The novice trader netting $10 million? We hardly doubt this was an “internal” error. Anyone in the biz knows the difficult regulations and how stringent risk is. This story wreaks of fraudulent insider doing. Anyway, we know damn well he isn’t going to see any of that!
There was a lot to digest last week, so let’s jump right to it.
The AP reported that the Supreme Court has ruled that states can force online shoppers to pay sales tax (all times local).
This was an obvious jab at the monopoly Amazon (AMZN) holds in the online e-commerce business. AP also reported that Wayfair (W), one of the companies named in the case and the e-commerce company that sells home goods expects this decision to have a “notable impact” on its business.
Our home state of Illinois is probably salivating, most likely spending the money before it’s even collected!
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Novice trader’s $10 million: We also read a story from the FT, that some novice day trader who thought he was trading a sim account amassed huge losses in a live account, to then realize he was trading a live account.
He went on to recoup all the losses and rack up $10 million in profits. Harouna Traroré was practice trading on Valbury Capital Brokerages platform, then realized the trades he was doing were in a live account, but not before he racked up some decent sized losses.
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Imperial President? Nomi Prins penned an excellent article last week via tomdispatch.com, entitled What’s the End Game? Her original article can be found under, Imperial President or Emperor with No Clothes.
Nomi voices her concern about the president’s recent tariff and harsh global rhetoric amongst our trading partners. She called into question his ability to actually sign or negotiate actual bi-lateral trade agreements.
She fears these trade wars may end up costing millions of American jobs instead of spurring them. We have discussed at length, what seems to be Trump’s anti-globalist agenda, and we can’t say that we disagree with his themes.
However, we must point out the fact that trade wars spur currency wars and they in turn spur hot wars, or real wars.
So, she may be on to something, but then again, is there really any other choice? Can the U.S. continue to afford exporting standard of living around the globe in return for cheap goods and services? We doubt it, so maybe Trump has just forced the issue to the forefront, rather than kick the can any further down the road.
We feel that perhaps there is more to this story behind the curtain and that American security is indeed a concern, especially with China.
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Speaking of China, the tariffs have had an obvious effect as FDI has plummeted.
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The OPEC meeting was in full anticipation mode on Friday as Crude Oil jumped a massive 4.6% then as speculators and those in the know anticipated higher prices as a result from their recent meeting in Vienna.
After agreeing to adding to production by 1 million barrels a day, the price jumped as investors obviously felt that perhaps the increase wouldn’t actually get to that level or geopolitical struggles out of Iran and Venezuela may hinder this production increase.
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As we pointed out last week, the equity markets have gone nowhere since carving out the January-February range. This doesn’t bode well, in our opinion and we have a few charts that we are seeing that don’t paint a very formidable picture of market strength. Let us begin with the obvious chart, that is, where is everyone hiding?
Next, let’s display exactly how this market has been so well supported.
And we have a great chart from Topdown Charts, entitled “US Stockmarket Leverage.”
Now let’s see what the “SMART” money has been doing:
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Flattened equity markets: Now we know something will have to give here. This simply cannot stay this far out of sync for long. With short rates continuing to be hawkishly driven higher and with long rates holding steady, the eventual flattened yield curve will indeed flatten the equity markets.
Long end rates have held up swimmingly despite all this Russian and alleged Chinese Treasury selling.
Speaking of this false threat of China dumping Treasuries, we feel that would exacerbate their problems, not fix them. You can’t peg your currency and sell the currency that you are pegged to without repercussions.
So that threat is patently false in our opinion. Anyway, you can see the U.S. Treasury Bond chart below. We figure any break of 2.96 will see further piling on driving rates lower and yield curves that much flatter:
Straight up quant: Now the icing on the cake, from one of the best analysts on the Street in our opinion, Pension Partners Charlie Bilello. If you don’t follow him on Twitter, or listen to his webinars, you are a fool. He is a straight up quant that gets it more so than normal, so we advise you to follow him.
Anyway, he posted this chart on Twitter of the Dow (DJIA).
When this breaks, we are certain, the flood gates will be sprung wide open:
Finally, we leave you with our weekly futures settles of the markets we tend to follow closely.
RBOB has peaked our attention, Crude continues to be black gold and the equities haven’t done much. In fact, the Nikkei and the DAX are of utmost concern which may perhaps lead to a broader global sell off.
With the half way point of the year gone, we can’t help but think a reversal of fortunes from the first half of the year may be in order and that volatility is begging to pick up,
Cheers!
Nell
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