Category: zerohedge

Authored by Greg Piper via The College Fix,

Dissenting judge to university: Appeal this immediately…

Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, not his death, which happens in the spring. When it comes to dead litigation, it’s apparently the opposite.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has resurrected a lawsuit against the University of Mary Washington for not meddling enoughin its students’ lives.

Here’s some background:

A location-based social media app called Yik Yak used to exist. It let users post things anonymously in a given geographic area, such as around colleges.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of people posted boorish and offensive things. Even less surprisingly, people with fascist tendencies demanded their universities identify and punish those people.

A feminist group at UMW took this to the next level by filing a lawsuit last year alleging the public university failed to protect them from a “sexually hostile environment.”

Also named as a defendant was the university’s former president Richard Hurley, who allegedly retaliated against the plaintiffs …by publicly defending the school against the students’ claims. I’m not kidding.

The lawsuit’s other legal reasoning was not particularly convincing. The plaintiffs said UMW should have shut down Yik Yak by banning the app from the campus network. This would not have stopped anyone with a data signal from using the app. Which is basically everyone.

A federal judge knocked down the lawsuit a year ago, saying that implementing the plaintiffs’ demands “may have exposed the university to liability under the First Amendment.”

It wasn’t even clear the university had control over the people posting on Yik Yak, since they could have been members of the broader Fredericksburg community in the vicinity of the university, or just visitors passing through, or students communicating off-campus.

Assumed but never demonstrated in the lawsuit: whether the speech at issue in Yik Yak was unprotected under the First Amendment. You’d think this would be the first thing the 4th Circuit would nail down.

Nope!

As analyzed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the Richmond, Virginia-based appeals court completely ignored the legal status of the very speech at issue.

That was the focus of a friend-of-the-court brief filed by FIRE and other free-speech groups earlier this year. They argued that not only were the “yaks” cited by the plaintiffs “crude and offensive” at worst, and nowhere near unprotected “true threats,” but that their cited case law only applied to K-12 contexts.

The university did everything short of violating the First Amendment rights of other students to assuage the concerns of the plaintiffs, the brief argued: It was anything but “deliberately indifferent,” the threshold for private damages under Title IX.

The 2-1 majority took 57 pages to showcase its willful ignorance of First Amendment law, not only describing the yaks as “harassing and threatening” but explicitly rejecting a narrow remedy for the alleged problem:

[T]he Complaint shows that UMW had substantial control over the context of the harassment because it actually transpired on campus. Specifically, due to Yik Yak’s location-based feature, the harassing and threatening messages originated on or within the immediate vicinity of the UMW campus. …

[T]he Complaint alleges that the University could have disabled access to Yik Yak campuswide. The Complaint also alleges that the University could have sought to identify those students using UMW’s network to harass and threaten Feminists United members. If the University had pinpointed the harassers, it could then have circumscribed their use of UMW’s network.

What message does this ruling communicate to colleges in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, the 4th Circuit’s jurisdiction?

As explained by FIRE’s Samantha Harris, vice president for procedural advocacy, they are being told:

Title IX may sometimes require colleges to censor or block all students’ access to certain internet sites or services based solely on anonymous statements made in an online forum that the university does not control, by people who may not be on campus, or even affiliated with the university at all.

It is shocking that the majority opinion seems oblivious to its “far-reaching implications for universities’ obligation to monitor and address the off-campus, online speech of its students,” Harris says. They completely ignored “the enormous elephant in the room; if the speech was constitutionally protected, and was not harassment, then the question of substantial control is irrelevant.”

The third judge on the panel, G. Steven Agee, echoed this view in a 32-page dissent that eviscerates the majority for their misunderstanding of the Supreme Court’s controlling Davisstandard on harassment in an educational context.

Agee marveled at his colleagues’ “unprecedented view of a Title IX Davis claim,” which “exposes a funding recipient to liability even when the allegations show that neither the student victims nor their school knows who the harassers are, much less has control over them, and the school has no control over the environment in which the harassment occurred.”

He accused judges Robert King and Pamela Harris of “pure speculation to reach a desired result”: that the yaks seen by the plaintiffs came from fellow students, even though the yaks can be posted by anyone within a 1.5-mile radius of the viewer (the plaintiffs).

Agee notes that UMW, a liberal arts school, has a “roughly 0.3-square-mile territory in every direction” from the center of campus, meaning the yaks could have come from “residential neighborhoods, apartment complexes, and numerous shopping and dining establishments,” as well as the hospital, high school, regional library … you get the point.

“These deficits in the Complaint’s factual allegations are fatal” to the plaintiffs’ deliberate indifference claim, Agee writes: “Merely labeling something as student harassment does not make it so.”

FIRE’s Harris identifies one redeeming quality of the majority opinion: It wasn’t dumb enough to agree with the plaintiffs that university officials aren’t allowed to defend the institution against high-profile accusations in an equally public way.

She agrees with Agee’s mic drop against his colleagues, that they deserve a rebuke from the full 4th Circuit if not the Supreme Court:

Make no mistake, the majority’s novel and unsupported decision will have a profound effect, particularly on institutions of higher education, until the Supreme Court reaffirms that Davis means what it says. Institutions, like the University, will be compelled to venture into an ethereal world of non-university forums at great cost and significant liability, in order to avoid the Catch-22 Title IX liability the majority now proclaims. The University should not hesitate to seek further review.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2UYFC46 Tyler Durden

While it is probably not a pressing issue today with the Nasdaq just entering a bear market, and more than half the companies in the S&P well below 20% as the broader market has clearly peaked, Deutsche Bank’s quants recently published a note describing its favorite market timing indicator.

To determine if it is time to BTFD, or alternatively, to sell the rip, Deutsche Bank quant Ronnie Shah introduces one of his favorite contrarian indicators, dubbed the Variance Risk Premium (VRP) indicator, which measures market overreaction and underreaction to realized risk. In simple terms, VRP is the difference between options-implied risk (i.e., the VIX index) and realized risk (i.e., the actual risk in the market, historically measured over the last month).

If VRP is high, the biggest German bank sees this as a buying opportunity for risky assets, like equities and high-yield bonds, and explains his reasoning as follows: when VRP is high, VIX has typically shot up dramatically (i.e., the market is in panic mode). At the same time,
realized risk has probably also risen, but not to the same extent. In other words, the market has overreacted relative to what the actual realized data is telling traders.

Historical research shows that such episodes are good buying opportunities for risky assets on about a three-month horizon. On the other hand, when VRP is low, it tends to be a complacency indicator – investors are failing to price rising realized risk into the market, and as a result, favors selling risky assets like equities.

So it may come as a surprise to those bulls who consider every downtick as an invitation to buy, currently the VRP indicator is at 3.0, less than the long-term average of 12, and suggesting bearish sentiment, i.e., it is nowhere near an “all clear” signal to buy right now.

That said, Shah notes that he mostly pays attention to the VRP when it hits extreme levels (like +/- 2 standard deviations, or outside -10 and 34). It has a ways to go on either side, which means that anyone hoping to jump into the market whether long or short, will have to wait a bit longer.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2T7BD3B Tyler Durden

Speaking to Bloomberg TV, former NY Fed president and Goldman managing director Bill Dudley brought brief tears of laughter to the eyes of traders when he said the biggest joke today, if not this year: namely that the Fed is not there to take away the market’s pain.

• DUDLEY SAYS FED DOESN’T CARE ABOUT MARKET PRICES FOR THEMSELVES
• DUDLEY SAYS FED NOT THERE TO TAKE AWAY THE MARKET’S PAIN

Why is this funny? Because taking away the market’s pain is precisely what the Fed is meant to do… and Dudley knows it… and those watching Dudley know that he knows it. Hence the hilarity that ensues.

Next, Dudley confirmed what all traders already knew: that the Fed was dovish, but not dovish enough. This took place as the Dow was trading over 1000 point lower than where it was yesterday when the Fed released its statement:

• DUDLEY: FED MAY NOT HAVE DIALED IT BACK AS MUCH AS MKT WANTED
• DUDLEY: FED DIALED IT BACK A LITTLE AT MEETING

Dudley had some advice for economists, investors and traders: focus on the Fed’s outlook, which incidentally has always been wrong and will be again, but not for the immediate future, when the Fed continues to see “above trend growth”…

DUDLEY: KEY TO FOCUS ON FED’S OUTLOOK

DUDLEY: FED CONTINUING TO TIGHTEN AS IT SEES ABOVE-TREND GROWTH

… which is notable because it again means that the Fed is focusing on the economy, and not the market, a welcome departure from the Feds of Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen where the sanctity of the S&P was the supreme goal of all monetary policy.

And this is why stocks suddenly spiked just after 2pm: Dudley’s confirmation that if the economy slows down, the Fed would stop hiking…

• DUDLEY: IF ECONOMY STARTS TO WEAKEN THEY WOULD DEFINITELY PAUSE

… although in the very next sentence, Dudley also makes it clear that the Fed will continue shrinking its balance sheet:

• DUDLEY SAYS HE EXPECTS FED B/SHEET RUNOFF TO CONTINUE

The former NY Fed president also confirmed he actually read the projections, and noted that the Fed will hike at least 2-3 more times, and that yesterday’s hike was not a close call…

• DUDLEY: TIGHTER FINANCIAL CONDITIONS PROBABLY A NECESSARY THING
• DUDLEY: TWO OR THREE RATE HIKES BY FED SEEMS MOST LIKELY
• DUDLEY: RAISING RATES WAS RIGHT THING TO DO, NOT A CLOSE CALL

… for one reason: despite the ongoing market plunge, Dudley is clearly not worried about the level of the S&P, which is not “evidence” that monetary policy is too tight:

• DUDLEY: NOT MUCH EVIDENCE THAT MONETARY POLICY IS TOO TIGHT

In kneejerk response, the Dow surged nearly 400 points when it tried hard to convince itself that Dudley was dovish, however after failing to do so, the Dow has since given back almost half the spike and was once again headed lower.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2A8P8IU Tyler Durden

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Economic analyst Peter Schiff, who accurately predicted the 2008 recession said recently that we are not in a bear market. Instead, “we’re in a house of cards that the Fed built.”

Schiff is referring to the Federal Reserve, the United States’ central bank that answers to no one, has no competition, and has been responsible for every depression and recession since its inception. Schiff, who is the chief executive of Euro Pacific Capital, a longtime gold bug and market pundit, has been putting the upcoming economic disaster squarely on the shoulders of the Fed -very much where that blame belongs.

“I’m watching the U.S. economy implode from the beach,” Schiff told MarketWatchduring a recent phone interview from a beach in Puerto Rico.

“We’re in a lot of trouble,” he said.

Schiff has often been considered “polarizing”  to Wall Street pundits because he calls the Fed out for their destruction of the economy and that’s just not something most want to hear.  The prominent investor should be worthy of investors’ attention, however, because his prescient calls ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, which earned him plaudits as one of the few able to spot a global economic crisis emanating from the housing market, were correct as  MarketWatch reported.

Schiff says that after a decade of “easy money” policies, such as money printing and low interest rates, the Fed has set up an economy unable to cope with a rise in rates.

Schiff added that the inflation that has taken hold in the lofty prices of stocks and other assets and predicts will gradually shift to higher prices for consumers, who are already feeling their wallets burn thanks to the trade war. The other big problem is that Americans are broke.  Any interest rate hike could push debt-laden and cash-strapped Americans to the brink forcing them to choose which bills will get paid.

Meanwhile, the most recent reading showed that the 12-month rate of inflation was flat at 2%  (as measured by Federal Reserve’s preferred PCE) or personal consumption expenditures, gauge.  Yet most think it’s higher after noticing an uptick in their grocery bill for example. And as the interest rate goes up, servicing debt becomes more expensive, and that a huge concern for the heavily indebted American. 

“Markets are starting to crack as this debt is getting more expensive to service,” Schiff said.

“We built this gigantic bubble on this unprecedented amount of cheap money and quantitative easing, and now the hangover will be much worse,” Schiff said.

Schiff says it won’t matter what the Fed does Wednesday (policy makers hiked the rates as expected), with a rate increase of a quarter percentage point anticipated.

“I think what’s going to happen is the Fed is ultimately going to take rates back to zero,” he said.

Schiff says the problem is that the Fed and the vast majority of the American public (thanks to the propaganda spewed by the talking heads in the mainstream media) don’t realize just how bad the economy is and how close the everything bubble is to bursting. 

“They don’t realize how bad the economy is just like they didn’t realize how bad it was in 2007,” Schiff said.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2QI1kuM Tyler Durden

In the latest sign that the Trump-Kim brief honeymoon phase of mutually presenting glowing letters and heaping praise on each other is over, North Korea said Thursday it will never voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons unless the “U.S. nuclear threat to Korea” is eliminated, according a statement presented by its official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

“The proper definition of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is completely eliminating the American nuclear threat to North Korea before eliminating our nuclear capability,” the statement said. The aggressive statement asserting the US must blink first comes a moment the US and North Korea have been deadlocked over negotiations related to easing sanctions, and after the Trump-Kim historic summit on June 12 in Singapore wherein both leaders pledged to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

And though advancements between the North and South have been perhaps presented in a rosier light than what Thursday’s statement suggest is the actual state of relations, it appears the pressing issue remains of extensive military assets in South Korea as well as the South being under the US nuclear umbrella. The statement indicated North Korea will eventually demand withdrawal of the some 28,500 US troops currently stationed on the peninsula.

“The United States must now recognize the accurate meaning of the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and especially, must study geography,” the statement said.

And further, the KCNA statement said the following, according to the AP:

When we talk about the Korean Peninsula, it includes the territory of our republic and also the entire region of (South Korea) where the United States has placed its invasive force, including nuclear weapons. When we talk about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, it means the removal of all sources of nuclear threat, not only from the South and North but also from areas neighboring the Korean Peninsula.

The statement also charged Washington with altering what had been agreed upon at Singapore and using threats to create an impasse over post-summit talks. And since the the stalled talks, satellite imagery recently published in international media suggests North Korea is actively upgrading its nuclear facilities. 

The KCNA said, “If we unilaterally give up our nuclear weapons without any security assurance despite being first on the U.S. list of targets for pre-emptive nuclear strikes, that wouldn’t be denuclearization — it would rather be a creation of a defenseless state where the balance in nuclear strategic strength is destroyed and the crisis of a nuclear war is brought forth.” 

And demanding the end of sanctions and “and end to hostile policies” as a precondition to denuclearization, the statement continued:

The corresponding measures we have asked the United States to take aren’t difficult for the United States to commit to and carry out. We are just asking the United States to put an end to its hostile policies (on North Korea) and remove the unjust sanctions, things it can do even without a snap of a finger.

Meanwhile this week the State Department issued an update on stalled negotiations, saying the US “remains confident” about the push toward denuclearization, and that the US looks forward to the “commitments that Chairman Kim and President Trump have made.”

But Thursday’s North Korean statement has left the skeptics feeling justified as denuclearization looks further away than ever, given the seeming sheer impossibility of the demand for “the removal of all sources of nuclear threat, not only from the South and North but also from areas neighboring the Korean Peninsula“.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2EHTdYG Tyler Durden

While bullish traders have been cursing the Fed and chairman Powell for daring to suggest the punchbowl is being pulled away, and they actually have to take – gasp – risk if they want to generate return, sentiment has clearly turned increasingly negative with bears increasing their domination in the current market, which has seen all major indexes tumble and hit fresh 2018 lows. And even though Nomura’s quants note that through the end of the year there are a number of important economic events that could a shift in market sentiment, speculative investors like hedge funds will finish the year not only in pain, but having largely liquidated many of their winners (and losers).

But while we already know that hedge funds are constantly on the verge of suicide, and retail investors have rarely been more bearish, the far more important question is what are unemotional robo-traders – who trade each and every day, come rain or shine,  i.e. algos, quants and robots – doing.

For the answer we go to Nomura’s Masanari Takada who writes that systematic trend-followers like CTAs are liquidating what’s left of their remaining long positions at full speed. The silver lining is that since CTA have already largely deleveraged, the size of these remaining positions is very small, and the sell-off pressure created by cutting loss-making positions should be limited.

There is a far bigger risk however as SPX futures slide below 2,480 – the critical support level for typical CTA trend-following strategies. The risk is that CTAs flip to the short side for the first time in about three years, at which point it will no longer be about covering long exposure but rather adding to the short side, and by implication, the more the market falls, the more shorts will be laywered on and the greater the downside momentum and acceleration.

As Nomura concludes, “now is the time when CTAs are likely to chase further downside of SPX futures by starting to add fresh shorts, and thus we will have to keep a close eye on trend-following investor reactions.”

One look at the market, which is crashing, confirms that pattern chasers have indeed turned short and are now accelerating every move to the downside.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2UZotY1 Tyler Durden

With S&P nearing bear market territory (and Nasdaq already there), The Dow is accelerating its losses, down 600 points today amid shutdown fears, and down 1400 points from its post-Powell highs yesterday…

Leaving Dow and S&P down 8% year-to-date…

And the S&P only 3% away from bear market…

Somebody do something!!

via RSS https://ift.tt/2R8pRsc Tyler Durden

In a world where only one ‘actor’ is still buying stocks, Nomura’s Charlie McElligott just uttered the three most terrifying words in the world to stock market bull:

“buyback blackout begins…”

Having exposed the multitude reasons for concern below the surface of the stock market, the cross-asset strategy MD warns we have already begun to enter the buyback blackout period, with 75% of the S&P 500 “out of the market” by December 26th (with 75% to emerge on Feb 6th).

• If you were wondering why Banks can’t catch a bid – they’ve been in the blackout since Dec 5th, followed by Transports Dec 13th and Household Goods Dec 14th

• Next week Telcos Dec 19th, Cap Goods, Software, Media Dec 20th and Pharma Dec 21st

• Following week is Semis, Autos, Healthcare, Insurance, Materials, Consumer Services Dec 26th / 27th

• First week of Jan sees Durables, Energy, Tech before REITS, Utes, Diversified Fins and Retailing at mid / end Jan

And tightening financial conditions cramping credit markets is not helping…

All of which is a major problem as it leaves the rest of the markets’ participants with no ‘greater fools’ to offload their risk to.

McElligott points out that while the trend-following CTAs have gone “max short” across global equities, they are far from any ‘covering levels’ to feed a short-squeeze…

Source: Nomura QIS

It’s also worth noting that Nasdaq is the only developed market which remains “long” – a test and break below that 6207 level would generate approx. -$20B notional for sale…

And the options market has a big problem as the ‘greeks’ have gone wild recently, with aggregate S&P delta and gamma at near-record negative levels (leaving a market very vulnerable to flash-crashes or smashes)…

SPX / SPY consolidated greeks keep getting more negative with spot, EVEN WITH calls over puts

Net overall Delta is -$506.8B (a 0.4%ile level back to 2013) and front-month -$325.3B / front-week -$228.6B with modest notional bias to upside

Net Gamma -$18B per 1% move + or – (a 1.6%ile level back to 2013), net gamma -$46.5B on a 2% move—with the size strikes that matter the most being 2600 ($5.9B gamma), 2650 ($4.1B), 2500 ($3.8B) and 2550 ($3.7B) and also a bias to the upside

All of which means we are likely to see incredibly-erratic price-action into Friday’s Quad Witch expiration and horrible year-end liquidity with dealers offering little balance sheet.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2SZIN9L Tyler Durden

Authored by Joseph Salerno via The Mises Institute,

Jeffrey Peshut at RealForecasts.com has composed several very illuminating graphs based on the Rothbard-Salerno True Money Supply (TMS). In one graph Peshut shows the collapse of the growth rate of TMS beginning at the end of 2016, which was caused by the Fed beginning to raise the fed funds target rate at the end of the preceding year.

What is of great interest is that the recent deceleration of monetary growth (the second red arrow) almost exactly matches in extent and rapidity the monetary deceleration (the first red arrow) that immediately preceded the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

 

 

 

The Fed recently reaffirmed its commitment to increasing the fed funds rate three more times in 2018 and has just begun its program of shrinking its balance sheet by a cumulative total of $450 billion by the end of 2018. Given these circumstances, I am inclined to agree with Peshut’s conclusion: 

 “it’s easy to see that the growth of TMS could grind to a halt and even begin to contract later this year.” 

With equity prices heading back toward historic highs after the January “correction” and housing prices bubbling to an all time high in major markets, the suppression of the TMS growth rate, if it is sustained for the rest of the year, portends another credit crisis and housing bust, followed by an economic recession for the U.S. economy. As Peshut’s graph below indicates the qualitative relationship between TMS growth, credit crisis, and recession has been remarkably clear since 1978.

Of course, this empirical relationship should not surprise us, because it is nothing but an illustration of the Austrian theory of the business cycle.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2PRTTvA Tyler Durden

As dumbfounded traders struggled to find some one – or some thing – to blame back in October as the market rout that today saw the Nasdaq drop into bear market territory and the 2s10s curve compress to single digits, one legendary hedge fund manager stammered out an explanation that has since been seized upon by market commentators of all stripes (and at least one increasingly anxious Treasury Secretary): The goddamn machines are at it again.

And with stocks once again ‘overreacting’ (according to Steven Mnuchin, the aforementioned Treasury Secretary, whose jawboning was promptly ignored) to a moderately dovish Fed statement and presser, it’s worth resurfacing comments made earlier this week by Stanley Druckenmiller, the legendary macro trader who first made his name off the legendary ‘Black Wednesday’ pound short, while he was working for George Soros.

George Soros

Druckenmiller’s skill at recognizing market signals helped his since-shuttered hedge fund Duquesne Capital predict four of the last four recessions and wrack up a legendary streak of market-dominating gains. But repeating such a feat today would be almost impossible (for him, at least), Druckenmiller said, because the volatility that we’re seeing today isn’t routed in technicals or fundamentals. Instead, a lot of it is “noise” generated by trend-following algos and quant strategies that simply distort market moves beyond recognition.

“I made 30 percent a year for 30 years,” Druckenmiller said. “Now, we aren’t even in the same zip code, much less the same state,” he quipped of his recent returns in an interview with Bloomberg Television.”

While secular trends have largely remained intact, short-fluctuations that used to “mean something” are now just…noise.

“I think the message over eight or nine months is still great,” said Druckenmiller, who converted his hedge fund to a family office after closing Duquesne Capital Management in 2010. “I just think over a week or two, you’re getting noise that used to mean something, and now it doesn’t mean anything.”

That’s a problem, because while hedge funds should welcome volatility (because, if nothing else, it offers “entry points” for a trade), instead, the volatility we’re seeing today has become “a nightmare” (hedge funds have suffered serious losses over the past two months while more LPs pull their money, having apparently grown tired for paying for the privilege of underperformance).

“Volatility is only good if it’s part of the trend and it’s giving you entry points within a trend,” he said. “When you’re going up and down, but there’s no real trend, that’s a nightmare. You might think that a volatility move is the beginning of a trend and get yourself whipsawed.”

“I’m not surprised at all by the hedge funds not doing well,” Druckenmiller said. In the future, “there’s probably going to be 10 to 20 of them that are great,” and the rest shouldn’t be charging traditionally high fees.

To make money today, Druckenmiller says, investors must exercise incredible emotional control.

“I’ve never made a buy at a low that I didn’t just feel terrible and scared to death making it,” he said.

As fate would have it, a Bloomberg story published late Wednesday revealed that Soros Fund Management, Druckenmiller’s old firm, has sharply reduced allocations to its macro traders, cutting back on the strategy that made Soros a billionaire in the first place – and inspired a generation of macro-focused traders. SFM CIO Dawn Fitzpatrick, who joined the fund early last year, has been slowly making these cutbacks since the beginning of 2018 due to “fewer opportunities”. And she has accomplished this by withdrawing money from external macro managers and cutting the allocation to the firm’s internal macro team.

Performance has apparently justified the retrenchment: Soros’ macro team has lost between 4% and 5% this year, though the firm has remained in the green more broadly.

Adam Fisher, who is Soros’s director of macro and real estate, now has an allocation to macro investments of about $500 million, said the people, down from about $3 billion last year. The amount could be increased in the future if conditions improve, one of the people said.

At Soros, the macro team lost between 4 and 5 percent this year, while the firm on the whole is up slightly, according to the people. This month, Soros cut several members of its macro staff, including Nuno Camara, who managed money in emerging markets, and Timothy Durnan, a macro trader. The two men couldn’t be reached for comment.

And with Cooperman appearing on CNBC Thursday afternoon and once again railed against HFT and algos, it’s worth asking: Will ‘blame the machines’ become the new ‘blame the Fed?’

via RSS https://ift.tt/2LrSETi Tyler Durden