Following the weakness in new home sales, starts, and permits, pending home sales modest beat of expectations (+1.4% MoM vs 0.5% exp) provides a glimmer of hope for homebuilders and recovery-narrative-buyers. The decoupling between new- and pending-home sales was also seen at the start of last year, and ended badly for pending home sales...
Yesterday's plunge in AAPL, which as we noted is one of the most widely held names by the hedge fund community with some 163 names long the stock, cemented what has already been a terrible start to 2016 for most hedge funds following a comparable blow up in Allergan one month ago, arguably the most popular at the time stock within the hedge fund community.
Overnight, none other than Third Point's Dan Loeb confirmed as much when he said that hedge funds are in the first stage of a "washout" after "catastrophic" performance this year, to wit:
In one of his tweets yesterday, Tom McClellan, creator of the famous McClellan Oscillator and Summation index used by thousands of traders everywhere as a market timing tool, pointed out something disturbing: the number of shares outstanding of the VXX, the VIX tracking ETN, has soared exponentialy in recent weeks.
VIX futures ETF extremely popular now. Can this possibly end well? pic.twitter.com/TT4SbC8SA1
— Tom McClellan (@McClellanOsc) April 26, 2016
They may not agree on everything, but it turns out that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump do have one in common…..a tax haven inside the United States. Both presidential candidates have an affinity for the same two-storey office building in Wilmington, Delaware and both refuse to explain why they share that same address.
Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
First it was the banks reporting horrendous numbers — largely, we were told, because of their exposure to recently-cratered energy companies. Now it’s Big Tech, which is a much harder thing to explain. The FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) own their niches and not so long ago were expected to generate strong growth pretty much forever. That’s why every large-cap mutual fund and most hedge funds (not to mention a few central banks) owned so much of them.