Short Interest in the Energy Sector Hasn't Been This High in More Than a Decade by Julie Verhage Just a couple of weeks ago, we pointed out that short interest in the S&P 1500 was at its highest level since June of 2012. Numbers are in for the second half of January, and the picture is only getting worse, with the...
Why traders are betting on a big bounce for the metals & The surprising new case for gold by Alex Rosenberg The metals are getting more precious. Gold (GLD) and silver (SLV) hit multi-month highs Thursday, as industrial metal copper rose to the highest level since the beginning of the year. This as the dollar (UUP) continued to lose value...
Citi: 'We Should All Fear Oilmageddon' A feedback loop of the U.S. dollar, crude, capital flows, and emerging markets. by Tracy Alloway [BigTrends.com Editor’s Note: Seeing this type of panicky headline instantly raises our ‘contrarian buy alert’ senses – we tend to see these kind of ‘world is ending’ headlines and predictions around bottoms – and this is from a major...
Bank of Japan Adopts Negative Rates, Keeps Asset-Buying Target by Toru Fujioka and Masahiro Hidaka Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda sprung another surprise on investors Friday, adopting a negative interest-rate strategy to spur banks to lend in the face of a weakening economy. The move to penalize a portion of banks’ reserves complements the BOJ’s record asset-purchase program, including 80...
A Better Approach to Measuring Aggregate Geographic Risk by Michael Amenta Fears of regional weakness—economic slowdown in China, the shock of devalued oil to OPEC, recessions expected in Argentina and Brazil—are driving volatility across the global investment universe. Though these concerns are often labeled with specific nations, the market has long accepted that there’s hardly such thing as a crisis...
Bet on this year's only winning sector? by Stephanie Yang In a bleak beginning to the year, only one sector of the S&P 500 (SPX) (SPY) is in the green so far in 2016: the Utilities (XLU). The S&P 500 has fallen sharply year to date, while utilities stocks have risen mildly. Meanwhile, every other sector has dropped, with Materials (XLB) leading the...
What's Going On? – This Happens All The Time What’s taking people’s breath away about this year’s stock market sell-off is probably some combination of three things: A) we’re unaccustomed to it, we’ve been spoiled for years, and B) it’s global in nature (and some would say global in origin), and C) the speed of the selling is incredible, by...
Saudi Arabia's Secret Holdings of U.S. Debt Are Suddenly a Big Deal by Andrea Wong & Liz McCormick It’s a secret of the vast U.S. Treasury market, a holdover from an age of oil shortages and mighty petrodollars: Just how much of America’s debt does Saudi Arabia own? But now that question — unanswered since the 1970s, under an unusual...
This is an easy way to find possible stock market bargains by Alex Rosenberg How does one find bargains in the market? Eddy Elfenbein of Crossing Wall Street suggests that investors start by examining two factors: a stock's dividend yield, and its amount of debt relative to equity. Performing such a screen will generate stocks that are attractive in terms of...
Dollar in Best Run Since July on Haven Bid Even as Fed Odds Fall by Lucy Meakin & Kevin Buckland Turmoil in global markets is boosting the dollar, even as it pushes back market expectations for when the Federal Reserve will next increase interest rates. An index of the U.S. currency against 10 of its peers rose for a third week,...
