For credit investors, 2015 was bad a year (for energy bonds it may have been the worst on record) culminating with the gating and liquidation of several credit-focused mutual and hedge funds.
However, judging by these heatmaps, 2016 is shaping up to be even worse.
Authored by Mark St.Cyr,
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen gave her bi-annual Humphrey-Hawkins testimony before congress this past week. Although the prepared remarks were much the same as expected with any monetary policy review. What really made “news” to anyone paying attention was the Q&A. Yes, may times Ms. Yellen seemed to give the usual rebuttals of “We would consider this if that …” and so forth.
When it comes to geopolitics, all anyone wants to talk about is Syria. And understandably so.
When it comes to financial markets, all anyone wants to talk about is China - an equally understandable fixation.
To be sure, China was already a big driver of risk on/ risk off sentiment going into August of 2015. The “is it a hard landing or is it not” question very often dominated global macro discussions among those who enjoy debating such things.
Excerpted from James Stack's InvesTech.com,
Technical Evidence: Confirming a bear market
Long before the mainstream media caught on to the topic of SWF selling of stocks, we warned a month ago that as a result of the collapse in oil, and assuming oil remains priced at roughly $31 per barrel, the world's largest SWFs showin the chart below...
... would be forced liquidate at least $75 billion in equities and the lower the price of oil goes, the more selling there would be.