Business

While market participants will hardly need the caution, having experienced historic moves in the oil complex over the past few days including the biggest two-day surge in seven years at the end of last week, one reason why oil remains so remarkably jumpy on even the tiniest hint of supply rationalization as demonstrated this morning by the latest comments by the Iraqi oil minister, is that the short interest in both WTI and Brent is at nosebleed record highs and continues to rise with every passing week.

The onslaught from JPMorgan continues, which in the aftermath of first Marko Kolanovic's periodic threats about sudden market crashes, and Mislav Matejka's recurring warnings that BTFD is dead and "not to overstay your welcome in the bounce", earlier today JPM's chief equity strategist Dubravko Lakos-Bujas has officially cut his 2016 year-end S&P500 earnings forecast to $120 from $123 "on stronger US Dollar and lower economic growth forecast" as well as trimming his year end S&500 target from 2,200 to 2,000.

Gold futures just broke out of their recent range, pushing well above the key 100-day moving average and testing towards $1120 - the highest since early November. It appears precious metals are signaling - as they have done since mid-December - that The Fed will be forced to admit it is wrong - just as Jeffrey Gundlach warned.

Is gold pricing in a policy error?

Breaking the crucial 100-day moving average (after testing its 3 times)

Because the money markets are...

Five months ago, when we previewed the asset classes that we thought would benefit the most ahead of (and during) China's ongoing currency devaluation, and its accelerating capital controls, we laid out two things we are focused on: bitcoin and gold. This is what we said:

Following December's disappointing drop in Services PMI data, January's initial print of 53.7 (missing expectations of 54.0) is the weakest since December 2014. It appears the "manufacturing recession doesn't matter" meme was wrong after all. As Markit notes, the survey data paint an inauspicious start to the year for the US economy.

Confirming ISM Servcies drop to May 2014 levels, PMI's drop shows that it appears there is a link between an industrial recession and slowing services...