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Total G-3 Central Bank Control - Craig Hemke

There’s a lot of amazement and wonder at how the “stock market” can be up today with the devastating news out of Texas and the latest North Korean missile launch. Longtime readers of TFMR know exactly how this market levitation is accomplished so this post is designed as a public service in order to better educate and inform everyone else.

Let’s just keep it simple…

In 2017…and, actually, since 2008…the “markets” don’t actually exist. Oh sure, there are trades and prices but in terms of what the markets were 20 years ago?…those days are long gone. Instead, what we have now is total HFT domination. Over 90% of all volume on the NYSE and NASDAQ is now done through HFT machines that swap positions back and forth. This is common knowledge and if you and I know this, then you can be assured that The Fed, The ECB and the BoJ ( known henceforth as the G-3) know this, too.

To that end, since the G-3 are dedicated to market stability and the wealth effect, these central banks clearly seek to influence the direction of the equity markets by influencing the two key drivers of the HFT machines. And what are these drivers? The currency pair of USDJPY and the volatility index known as the VIX. Simply stated, if your wish is to drive “the stock market” higher, all you need to do is buy the USDJPY while at the same time selling the VIX. It truly is that simple.

To that end, daily observation of trading patterns allows us to observe a clear and obvious, algo-driven program in the all-important USDJPY. Because of the sheer size of the forex market (up to $7T/day), any algorithm put in place to manage this pair could only come from pockets deep enough to make it happen….namely, the G-3.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Mystery Investor Has Made A 262 Million Dollar Bet That The Stock Market Will Crash By October

July 24, 2017

A Mystery Investor Has Made A 262 Million Dollar Bet That The Stock Market Will Crash By October

One mystery trader has made an extremely large bet that the stock market is going to crash by October, and if he is right he could potentially make up to 262 million dollars on the deal. Fortunes were made and lost during the great financial crisis of 2008, and the same thing will happen again the next time we see a major stock market crash. But will that stock market crash take place before 2017 is over? Without a doubt, we are in the midst of one of the largest stock market bubbles in U.S. history, and many prominent investors are loudly warning of an imminent stock market collapse. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this stock market bubble is going to end very badly just like all of the other stock market bubbles throughout history have, but if you could know the precise timing that it will end you could set yourself up financially for the rest of your life.

I want to be very clear about the fact that I do not know what will or will not happen by the end of October. But one mystery investor is extremely convinced that market volatility is going to increase over the next few months, and if he is correct he will make an astounding amount of money. According to Business Insider, the following is how the trade was set up…

To fund it, the investor sold 262,000 VIX puts expiring in October, with a strike price of 12.
The trader then used those proceeds to buy a VIX 1×2 call spread, which involves buying 262,000 October contracts with a strike price of 15 and selling 524,000 October contracts with a strike price of 25.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Deutsche Bank: The Market’s Current “Metastability” Will Lead To “Cataclysmic Events”

June 18, 2017

Deutsche Bank: The Market’s Current “Metastability” Will Lead To “Cataclysmic Events”

With the VIX slammed at the close of trading on “quad-witch” Friday, sending it just shy of single-digits once again and pushing stocks back in the green in the last seconds of trading, the much discussed topic of (near) record low volatility simply refuses to go away, which means even more attempts to i) explain it, ii) predict what ends the current regime of “endemic complacency” and iii) forecast the “catastrophic” damage to markets when it does finally end as JPM’s Kolanovic did earlier this week, when he set the bogey on a modest increase in the VIX from 10 to just 15.

Overnight, applying his typical James Joycean, stream-of-consciousness approach to capital markets, Deutche Bank’s derivatives analyst Aleksandar Kocic penned his latest metaphysical essay on this topic, which covered most of the above bases, and which postulates that far from “stable” the current market equilibrium is one which can be described as “metastable”, the result of widespread complacency, and which he compares to an avalanche:”a totally innocuous event can trigger a cataclysmic event (e.g. a skier’s scream, or simply continued snowfall until the snow cover is so massive that its own weight triggers an avalanche.”

He also inverts the conventionally accepted paradigm that lack of volatility means lack of uncertainty, and writes that to the contrary, it is the ubiquitous prevalence of uncertainty that has allowed vol to plunge to its recent all time lows, keeping markets “metastable.”

How does the regime change from the current “metastable” regime to an “unstable” one? To Kocic the transition will take place when uncertainty, for whatever reason, is eliminated: “Big changes threaten to explode not when uncertainty begins to rise, but when it is withdrawn.” He also points out that while there is punishment for those who seek to defect from a “complacent regime”…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Murderous Complacency

February 4, 2017

A Murderous Complacency

Dark omens are circling everywhere in today’s markets

murder: a flock of crows

~ Miriam-Webster dictionary

Many view the appearance of crows as an omen of death because ravens and crows are scavengers and are generally associated with dead bodies, battlefields, and cemeteries, and they’re thought to circle in large numbers above sites where animals or people are expected to soon die.

~ “Nature”, PBS.org

Running PeakProsperity.com requires me to read and process a lot of data on a daily basis. As it’s hard to digest it all in real-time, I keep a running list of charts, tables and articles that catch my attention, to return to when I have the time to give them my full focus.

Lately, that list has been getting quite long. And it’s largely full of indicators that concern me; signals that the long era of “extend and pretend” in today’s markets may finally be at its terminus.

Like crows circling overhead, every day brings with it new worrisome statistics that portend an ill change ahead. Indeed, these omens are increasing so quickly now that it’s hard not to feel like Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s suspense classic The Birds:

So what are the data that make me think these crows will soon be feasting on the carcass of the great bull market that has powered stock, bonds, real estate and most other asset classes to record highs since 2009?

Rogue’s Gallery

Complacent Investors

Investors have enjoyed remarkably gentle treatment by the stock markets over the past half-decade. Retracements have occurred much less frequently than historical norms, and have been shallow and short-lived when they happened.

Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat and often referred to as “Wall Street’s biggest bull” notes that 2016 was the mildest year on record for the S&P 500, with only 7 days in which the index traded at less than 3% of its 52-week high.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weekly Commentary: Draghi Ready to Fight

January 24, 2016

Weekly Commentary: Draghi Ready to Fight

A few Friday Bloomberg headlines: “Asian Stocks Jump by Most in Four Months on Stimulus Speculation;” “Japanese Stocks Surge by Most in Four Months as Bears Retreat;” “Hong Kong Dollar Jumps Most in 12 Years as Global Stocks Rally.” It was quite a week.

Back in early December I posited that Mario Draghi had evolved into the world’s most powerful central banker. I also stated my view that his inability to orchestrate a larger ECB QE program was likely an inflection point in the markets’ confidence in Draghi and central banking more generally. Mario’s not going down without a fight.

Global markets were too close to dislocating this week. Wednesday saw the S&P500 trade decisively below August lows. Japan’s Nikkei 225 Index sank to test November 2014 lows. Emerging stocks fell to six-year lows, with European equities at 13-month lows. Wednesday also saw WTI crude trade below $27 (sinking almost 7%), boosting y-t-d losses to 25%. Credit spreads were blowing out, and currency markets were increasingly disorderly. Early Thursday trading saw the Russian ruble down 5.3% (at a record low vs. dollar), with Brazil’s real also under intense pressure. The Hong Kong dollar peg was looking vulnerable. The VIX traded to the highest level since the August “flash crash,” while the Japanese yen traded to one-year highs (vs. $). De-risking/de-leveraging dynamics were quickly overwhelming global markets.

The Italian banking sector sank 7% Wednesday, pushing y-t-d losses above 20% (down 32% from 2015 highs). Fears of mounting bad loans and undercapitalization have been weighing on Italian and European bank shares and bonds. This week also saw a notable widening of sovereign spreads to bunds. Despite a post-Draghi narrowing of risk premiums, Italian spreads to bunds widened another seven bps this week, with Portuguese spreads blowing out 35 bps. A fragile European financial sector was rapidly succumbing to a deepening global financial crisis.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Conspiracy “Fact” – VIX Manipulation Runs The Entire Market

September 19, 2015

Conspiracy “Fact” – VIX Manipulation Runs The Entire Market

Ever since Simon Potter’s 2012 arrival as head of The NYFed’s trading desk, the manipulation of VIX (and thus its reflexive levered tail wagging the algo-driven dog of the indices) has been front-and-center day-after-day in the so-called US equity ‘market’. Since the introduction of VIX ETFs there has been an almost inexhaustible supply of conspiracy theory coincidental evidence of a mysteriously well-capitalized market participant always willing to step on the neck of any volatility-spike, thus protecting poor market participants from any prospective plunge. While only fring-blogs have noticed this in the past, now The FT admits that not only was recent volatility in markets exacerbated by VIX ETFs (thus confirming the tail-wagging-dog analogy), and further, the nature of the link between VIX ETFs and VIX Futures (rebalancing) enables frontrunning which serves to reinforce any trend into the close and thus manipulate the markets.

Since Simon Potter’s arrival at The NY Fed in 2012… the rather amusing correlation between the collapse in net VIX futures non-commercial spec interest (yes, the traded VIX, which courtesy of the New Normal’s relentless synthetic reflexivity has a huge impact on the trillions in underlying assets: think massive leverage) as per the CFTC’s weeklycommitment of traders report, and the arrival of Brian Sack’s replacement as head of the NY Fed’s trading desk, Simon Potter, the same former UCLA Econ PhD who recently delivered a very ornate speech explaining central bank interactions with financial markets “through the prism of an economist.” Now at least we know how said “interactions” look outside of “Market Manipulation for Econ PhD Dummies” and in practice.

So-called VIX-terminations have bcome ubiquitous…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Market’s “Other” Panic Indicator Just Went Off The Charts

September 1, 2015

The Market’s “Other” Panic Indicator Just Went Off The Charts

With indicators from macro-fundamentals (e.g. retail sales, core capex, inventory-to-sales) to market-oriented measures (VIX levels and backwardation, HY credit spreads, commodity prices) all flashing various colors of dead canary in the coal-mine red, we thought today’s colossal spike in the Arms (TRIN) Index was a notable addition.

An Arms Index value above one is bearish, a value below one is bullish and a value of one indicates a balanced market. Traders look not only at the value of the index, but also at how it changes throughout the day. Traders look for extremes in the index value for signs that the market may soon change directions. The Arm’s Index was invented by Richard W. Arms, Jr. in 1967. In essence, a sudden surge in the TRIN indicates a jump in trader lack of confidence, as everyone scrambles to either go long the 2-3 rising stocks, or to sell or short the biggest decliners, ignoring the bulk of the market..

Today’s move was far greater than “Black Monday’s market-halting crash:

In longer context:

As we noted previously, the Arms index is an indicator of market breadth essentially tracks lemming like momentum-chasing behavior with respect to volume… meaning today saw panic-buying volumes which given that it was dip-buyers at the close, we suspect won’t end well…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What If The “Crash” Is as Rigged as Everything Else?

August 26, 2015

What If The “Crash” Is as Rigged as Everything Else?

Take your pick–here’s three good reasons to engineer a “crash” that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

There is an almost touching faith that markets are rigged when they loft higher, but unrigged when they crash. Who’s to say this crash isn’t rigged? A few things about this “crash” (11% decline from all time highs now qualifies as a “crash”) don’t pass the sniff test.

Exhibit 1: VIX volatility Index soars to “the world is ending” levels when the S&P 500 drops a relatively modest 11%. The VIX above 50 is historically associated with declines of 20% or more–double the current drop.

When the VIX spiked above 50 in 2008, the market ended up down 57%. Now that’s a crash.

Exhibit 2: The VIX soared and the market cratered at the end of options expiration week (OEX), maximizing pain for the majority of punters. Generally speaking, OEX weeks are up. The exceptions are out of the blue lightning bolts such as the collapse of a major investment bank.

Was a modest devaluation in China’s yuan really that unexpected, given the yuan’s peg to the U.S. dollar which has risen 20% in the past year? Sorry, that doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Exhibit 3: When the VIX spiked above 30 in October 2014, signaling panic, the Federal Reserve unleashed the Bullard Put, i.e. the Fed’s willingness to unleash stimulus in the form of QE 4. Markets reversed sharply and the VIX collapsed.

Now the VIX tops 50 and the Federal Reserve issues an absurd statement that it doesn’t respond to equity markets. Well then what was the Bullard Put in October, 2014? Mere coincidence? Sorry, that doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Why would “somebody” engineer a mini-crash and send volatility to “the world is ending” levels? There are a couple of possibilities.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Stock Market’s Panic Potential

August 25, 2015

The Stock Market’s Panic Potential

The Odds Favor a “Warning Shot” Scenario – but there is a “But”

As regular readers have probably noticed, we have upped the frequency of our “caution is advised” posts on the stock market in recent weeks in light of the market’s increasingly deteriorating internals. Although one never knows when exactly such warning signs may begin to matter, it is always a good bet that they eventually will. Last week the market delivered a little wake-up call to the hitherto rather complacent majority of market participants, by essentially wiping out 9 months worth of gains in more or less just four trading days.

The S&P 500, daily – obviously, this chart doesn’t look good – click to enlarge.

The sheer speed of this decline masks the fact that the S&P 500 is actually only 163.83 points or 7.67% below its all time high made in May. In other words, this decline doesn’t even amount to a routine 10% correction yet. And yet, as Zerohedge reports, cries for intervention by the Fed are amusingly already going up. We actually don’t believe that the federal purveyors of Anglo-Saxon central banking socialism will jump into the breach thatquickly.

Last week’s sudden “1-800-get-me-out” moment certainly wasn’t widely expected, not least because it was an options expiration week, and expiration weeks normally tend to follow certain patterns. Either there is little net volatility, or if the market has a weak close on Wednesday, it tends to rise on Thursday and Friday. This even happened in the October 2014 sell-off, which ended on a Wednesday in an expiration week (with the SPX gaining 80 points between the Wednesday intraday low and the Friday intraday high, rendering a great many puts, VIX calls, etc. that were bought earlier in the week worthless).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wedges and Triangles: Big Move Ahead?

April 22, 2015

Wedges and Triangles: Big Move Ahead?

The central bank high is euphoric, the crash and burn equally epic.

Just out of curiosity, I called up a few charts of key markets: stocks (the S&P 500), volatility (VIX), gold and the U.S. dollar (UUP, an exchange-traded fund for the dollar). Interestingly, all of these charts displayed some version of a wedge/triangle.

In a wedge/triangle (a formation with many variations such as pennants), price traces out a pattern of higher lows and lower highs, compressing price action into the apex of a triangle as buyers and sellers reach an increasingly unstable equilibrium.

As price gets squeezed into a narrowing band, the likelihood increases that price will break out of the triangle, either up or down, in a major move.

So which way will these markets break–up or down? One thing is fairly certain: the S&P 500 (SPX) and the VIX (volatility) are on a see-saw–both don’t soar at the same time. If the VIX soars, stocks are plummeting as fear takes hold. If the VIX stumbles along the bottom of its range, market players are complacent and stocks loft higher.

Many observers see the same inverse relationship in gold and the U.S. dollar–when one is going up, the other is weakening.

I tested this widely accepted truism by aligning the charts of both the U.S. dollar and gold, and found that there were lengthy periods during which gold and the U.S. dollar rose in tandem: About That Supposed Correlation of the U.S. Dollar and Gold…. (July 8, 2013)

My conclusion: each is influenced by a number of factors, some shared, some unique to each asset. As a result of this complex confluence, at times both go up together and at times there is a negative correlation (see-saw effect), and during other periods, there is little correlation, i.e. they act entirely independent of the other.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

charles hugh smith-The Rubber Band Is Stretched–Will It Break?

November 15, 2014

charles hugh smith-The Rubber Band Is Stretched–Will It Break?.

A rubber band can remain stretched for some time, but it takes some force to keep it stretched.

The consensus is anticipating a smooth sleigh ride for Santa’s traditional stock market rally from November to year-end. But the rubber band of the current rally is looking quite stretched, and there’s a distinct possibility the rubber band snaps and Santa’s rally hits a rough patch and overturns, distributing lumps of coal rather than additional equity gains.

Exhibit 1: The Russell 2000 index (RUT). It’s hard not to notice that MACD is about to cross in a bearish signal, and that the stochastic has already crossed and is heading south.

Then there’s the open gaps below, which tend to get filled despite endless claims that “this rally is different.” Yes, of course it is.

At the previous top, the RUT noodled around in a trading range for a couple of weeks, reaching for a breakout that quickly failed.

The RUT has repeated the pattern rather neatly: two weeks of going nowhere (a.k.a. distribution), and a breakout that quickly reversed.

It’s also interesting that the RUT’s runs seem to last around 20 days or so. The downturn in October lasted about 22 days, and the current run-up is stretched tight at 24 days.

Exhibit 2: the volatility index (VIX). As Zero Hedge has noted, the VIX exhibits a peculiarity at the close of each trading session: it drops precipitously in the waning minutes of trading, and equally magically, stocks pop up to close positive for the day.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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