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As we already noted earlier today in our overnight recap “Alarms Going Off As 102 Dollar-Yen Support Breached“, all eyes are glued on the USDJPY 102, which moments ago decisively breached the 102 support level. We said that “if support below the USDJPY fail solidly, then watch out below.” Sure enough, here is Ben Hunt from Epsilon Theory with some follow up observations on this topic.

There was a clear short-term narrative developed in the financial media last week creating a focal point at 102 in the Yen/USD exchange rate. The short-Yen trade is perhaps the most crowded trade in the world right now, so a strengthening of the Yen to break below the focal point is a big deal for market game-playing behavior. The Yen broke below 102 today, which will put plenty of game-playing pressure on levered short-Yen positions in particular, and the entire equity market in general. Be careful out there.

Untaper time yet?

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1bVvY3R Tyler Durden

It’s not just Japanese stocks that are in trouble. The Dow Industrials futures just lost 15,500 – the lowest level since the debt-ceiling lows mid-November and down over 1000 points from 2013’s closing highs. The terrible ISM print triggerd wholesale buying in bonds and bullion and selling of stocks and the USD.

 

 

The Nikkei is getting nuked and now trades over 2,000 points from its highs and over 1100 points “cheap” to the Dow…

 

Bonds are well bid… as is bullion…

 

Charts: Bloomberg

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1cNlOqj Tyler Durden

The downward revision to last month’s recent record high appears to have been the warning flag but this is a disaster. ISM Manufacturing dropped by its most since 2008; missed by its most on record; and new orders collapse at the fastest pace since 1980. The employment sub-index also tubled from 55.8 to 52.3. “Poor weather” was blamed by some respondents and still hangovers from the government shutdown but these numbers are simply unprecedented as the data came in at a 6-sigma miss to “economist” expectations.

Biggest miss on record…

 

6-Sima from smart people’s expectations…

 

And New orders dropped by the most sicne 1980…

 

The full component breakdown with New Orders highlighted:

Charts: Bloomberg

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1bjVkZk Tyler Durden

Once again we learn that not a single sell-side analyst could have predicted the unprecedented “snow in the winter” weather shock that everyone knew about a month or so ago. In the latest example of just how confused “analysts” were when it comes to analyzing weather patterns, we just got both Ford and GM January car sales which tumbled by 7.5% and 12% respectively, on expectations for a decline of only 2.3% and 2.5% for the two US carmakers. And confirming that automaker executives continue the trend we have seen with all other sellers of goods and services, namely that when it is snowing in the winter, nobody buys anything, it was all the weather’s fault.

• FORD: WEATHER HAD EFFECT ON TIMING OF SOME FLEET DELIVERIES
• GM SAYS EXTREME WEATHER DEPRESSED CO., INDUSTRY SALES

Perhaps they are referring to the abnormally dry weather in California?

Maybe not. Here is the detail from GM:

Historically, January is the industry’s lowest sales month of the year. Extreme winter weather in the South, Midwest and Northeast this January further depressed GM and industry sales. The seasonally adjusted annual selling rate (SAAR) for light vehicles is expected to be an estimated 15.3 million units, down from 15.6 million in December.

And from Ford:

“Given the difficult weather in our largest sales regions, we are fortunate to have held in at retail as well as we did,” said John Felice, Ford vice president, U.S. marketing, sales and service. “In areas where the weather was good, such as in the West, sales were up. The poor weather also had an impact on the timing of some of our fleet deliveries. A bright spot is Lincoln, which had its strongest sales in four years.”

Of course, it could be the weather – one doesn’t know since the geographic sales breakdown is not provided. Or perhaps, it just may be that the Uncle Sam car loan-funded car purchase bubble has also finally burst.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1gGvw1d Tyler Durden

Cryptocurrencies have been on a tear over the last 2 years, both in terms of mindshare and returns. This is particularly true of the last year, in which Bitcoin (the de facto proxy for cryptocurrencies) has heaved from $13 to $950, making a pit stop at $1200 along the way. This 7,308% return looks to be outrageously delectable to many a speculator and has even caught the eye of an institutional fund or two. The problem is, and what many novice investors have a problem conceptualizing, that astute institutional “investment” funds actually have a problem dipping their toes in the wilding appreciative yet hyper-volatile world that is cryptocurrencies.

The reason is because “investment funds” as opposed to beta chasing “trading” or “hedge” funds seek a measured return on investment. The raw returns that you see spouted for Bitcoin and the various alt.coins are actually not what the smart institutional money is looking for.

 

Put another way, you tend to get what you pay for. Risk is the price of reward, with risk being defined as deviation from expected return. You nearly never get a reward without bearing some risk to attain said reward. On the flip side, you should always demand a commensurate reward for the risk that you take. Measuring reward without taking into consideration the risk paid to attain such reward is akin to jumping out of the top floor of a 50 story building to revel in the exhilaration of the drop without taking into consideration what happens when you reach ground level. All in all, it tends to end ugly.

My clients are told that if you assumed $1 of risk to reap $1 of reward, then you effectively made nothing from an economic, risk adjusted reward perspective. This is difficult for the layperson to understand since those who reaped said dollar are left holding one dollar of nominal returns which looks, smells and spends like a dollar. They don’t seem to get it until that third or fourth go around when they get 30 cents back for the dollar they invested (versus an amount over a dollar, hence a negative return). You see, probabilistically, you can reap more than you sow over the short term simply out of dumb luck. Realistically, the law of averages will catch up to you and eventually (and most likely close to immediately) you will reap what you sow, or… you get what you pay for!

Similarly, if bitcoin investors/traders believed they are doing well when bitcoin jumps from $13 to $950, they may be mistaken. The reason? Bitcoin has a modified beta of roughly 673! That means that it is volatile. Very volatile! More volatile than practically any basket of currencies or stocks you can think of. This volatility means that in a short period of time it’s just as easy to be on the losing side of the trade of this asset as it is to be on the winning side. So, you’re lucky if you bought at $500 and rode it to $950, but you could have just as easily bought at $1,200 and rode it down to $500.

With these concepts in mind, you should always adjust for risk before attempting to measure reward. By doing that you will find that you can compare disparate assets, ventures and opportunities that have different reward propositions and even different horizons by measuring the risk (or the economic cost) of the investments and then adjusting the actual or expected reward desired to compensate for said risk commensurately.

The UltraCoin team has run these calculations, among many other currencies, on every cryptocurrency with a market value over $1 million. In addition, these currencies have been aggregated to form what we have coined as the “UltraCoin Cryptocurrency Composite Index” – a basket of cryptocurrencies upon which our custom UltraCoin derivatives can trade, hedge, invest and speculate.

These indices and calculations (not to mention a bevy of other calculations to assist in trading) are part and parcel of the UltraCoin client.

The graph below depicts the outrageous raw returns had by holders of bitcoin. It also denotes the extreme volatility experienced therein, particularly from late 2013 onward.If one were to place a hurdle rate of required return to compensate for said volatility, the return curve will look somewhat different.

As you can see, all that glitters is not necessarily gold! I will be pushing for the beta release of the UltraCoin client quite soon, quite possibly at the Berlin Bicoin conference. In the meantime, for those of you who have not had a chance to play with the software, here are a few screen shots.

 See http://ultra-coin.com/ to access the client when it becomes available.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1gGvsOP Reggie Middleton

With the Greeks facing up to their third (or 4th or 5th, who’s counting anymoe anyway) bailout, proclaiming growth is just around the corner, that the crisis is behind them, and that slavery will solve European youth unemployment; we thought it both ironic and sad that, as Bloomberg’s Niraj Shah notes, the European Commission today publishes its first anti-corruption report and finds Greece has the most corrupt public sector, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

In chart form…

 

and table…

 

As a gentle reminder,  Greece’s shadow economy was equivalent to 24 percent of GDP in 2012, the Institute of Economic Affairs estimates.

 

But Afghanistan and Somalia top the world’s corruption index…

(click image for large legible version)

 

The Corruption Perceptions Index 2013 serves as a reminder that the abuse of power, secret dealings and bribery continue to ravage societies around the world.  The Index scores 177 countries and territories on a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). No country has a perfect score, and two-thirds of countries score below 50. This indicates a serious, worldwide corruption problem.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1kEtL2G Tyler Durden

Two observations on the latest thoughts by Jim Reid (DB’s best strategist by orders of magnitude):

1. He is far more concerned by what is going on in China than any of the other noise around the world. And rightfully so. As we first showed a few months ago, the money creation in China puts what all the other global central banks do to shame. Any slowdown in this credit creation and the wheels have no choice but to fall off, which also explains why even the tiniest default in this $9 trillion economy will be bailed out as it would risk an outright “flow” collapse.

   

2. The Fed came, saw, and after realizing the mess it created with tapering – which can never be priced in now that the market is terminally addicted to the Fed’s liquidity injections – will soon do what we have said since the May 2013 “taper tantrum” would happen – untaper, and resume bailing out everyone.

Full note from Reid:

From all the stories that broke while I was away the most fascinating surely revolves around the Chinese Trust product that in the end wasn’t allowed to be at the mercy of market forces. For me it’s a microcosm of the fragility still present in global financial markets that a $9.0 trillion dollar economy – that will be the biggest in the world within the time frame of most of our careers – struggles to allow a $500 million investment product to default without there being market fears of it igniting panic in financial markets. This has now been a theme for the best part of 10-15 years in global financial markets particularly in the developed world but more recently the EM world since the GFC. We’ve created a global debt monster that’s now so big and so crucial to the workings of the financial system and economy that defaults have been increasingly minimised by uber aggressive policy responses. It’s arguably too late to change course now without huge consequences. This cycle perhaps started with very easy policy after the 97/98 EM crises thus kick starting the exponential rise in leverage across the globe. Since then we saw big corporates saved in the early 00s, financials towards the end of the decade and most recently Sovereigns bailed out. It’s been many, many years since free markets decided the fate of debt markets and bail-outs have generally had to get bigger and bigger.

 

This sounds negative but the reality is that for us it means that central banks have little option but to keep high levels of support for markets for as far as the eye can see and defaults will stay artificially low. As such we remain bullish for 2014. However it’s largely because we think the authorities are trapped for now rather than because the global financial system is healing rapidly. So as well as EM being very important for 2014, we continue to think the Fed taper pace is also very important. If the US economy was the only one in the world then maybe they could slowly taper without major consequences. However the world is fixated with US monetary policy and huge flows have traded off the back of QE and ZIRP so it does matter. We have suspicions that the Fed may have to be appreciative of the global beast they’ve helped create as the year progresses.

In other words: bullish… because the system will continue to collapse and need more bailouts. The Bizarro world Bernanke created truly is an exciting place.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1cN7YUS Tyler Durden

Two observations on the latest thoughts by Jim Reid (DB’s best strategist by orders of magnitude):

1. He is far more concerned by what is going on in China than any of the other noise around the world. And rightfully so. As we first showed a few months ago, the money creation in China puts what all the other global central banks do to shame. Any slowdown in this credit creation and the wheels have no choice but to fall off, which also explains why even the tiniest default in this $9 trillion economy will be bailed out as it would risk an outright “flow” collapse.

   

2. The Fed came, saw, and after realizing the mess it created with tapering – which can never be priced in now that the market is terminally addicted to the Fed’s liquidity injections – will soon do what we have said since the May 2013 “taper tantrum” would happen – untaper, and resume bailing out everyone.

Full note from Reid:

From all the stories that broke while I was away the most fascinating surely revolves around the Chinese Trust product that in the end wasn’t allowed to be at the mercy of market forces. For me it’s a microcosm of the fragility still present in global financial markets that a $9.0 trillion dollar economy – that will be the biggest in the world within the time frame of most of our careers – struggles to allow a $500 million investment product to default without there being market fears of it igniting panic in financial markets. This has now been a theme for the best part of 10-15 years in global financial markets particularly in the developed world but more recently the EM world since the GFC. We’ve created a global debt monster that’s now so big and so crucial to the workings of the financial system and economy that defaults have been increasingly minimised by uber aggressive policy responses. It’s arguably too late to change course now without huge consequences. This cycle perhaps started with very easy policy after the 97/98 EM crises thus kick starting the exponential rise in leverage across the globe. Since then we saw big corporates saved in the early 00s, financials towards the end of the decade and most recently Sovereigns bailed out. It’s been many, many years since free markets decided the fate of debt markets and bail-outs have generally had to get bigger and bigger.

 

This sounds negative but the reality is that for us it means that central banks have little option but to keep high levels of support for markets for as far as the eye can see and defaults will stay artificially low. As such we remain bullish for 2014. However it’s largely because we think the authorities are trapped for now rather than because the global financial system is healing rapidly. So as well as EM being very important for 2014, we continue to think the Fed taper pace is also very important. If the US economy was the only one in the world then maybe they could slowly taper without major consequences. However the world is fixated with US monetary policy and huge flows have traded off the back of QE and ZIRP so it does matter. We have suspicions that the Fed may have to be appreciative of the global beast they’ve helped create as the year progresses.

In other words: bullish… because the system will continue to collapse and need more bailouts. The Bizarro world Bernanke created truly is an exciting place.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1cN7YUS Tyler Durden