Authored by Arthur Berman via OilPrice.com,
The lead editorial in Friday’s Wall Street Journal was pure energy nonsense.
“Lessons of the Energy Export Boom” proclaimed that the United States is becoming the oil and gas superpower of the world. This despite the uncomfortable fact that it is also the world’s biggest importer of crude oil.
As noted yesterday, Bloomberg trading commentator Richard Breslow refuses to jump on the bandwagon that the Fed is hiking right into the next policy mistake. In fact, he is pretty much convinced that Yellen did the right thing... she just needs some help from future inflationary print (which will be difficult, more on that shortly), from the dollar (which needs to rise), and from the yield curve.
European stocks were flat after starting off strongly earlier, dragged lower by energy stocks. Asian stocks, U.S. futures little changed as oil tumbled with Brent tumbling as low as $45.85/bbl to the lowest intraday since November 30 and taking out a 38.2% Fib support, after a one-minute spike in volume to a day-high 5,208 lots just after 6am, with WTI mirroring Brent's momentum, and falling as much as 98c to $43.22, lowest since November 14.
Investors added $871 million to the Vanguard FTSE Europe exchange-traded fund in the five days through Friday, pushing the largest European ETF to its largest two-week inflow in history.
The US hedge fund industry is in rough shape as the Federal Reserve’s lift-all-boats monetary policy has made it increasingly difficult to beat the market. US hedge funds endured nearly $100 billion in redemptions last year, as only 30% of US equity funds beat their benchmarks.