'Speculators' have never been so confidently complacent that 'all is well'.
Speculative positioning in VIX futures and options remains at its most short in history as traders refuse to back away from 'what works' as realized volatility collapses to its lowest in over 60 years...
And as Dana Lyons notes, assets in mutual funds designed to rise when stocks fall have dropped to an all-time low.
While former Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli languishes inside a federal jail in Brooklyn, the trial of his former attorney - and alleged co-conspirator - Evan Greebel is just beginning, with the defense and prosecution giving opening statements Friday.
by Dominic Frisby of Money Week
Every year, Ronald-Peter Stoeferle and Mark J Valek of investment and asset management company Incrementum put together the report In Gold We Trust – 160-plus pages of charts and thoughts, mostly gold-related, on the state of the world’s finances.
There’s so much to look at and consider. It’s a sort of digital equivalent of a coffee-table book.
Company towns used to be a defining feature of the American economy. Nowadays, as Raul at HowMuch.net notes, thanks to globalization and offshoring, it is much harder to find employers that exert such influence over a small town (with a few notable exceptions).
Last weekend, One River's CIO Eric Peters explained what he thought would be the nightmare scenario for the next Fed chair, who as we now know will either be Jerome Powell or John Taylor, or both (with an outside chance of Yellen remaining in her post). According to the hedge fund CIO, the "worst case scenario" is one in which despite an improving economy, yields simply refuse to go up, leading to the final asset bubble and Fed intervention that "pops" it: