Rise…
A 4-sigma event would be expected to happen once or twice in a trading lifetime – according to the most popular VaR-based risk models. We’ve seen 10 of those this month in Treasuries. What we should have learned from the GFC has been all but forgotten. What the market had considered to be impossibilities (or at least highly unlikely…) is quickly becoming the norm.
5 Things Every Trader Needs to Know About Rates
From what’s priced in to curve inversion to term premium. Here are the 5 things every trader needs to know about the rates market…
Ebb & Flow: Tidal Forces in Markets
There’s a pattern & predictability to tides that make them easy to forecast. But, on very long timescales, that doesn’t mean they are constant by any measure. At a celestial level, the amount of force produced depends on the mass of the objects involved, the distance, the eccentricity of the orbits, and the radius of the bodies – for starters. The push & pull that’s observed in financial markets is analogous: different assets exhibit similar ebb & flow as correlations oscillate.
Odds of another 100bps by year-end? Now 1 in 5.
I mentioned this morning that the options market was beginning to make some pretty exceptional progress on the way to pricing in 50bps+ at the September meeting. What’s even more significant, in my mind, is what the market has done to the odds of additional easing in 2019. We’re now 1 in 5 odds that the Fed delivers an additional 100bps by year-end.