International Investing

Currency vols are going to spike up across the board this week with FOMC interest rate change and the employment numbers coming out on Friday. The sentiment is still USD negative and while a very good NFP won’t change that trend, the whipsaw could run stops in 70 pts + in either direction. This chart [...]

Soon private investors will be able to buy stakes in law firms in the UK. While not as broad as Australia’s rules, which allow for publicly traded law firms, it could be an initial step down in that direction. Besides cashing out their shares why would any law firm want to go public?
This Bloomberg article [...]

Rising gas and food prices combined with a cratering housing market don’t give the average consumer much to be happy about.

Chart from Mauldin

WSJ on the USD, its weak against everything:
The dollar’s problems didn’t stop with the euro. The greenback also reached a fresh 33-year low against Canada’s currency, a 23-year low against the Australian dollar and dipped to its weakest point in three months against the U.K. pound.

The US is doing everything it can to raise the [...]

The LA fires are all over the news and so is the Broken Windows Fallacy; the idea that the rebuilding effects will  make the area richer than it was before the fire. It’s not just the journalists that believe destruction has a net benefit. Larry Kudlow, the former chief economist of BearStearns made the same [...]

Still no signs of the decline slowing. As the mortgage market grind to a halt this decline may accelerate. This is the flip-side to securitization of mortgages. Mortgage securitization allows families to gain access to credit regardless of the credit available at their local bank. By freeing the market from geographical constraints, liquidity increased and [...]

Article from Yahoo.com:
A shortage in cargo ship space could push up commodity exchange traded funds.
The world’s fleets of cargo ships are aging, and demand for commodities is surging. That means the cost of shipping will go up, pushing up prices and crimping supply.
…
Commodity prices tend to rise with the index because they have to be [...]

Great article about academia vs real world trading:
We learn from crisis to crisis that MPT has the empirical and scientific validity of astrology (without the aesthetics), yet the lessons are ignored in what is taught to 150,000 business school students worldwide.
Academic economists are no more self-serving than other professions. You should blame those in the real [...]

This was buried as a small story on Yahoo but it should be a much bigger story. Some of the questions that this article doesn’t answer: Why is the Fed bailing out ANY individual banks customers? Why is the Fed bailing out US customers who held their money overseas, in effect subsidizing foreign financial firms, [...]

Gartmans write up was the best one published.  Here is a brief excerpt:
By 12:30, a mere two and one half hours later, the trade had moved what would have been 1000 points in our favour; by mid-afternoon, it had moved what would have been 2000 points in our favour. By the opening the next morning [...]