Business

The surge in Hong Kong housing costs has lifted home prices well beyond the bounds of affordability for most local families and young professionals, leading to long lines at housing sales that were sometimes oversubscribed by as much as 15x. But while home prices have risen for every type of home, Bloomberg notes that the intensifying demand for micro-apartments - some of which are as small as 128 square feet (about the size of a garden shed) - has caused prices for this segment of the housing market to climb more quickly than normal-sized homes. Why?

With Nasdaq 'VIX' reaching 15-year highs relative to S&P 'VIX' in the last week, we suspect tomorrow's quad-witching will be a little more noisy than normal as traders scramble to cope with $1.3 trillion of expiring S&P options...

JPMorgan's Marko Kolanovic lays out the details...

In our view, it will be difficult for the market to go much higher from these levels (~2,450) unless there is meaningful progress on US fiscal reform (i.e. tax cut).

 

Two days ago, JPM's head quant made a striking observation: "Passive and Quantitative investors now account for ~60% of equity assets (vs. less than 30% a decade ago). We estimate that only ~10% of trading volumes originates from fundamental discretionary traders." In short, markets are now "a quant's world", with carbon-based traders looking like a slow anachronism from a bygone era.

Hayman Capital's Kyle Bass made a brief media appearance today, when he confirmed to Reuters that unlike some other "China tourist bears", he remains staunchly negative on China, saying he is still short the Yuan because problems from China’s credit bubble are "metastasizing."