As sentiment shifts from a Fed rate-cutting forecast to one that now sees a chance of a rate increase, a potentially powerful short squeeze setup might be emerging in the Treasury market. Heading into the Iran conflict, speculative short positions in TLT and Treasury futures were near historically elevated levels, reflecting a broad consensus that […]
Volume profiling provides unique insight into the profit-and-loss position of recent investors by identifying price levels at which significant buying and selling have occurred. Areas of high volume can act as powerful support and resistance levels because they represent prices at which a large number of investors have established positions and are therefore likely to […]
Dario Perkins of TS Lombard wrote a piece titled “How to Respond to Oil Shocks.” His analysis draws on the Fed’s history to address how it should respond to today’s oil shock. While researching Fed transcripts from the 1990 Gulf War, he discovered a proposal by Don Kohn, senior Fed staffer, that offers a solution […]
There seems to be widespread disbelief among gold investors, as gold prices have fallen by over 10% since the US and Israel started bombing Iran on February 28th. Many investors think that gold is a safe haven that should do its best during crisis periods, as we are in. This assumption fails to consider the […]
Expected and historical (realized) volatility are sending investors a puzzling signal. Because of the Iran conflict, intense oil price swings, and rising interest rates, the VIX, or implied volatility (what options markets are pricing in as future fear), is elevated. However, actual realized volatility has been much more subdued. That gap between the VIX and […]
Geopolitical events are among the most reliable drivers of bad investment decisions. When headlines are alarming, and markets are volatile, as they are today, investors instinctively overweight worst-case scenarios and underweight the likelihood that the situation resolves more quietly than feared. Behavioral finance calls this availability bias: the tendency to judge the likelihood of an […]
Albert Edwards from Societe Generale posted a graph similar to the one on the left below. It tracks the unemployment rate and its 3-year moving average. The red arrows signify every time the unemployment rate rose above the moving average. As we circle, the unemployment rate is now above the moving average. Albert’s comment alongside […]
Some media pundits are warning the public that high oil prices will spark a repeat of the high-inflation era of the 1970s. High oil prices will feed through to inflation; however, the economic, monetary policy, and geopolitical environments of the 1970s are quite different from today’s. To wit, consider the following reasons for inflation in […]
According to a recent analysis by the Wall Street Journal, corporate treasurers are fundamentally shifting how they approach the capital markets to navigate record-breaking supply. Rather than offering debt in monolithic blocks, firms are increasingly utilizing multiple corporate debt tranches to better manage investor demand. This strategic shift has pushed the average number of pieces […]