Business

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.

Submitted by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

This is a financial cold war - nothing more, nothing less.

While there are billions of reasons to cut output, and every major producing country is reeling from the loss of revenues, some are weathering the current bust better than others, but the devil is in the details, and the details contain tons of variables.

Production cost and breakeven figures that analysts enjoy bandying can trap you in bubble of black-and-white mathematics that is a few brush-strokes shy of a full picture.

As we reported yesterday, less than two weeks after calling for a short-term market bounce on February 11, Geneva Swiss Bank said it was taking profits and going neutral.

This is how it justified its decision:

After this nice rebound in equities, we are moving tactically cautious. Actions taken today: we moved to market neutral (long equities / short index futures) on our new Swiss Tactical Equity Certificate and have bought downside protection on the S&P500 in our portfolios.

 

We believe that :