Europe

Just over a decade ago, as the S&P was hitting all time highs and there was a line around the block of 30-some year old hedge fund managers, desperate to put other people's money in various ultra risky investments just so they could pick a few excess bps of yield over Treasurys - a situation painfully familiar to what is going on now - Goldman had an epiphany: create new synthetic products that have huge convexity, i.e., provide little upside (such as a few basis points pick up in yield) versus unlimited downside, link them to the shittiest assets possible and sell them to gullible, yie

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

 

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

 

Yesterday, we showed that after a September with the lowest implied vol on record, October is starting off with the lowest (annualized) realized vol on record.

Of course, as we have shown previously, when looking across capital markets, it's not just equities: vol has dropped to all time lows across virtually every asset class.

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

In the late 90's and early 2000's, I spent a lot of time travelling through a host of the world's airports.

At a time when the SEC is still debating whether to permit bitcoin-based ETFs in the US, Europe has been one step ahead thanks to the Swedish-based XBT Exchange Traded Notes (from provider CoinShares). And today, remaining one step ahead of the US, the same team behind the XBT ETN has launched the first ever ETN for Ether, the native token of the Ethereum platform, which will be listed on the Nasdaq Stockholm.