Submitted by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,
Recently, my article on weak economic underpinnings led to an interesting exchange, via Twitter, with Steve Chapman regarding debt and the impact on economic growth.
The question is: Does rising debt cause slow growth or does slow growth cause debt to rise? https://t.co/CLDQnoyUBu
We asked this morning "Is The Short Squeeze Over?" - it appears the answer is... YES
And it was Jamie Dimon who let the cat out of the bag and his "bottom" looks in jeopardy...
And that weighed further on the entire financial sector...
Just a few hours after JPM admitted that our concerns that the bank was covering up its oil and gas exposure by dramatically underreserving for future loans when it took another 60% reserve for future losses to a total of $1.3 billion, one which as the chart below shows won't be nearly enough on the bank's $44BN in exposure...
... JPM delivered another big surprise to shareholders when it reported that revenue in the bank's critical investment banking group are set to plunge by 25% in Q1 from a year ago.
The good news is that lower rates can justify higher valuations, but as former Morgan Stanley guru Gerard Minack explains, the bad news is lower earnings growth. In Minack's view the rally from the 2011 lows was the equity market factoring in the beneficial part of the story: re-rating on the back of a low discount rate; but, markets are only now starting to focus on the corollary: lower trend earnings growth.
This post is divided in two clear parts. The first one shows what according to the latest set of 13F filings, were the most popular stocks within the hedge fund community.
According, to Goldman, among the entire universe of publicly traded US stocks, the list of 50 names that have the largest number of hedge fund investors are the following.