Authored by Peter Tchir via Brean Capital,
Momentum Trader: It’s going to zero!
Sales: Protection is worthless. Why pay up for protection, it always turns out worthless?
Quant Trader: The skew and relative steepness makes timing critical on any purchase. The theta decay is virtually impossible to overcome.
Desk Head: Why aren’t we selling more?
While many have blamed today's spike in yields for the broader underperformance of the REIT sector, which sent the Bloomberg North American REIT index down 1.4%, its biggest one-day drop since December in a widespread selloff across all property sectors with 194 of the 214 stocks in the index lower today, it's more than just the jump in rates that is slamming the rate-sensitive sector.
In the final day of the week, it has again been a story of currencies and commodities setting stock prices, however instead of yesterday's Yen surge which slammed the USDJPY as low as 107.67 and led to a global tumble in equities, and crude slide, today has been a mirror imoage after a modest FX short squeeze, which sent the Yen pair as high as 109.1, before easing back to the 108.80 range.
Following yesterday's dollar spike which topped the longest rally in the greenback in one month, the prevailing trade overnight has been more of the same, and in the last session of this holiday shortened week we have seen the USD rise for the fifth consecutive day on concerns the suddenly hawkish Fed (at least as long as the S&P is above 2000) may hike sooner than expected, which in turn has pressured WTI below $39 earlier in the session, and leading to weakness across virtually all global risk assets.
Following two days of rangebound moves, where Monday's modest market rebound was undone by the Tuesday just as modest decline (despite the early surge higher on the latest "bullish for stocks" European terrorism), overnight equity action continued to be more of the same, and as of this moment S&P 500 futures were unchanged, while European stocks were modestly higher.