In the current turbulent times, in which one after another hedge fund is posting miserable performance numbers, gating or simply shutting down, one stalwart remains: Chicago's appropriately named financial megalith Citadel, which year after year posts tremendous returns purely on the back of its retail orderflow frontrunning HFT platform.
Norway is in trouble. As we have detailed previously (here, here, here, and here), the world's largest sovereign wealth fund has begun liquidating assets (after its largest quarterly loss) as the nation faces recessionary fears (key data deterioration as oil stays lower for longer) with expectations building (despite denials by the central bank) that ZIRP (or even NIRP) is coming. Why? Simple - as the following real-time map shows - every one of Norway's oil fields are currently underwater!
By EconMatters
Stock down 20%
Back on October 17, 2014, the market was in free fall mode, when out of the blue during an interview with Bloomberg TV, one of the Fed's alleged biggest hawks hinted that the Fed could do QE4 if the rout continued. The rest, as they say was history, and the Dow soared 400 points higher to close at 16,350....
... practically exactly where the Dow Jones is right now, 14 months later.
Yesterday we reported something disturbing: a small regional bank, BOK Financial, announced that it had underestimated its exposure to energy loans, or rather loan, issued by just one company, and as a result its previously forecasted provision for credit losses of $3.5 million to $8.5 million would be insufficient, and due to the unexpected loan impairment it would have to take a dramatic $22.5 million in credit losses." As a result BOKF stock crashed and is now trading at levels not seen since 2010.