With WTI back below the Maginot Line of $50, speculative investors are growing increasingly anxious about their record extreme bullish positioning across the energy complex.
As Reuters' John Kemp reports, hedge fund bullishness towards crude oil and refined products including gasoline and diesel appears to have peaked for now, according to an analysis of regulatory and exchange records.
In a note released this morning by Macquarie's Viktor Shvetz, the bank's stunned head of global equity strategy looks at what has become a "world without risk" and makes several observations, the key of which is absolutely spot on: "Investors are probably suffering extreme mental exhaustion.
Authored by Jared Dillian via MauldinEconomics.com,
Bubbles aren’t new - they’ve been around since Dutch tulips - but it’s only recently that they’ve worked their way into the average investor’s lexicon. That’s probably because bubbles happen much more frequently these days.
We never used to get a giant speculative bubble every 7–8 years. But that has been the case since the new millennia.
In 2000, we had the dot-com bubble.
In 2007, we had the housing bubble.
With one foot out of the door of Germany's finance ministry, the former head of the German economy, Wolfgang Schäuble, 75, delivered a fire and brimstone warning over the weekend, telling the FT in an interview that there was a danger of "new bubbles" forming due to the trillions of dollars that central banks have pumped into markets. Schäuble also warned of risks to stability in the eurozone, particularly those posed by bank balance sheets burdened by the post-crisis legacy of non-performing loans, something we warned about since 2012, and an issue which remains largely unresolved.
Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,
Melt-Up Gains Traction
Back in November, just following the election of President Trump, I wrote about the market entering into potentially the final “melt-up” phase of the cyclical bull market.