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Meet “Gekko”: The Robot Bond Trader Being Developed By Quant Funds
Meet “Gekko”: The Robot Bond Trader Being Developed By Quant Funds
We pointed out earlier this year that “factor based” quant funds were having difficulty finding strategies to beat the market – especially now that all quant funds are doing the same thing. But now, the computer scientists at Cantab Capital, based out of Cambridge, have taken on another challenge: trying to create the next “bond king” out of algorithms and data, according to FT.
The company’s computer scientists have backgrounds in astrophysics and molecular biology and are trying to write programs that “surf the undulations” of the bond market in order to copy the best features from human traders, while leaving their frailties behind.
Anthony Lawler, co-head of GAM Systematic, the arm of the Swiss asset manager that owns Cantab said: “An active credit trader is ‘feeling the tape’. We want our models to replicate that behaviour.”
This is now the new world of bond investing, formerly an old-school industry that, for decades, had been limited to wealthy fund managers in places like London and New York. The rarely anointed title of “bond king” – usually used by the media – was reserved for traders like Bill Gross and Jeff Gundlach in the past. It’s now being sought after by computers.
Rare Fund Freeze Attracts Scrutiny of U.K. Regulators
Paul Kamenski, co-head of credit at Man Group’s Numeric unit said: “This feels like the early days of the ‘quant’ equity industry. A lot of the research is in the early stage but the pace of advancement is likely to be faster. There’s a realisation that this is an untapped market.”
Man Numeric launched a bond platform late last year that was initially focused on US junk bonds. Now, it plans on expanding into investment grade corporate debt.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Negative Interest Rates Spread To Mortgage Bonds
Negative Interest Rates Spread To Mortgage Bonds
There are trillions of dollars of bonds in the world with negative yields – a fact with which future historians will find baffling.
Until now those negative yields have been limited to the safest types of bonds issued by governments and major corporations. But this week a new category of negative-yielding paper joined the party: mortgage-backed bonds.
Bankers Stunned as Negative Rates Sweep Across Danish Mortgages
(Investing.com) – At the biggest mortgage bank in the world’s largest covered-bond market, a banker took a few steps away from his desk this week to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him.
As mortgage-bond refinancing auctions came to a close in Denmark, it was clear that homeowners in the country were about to get negative interest rates on their loans for all maturities through to five years, representing multiple all-time lows for borrowing costs.
“During this week’s auctions, there were three times when I had to stand back a little from the screen and raise my eyebrows somewhat,” said Jeppe Borre, who analyzes the mortgage-bond market from a unit of the Nykredit group that dominates Denmark’s $450 billion home-loan industry.
For one-year adjustable-rate mortgage bonds, Nykredit’s refinancing auctions resulted in a negative rate of 0.23%. The three-year rate was minus 0.28%, while the five-year rate was minus 0.04%.
The record-low mortgage rates, which don’t take into account the fees that homeowners pay their banks, are the latest reflection of the global shift in the monetary environment as central banks delay plans to remove stimulus amid concerns about economic growth.
Denmark has had negative rates longer than any other country. The central bank in Copenhagen first pushed its main rate below zero in the middle of 2012, in an effort to defend the krone’s peg to the euro. The ultra-low rate environment has dragged down the entire Danish yield curve, with households in the country paying as little as 1% to borrow for 30 years. That’s considerably less than the U.S. government.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Bank of Japan & the Bond Crisis
Bank of Japan & the Bond Crisis
The Great Financial Unknown is now upon us. After 10 years of Quantitative Easing, the European Central Bank (ECB) in Europe owns 40% of the national debts in the EU and it can neither sell them nor stop buying without creating a Panic in Interest Rates. Likewise, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) owns between 70% and 80% of the ETF bond market in Japan. The Bank of Japan confirmed it is ending free market determination of interest rates for the municipal level and that they “will not require any procedures such as auction as the method of determining lending conditions.” today it may introduce a lending facility for its exchange-traded fund buying program, which would allow it to temporarily lend ETFs to market participants.
4. Introduction of Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) Lending Facility
The Bank will consider the introduction of ETF Lending Facility, which will make it possible
to temporarily lend ETFs that the Bank holds to market participants.
The statement at the end of the announcement on the last page on its monetary policy has left traders in shock. This appears that the BoJ realizes that it now effectively has destroyed its bond market and realizes that there is not only the end of a free market, but there is a contagion of surrounding lack of liquidity.
We have never before in the history of human society ever witnessed such a major financial crisis. The BoJ makes it clear it will continue its policy of Quantitative Easing. It stated plainly:
The Bank will continue with “Quantitative and Qualitative Monetary Easing (QQE) with
Yield Curve Control,” aiming to achieve the price stability target of 2 percent, as long as it is
necessary for maintaining that target in a stable manner.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is This Downturn A Repeat of 2008?
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Is This Downturn A Repeat of 2008?
Even people who don’t follow the stock market closely are aware that the global economy is weakening and appears to be heading into recession.
For those who track the stock market, the signs are ominous: the U.S. was the last major market to notch gains this year and in October the U.S. market followed the rest of the global markets into an extended slide which has yet to end.
Just as sobering, key sectors such as oil, banking and utilities have crashed with alarming ferocity, reaching oversold levels last seen in 2008 as the global financial system was melting down.
These sectors crashing sends an unmistakable signal: the global economy is heading into a potentially severe recession and assets will not be rising in value in a recessionary environment. So better to sell risk-assets like stocks now rather than later, and rotate the money into safe assets such as Treasury bonds.
And indeed, households now own more Treasuries than the Federal Reserve–a remarkable shift in risk appetite.
Many other indicators of recession are in the news: auto and home sales and global trade are all slumping.
Are we in a repeat of the global financial meltdown and recession of 2008-09? The sharp drop in equities is certainly reminiscent of 2008. Indeed, the December decline is the worst in a decade. Or are we entering a different kind of recession, the equivalent of uncharted waters?
And if we are entering a recession, what can central banks and governments do to ease the financial pain and damage? We can’t be sure of much, but we can be relatively confident central banks and states will respond to the cries to “do something.” This poses two questions: what actions can central banks/states take, and will those policies work or will they backfire and make the recession worse?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
2019: The Beginning Of The End (Free Premium Report)
2019: The Beginning Of The End (Free Premium Report)
Welcome to our new readers and a very Happy New Year to everyone!
Now that it’s 2019, we’re going to start the new year here at Peak Prosperity by responding to the wishes of our premium subscribers and making our most recent premium report free to everyone.
For those unfamiliar with our work, it’s based on the idea that humanity is hurtling towards a disaster of our own making. Several powerful and unsustainable trends are all converging towards an ever-narrowing gap in the future.
Because of this, the individual and collective choices we make today take on ever-increasing importance. Our collective choices — around such issues as rampant money-printing by central banks, the failure to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, and tossing an entire younger generation under the bus because that’s most convenient for an older generation afraid of living within its actual means — are all pointing to a diminshed and disappointing future. We need to make better choices that align ourselves with these (and many other) looming realities.
This is our work here at Peak Prosperity.
For ten years now, we’ve been pointing out the many predicaments society faces. And we will continue our vigilance. No because we enjoy crisis, or that we relish delivering hard messages, but because these are the times in which we live — and those, like you, who are awake to reality, need unvarnished facts and data to make informed decisions.
So we offer to you, today, a peek behind our premium subscription curtain. The people who subscribe to our work do so to make themselves more resilient, as well as to support Peak Prosperity financially as we carry on our mission of “Creating a world worth inheriting”, which invoves bringing difficult messages to reluctant audiences.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Ghost Of Christmas Future
Here in the brief period between Christmas and New year’s, as a writer I am obligated to say happy, wishful things. I have to confess, I’m just not feeling it this year, so I’ll just do the minimum here and return to being a curmudgeon, because that’s what the times call for.
So, happy new year. I hope everything works out well for you in 2019.
There, with that behind us we can now return our attention to the true state of the world, which is deteriorating and getting worse.
For most people things will be decidedly worse, not better, as things progress along their current trajectories. The only planet we’ve got to live on is being killed by human activity and gross inattention, while economically the greatest and most ill-advised credit bubble in all of human history flirts with the sort of sudden disaster that follows shortly after the failure of one’s reserve parachute.
As I’ve often repeated, I truly wish this weren’t the case. I don’t have a “bummer gene” that relishes bad news nor do I enjoy being “that guy” who says what no one wants to hear.
Many of you reading this know exactly what I’m talking about. You, too, had to keep your lips zipped over the holidays lest the strained family small talk and opening of cheaply-made forgettable gifts be ruined by any talk of ‘reality’. Sure, everyone can inwardly wince at uncle Jack’s sixth bourbon and tolerate the buffoonery and social awkwardness sure to follow because “it’s only once a year.”
But collapsing insect populations, species loss, shrinking aquifers, and the utter betrayal of the younger generations by the “olders” running the fiscal and monetary policies of the world are not as easily dismissed. There’s no relief at the end of the day when the problem drives itself home.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
2019: Zombie Markets Before The Fall
I haven’t really written about finance since April of this year, and given recent fluctuations in what people persist in calling the markets, maybe it’s time. Then again, nothing has changed since that article in April entitled This Is Not A Market. I was right then, and I still am.
[..] markets need price discovery as much as price discovery needs markets. They are two sides of the same coin. Markets are the mechanism that makes price discovery possible, and vice versa. Functioning markets, that is. Given the interdependence between the two, we must conclude that when there is no price discovery, there are no functioning markets. And a market that doesn’t function is not a market at all.
[..] we must wonder why everyone in the financial world, and the media, is still talking about ‘the markets’ (stocks, bonds et al) as if they still existed. Is it because they think there still is price discovery? Or do they think that even without price discovery, you can still have functioning markets? Or is their idea that a market is still a market even if it doesn’t function?
But perhaps that is confusing, and confusion in and of itself doesn’t lead to better understanding. So maybe I should call what there is out there today ‘zombie markets’. It doesn’t really make much difference. What murdered functioning markets is intervention by central banks, in alleged attempts to save those same markets. Cue your favorite horror movie.
Now Jerome Powell and the Fed he inherited are apparently trying to undo the misery Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen before him wrought upon the economic system, and people, cue Trump, get into fights about that one. All the while still handing the Fed, the ECB, the BoJ, much more power than they should ever have been granted.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
2018 Year in Review
2018 Year in Review
Every year, friend-of-the-site David Collum writes a detailed “Year in Review” synopsis full of keen perspective and plenty of wit. This year’s is no exception. As with past years, he has graciously selected PeakProsperity.com as the site where it will be published in full. It’s quite longer than our usual posts, but worth the time to read in full. A downloadable pdf of the full article is available here, for those who prefer to do their power-reading offline. — cheers, Adam
David B. Collum
Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology – Cornell University
Email: dbc6@cornell.edu
Twitter: @DavidBCollum
“Dave: You are roundly tolerated.”
~Danielle Dimartino Booth, former Fed advisor and founder of Quill Intelligence
Every December, I write a Year in Reviewref 1 that’s first posted on Chris Martenson & Adam Taggart’s website Peak Prosperityref 2 and later at ZeroHedge.ref 3 This is my tenth, although informal versions go back further. It always presents a host of challenging questions like, “Why the hell do I do this?” Is it because I am deeply conflicted for being a misogynist with sexual contempt—both products of the systemic normalization of toxic masculinity perpetuated by an oppressively patriarchal societal structure? No. That’s just crazy talk. More likely, narcissism and need for e-permanence deeply buried in my lizard brain demands surges of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that drives kings to conquer new lands, Jeff Bezos to make even more money, and Harvey Weinstein to do whatever that perv does. The readership has held up so far. Larry Summers said he “finished the first half.” Even as a fib that’s a dopamine cha-ching.
“If you think you are too small to make an impact, try spending the night in a room with a mosquito.”
~African proverb
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Every Bubble Is In Search Of A Pin
Every Bubble Is In Search Of A Pin
Now that the world’s central banking cartel is taking a long-overdue pause from printing money and handing it to the wealthy elite, the collection of asset price bubbles nested within the Everything Bubble are starting to burst.
The cartel (especially the ECB and the Fed) is hoping it can gently deflate these bubbles it created, but that’s a fantasy. Bubbles always burst badly; it’s their nature to do so. Economic suffering and misery always accompany their termination.
It’s said that “every bubble is in search of a pin”. History certainly shows they always manage to find one.
History also shows that after the puncturing, pundits obsess over what precise pin triggered it, as if that matters. It doesn’t, because ’cause’ of a bubble’s bursting can be anything. It can be a wayward comment by a finance minister, otherwise innocuous at any other time, that spooks a critical European bond market at exactly the right (wrong?) moment, triggering a runaway cascade.
Or it might be the routine bankruptcy of a small company that unexpectedly exposes an under-hedged counterparty, thereby setting off a chain reaction across the corporate bond market before the contagion quickly spreads into other key elements of the financial system.
Or perhaps it will be the US Justice Department arresting a Chinese technology executive on murky, over-reaching charges to bully an ally into accepting that unilateral US sanctions are to be abided by everyone, regardless of sovereignty.
How was it that the famous Tulip Bulb bubble came to a crashing end back in the 1600’s? No one knows the exact moment or trigger. But we can easily imagine that in some Dutch pub on the fateful night on the Feb 3rd1637, a bidder on the most-coveted of all bulbs, the Semper Augustus, had an upset stomach and briefly grimaced when hit by a ripping gas pain:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Mike Maloney: “One Hell Of A Crisis”
Mike Maloney: “One Hell Of A Crisis”
Mike Maloney, monetary historian and founder of GoldSilver.com, has just released two new chapters of his excellent Hidden Secrets Of Money video series.
In producing the series, Maloney has reviewed several thousand years of monetary history and has observed that government intervention and mismanagement — such as is now rampant across the world — has alwaysresulted in the diminishment and eventual failure of currency systems.
As for the world’s current fiat currency regimes, Mike sees a reckoning approaching. One that will be preceded by massive losses rippling across nearly all asset classes, destroying the phantom wealth created during the latest central bank-induced Everything Bubble, and grinding the global economy to a halt:
Gold and silver are tremendously undervalued right now, and I dare you to try to find another asset that is tremendously undervalued. There just is not. By all measures, everything is just in these hyper-bubbles. OK, real estate is not quite a hyper-bubble; it’s not quite as big as 2005 and 2006, but by all measures, it’s back into a bubble. But now, we’ve got the bond bubble, the biggest debt bubble in the world. These are all going to pop.
We had a stock market crash in the year 2000, and then in 2008, we had a crash in stocks and real estate. The next crash is going to be in stocks, real estate and bonds — including a lot of sovereign debt, corporate bonds and a whole lot of other bonds that will be crashing at the same time. So, it will be all of the standard financial asset classes, including the traditional ‘safe haven’ of bonds that are going to be crashing at the same time that the world monetary system is falling apart.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Emerging Markets Face a New Problem as Trillions in Bonds Mature – and Soon
Emerging Markets Face a New Problem as Trillions in Bonds Mature – and Soon
The U.S. dollar continues being the single most important factor for the Emerging Markets.
And as the dollar keeps getting stronger – it will continue crippling them.
“But isn’t a strong dollar supposed to be better for Emerging Markets by making their exports cheaper?”
Yes – and no.
True, a stronger dollar does make foreign currencies cheaper – which can boost their exports.
But the problem today is that Emerging Markets are bogged down with massive amounts of dollar-denominated debts. And the weaker their currencies are – the harder it is to repay those debts.
That’s very important to keep in mind – especially as trillions of dollar-denominated bonds mature over the next few years.
Let’s take a closer look. . .
Since 2009 – Emerging Market governments and corporations have gorged on cheap dollar debt.
How?
Because when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to zero and launched three rounds of money printing (via Quantitative Easing) in attempt to save the global financial system post-2008 – two critical things ended up happening.
First – U.S. investors were starved for yield. Meaning they couldn’t make enough interest from government bonds to meet their future obligations. So they started lending abroad to foreign countries that offered higher rates of interest (although much riskier).
And even though some of these borrowers didn’t deserve such favorable rates (like Turkey and Argentina and Greece) – lenders still gave them what they wanted.
And Second – the Emerging Market governments and corporations saw this as an opportunity to get cheaper dollar financing. They could now get dollar loans at lower rates of interest than what was available locally.
Here’s an example of a ‘free money’ tactic Emerging Markets would do with their cheaper U.S. debt. . .
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is The Long-Anticipated Crash Now Upon Us?
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Is The Long-Anticipated Crash Now Upon Us?
I admit: I’m a permabear.
This is no surprise to those who know and have followed me over the years. But I’m publicly proclaiming my ‘bearishness’ because doing so might open up a needed and long overdue dialog.
Here’s my fundamental position: Infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.
Cutting to the chase, this is why I predict a major crash/collapse across stocks, bonds and real estate is on the way.
The recent market weakness seen over the past two weeks is nothing compared to what’s in store. As we’ve been carefully chronicling, bubbles burst from ‘the outside in’, starting at the weaker places at the periphery before progressing to the center.
Emerging market equities are now down -26% from their January highs and -18% year-to-date. China’s stocks market is down -32%, even with substantial intervention by the government to prop things up.
The periphery has been weakening all year, and the contagion has now spead worldwide.
Taken as a whole, global equities have shed some $13 trillion of market capitalization for a -15% decline:
The rot has spread to the core with surprising speed. Now even the formerly bullet-proof US equity markets are stumbling.
The S&P 500 is now negative on the year:
It’s been obvious for a long time to those who have watched The Crash Course that endless growth is simply not possible. Not for a bacteria colony in a petrie dish, not for an economy, not for any species on the planet. Eventually, when finite resources are involved, limits matter.
But the vast majority of society pretends as if this isn’t true.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Weighted Average Cost Of Capital
ittybiz.com
The Weighted Average Cost Of Capital
This is a revisitation of a report I wrote back in late 2016, predicting the imminent end of zero-bound interest rates and warning of the downward pressure that rising rates, mathematically, must place on today’s elevated asset prices.
Since the publication of that report, interest rates have indeed vaulted higher. Look at how the 3-month US Treasury yield has exploded since the start of 2017:
A Little Background
When I was fresh out of college in the mid-90s, I landed a job at Merrill Lynch. I was an “investment banking analyst”, which meant I had no life outside of the office and hardly ever slept. I pretty much spoke, thought, and dreamed in Excel during those years.
Much of my time there was spent building valuation models. These complicated spreadsheets were used to provide an air of quantitative validation to the answers the senior bankers otherwise pulled out of their derrieres to questions like: Is the market under- or over-valuing this company? Can we defend the acquisition price we’re recommending for this M&A deal? What should we price this IPO at?
Back then, Wall Street still (mostly) believed that fundamentals mattered. And one of the most widely-accepted methods for fundamentally valuing a company is the Discounted Cash Flow (or “DCF”) method. I built a *lot* of DCF models back in those days.
I promise not to get too wonky here, but in a nutshell, the DCF approach projects out the future cash flows a company is expected to generate given its growth prospects, profit margins, capital expenditures, etc. And because a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, it discounts the further-out projected cash flows more than the nearer-in ones. Add everything up, and the total you get is your answer to what the fair market value of the company is.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Wolf Richter: Making Sense Of The Recent Market Gyrations
Wolf Richter: Making Sense Of The Recent Market Gyrations
Every week at PeakProsperity.com, we record a podcast exclusive for our premium subscribers titled Off The Cuff, where Chris and a weekly expert discuss the notable developments of the week. Every once in a while, we’ll share one of these episodes with the general public, which we’re doing this week. Here’s Chris Martenson in discussion with Wolf Richter, evaluating the causes and repercussions of last week’s violent drop across the stock and bond markets.
Recorded last week as the market was in full melt-down mode, Chris and Wolf Richter decode the underlying drivers of the sudden reversal, and peer into the future to predict what is most likely to happen next. Both agree that, whether stocks are briefly ‘rescued’ in the ensuing days, the long-awaited downward re-pricing of the ‘Everything Bubble’ is nigh.
As Wolf puts it:
The emerging market stock index is down 22% from January. So they have gotten hit pretty hard. There’s this trend from the outside toward the core. So when something deteriorates, it starts at the outside and moves toward the core, the core being the higher quality US financial instruments. So that’s probably a dynamic that has already started. And I agree with you. The central banks removing liquidity is a big thing, and it has a big impact.
And people have said, for years, well, QE didn’t cause stocks to go up. So when that goes away, it’s not going to cause stocks to go down. But that’s just not true. The purpose of QE, as Bernanke himself explained it in a Washington Post editorial in 2010, is to create the wealth effect, to bring asset prices up so that the wealthy feel wealthier and spend more money and then this someone trickles down.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Has “It” Finally Arrived?
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Has “It” Finally Arrived?
With the recent plunge in the S&P 500 of over 5%, has the long-anticipated (and long-overdue) market correction finally begun?
It’s hard to say for certain. But the systemic cracks we’ve been closely monitoring definitely got an awful lot wider this week.
After nearly a decade of endless market boosting, manipulation and regulatory neglect, all of the trading professionals I personally know are watching with held breath at this stage. The central banks have distorted the processes of price discovery and market structure for so many years now, that it’s difficult to know yet whether their grip on the markets has indeed failed.
But what we know for certain is that bubbles always burst. Inevitably. Each is built upon a fallacy; and when that finally becomes apparent to enough people, the mania ends.
And today, there are currently massive bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate. Every one courtesy of the central banks (as we have written about in great detail here at PeakProsperity.com over the years).
And with no Plan B in place to gracefully exit the corner they have painted themselves — and thereby the global economy — into, the only option available to them is to double-down on the pretense that we’d all be screwed without their stewardship. They have to do this I suppose. To admit the truth would throw the world into panic and themselves out of a job.
Who knows what they think privately? But in public, they give us real gems like these:
Williams Says Fed Rate Hikes Helping Curb Financial Risk-Taking
U.S. interest-rate increases will help reduce risk-taking in financial markets, Federal Reserve Bank of New York President John Williams said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
