The near-record string of 10 consecutive Dow Industrials record highs, a streak not seen since early 1987, may be about to end if futures, which are currently trading -0.3% lower, fail to stage a rebound.
As French voters look set to make a massive swing to the right in their upcoming presidential election (see our notes on the topic here and here), a group of frightened liberal protesters have decided to back a relatively surprising, if impossible, presidential candidate in 2017, Barack Obama.
And, lest you thing this is a joke, a quick walk around Paris even reveals campaign posters for "Obama17" plastered all around the city.
As we previously noted, while speculatrs had been reducing their shorts in Treasury futures, they had added to Eurodollar shorts - pushing their bets on Fed rate hikes to record highs. However, as Bloomberg notes, signals are starting to emerge that traders who built up that heavy short, or hawkish, eurodollar base since the start of 2016 could be starting to throw in the towel on a March Fed rate hike.
Last August, we introduced readers to the hedge fund that we dubbed the "puppe master behind the US presidential election", which also happened to be the most successful hedge fund in history : Setauket-based Renaissance Technologies (a recent analysis by LCH found that Ray Dalio's Bridgewater, with $45 billion in absolute profits since inception, was the most successful but the ranking ignored Renaissance, which has return $10 billion more).
Submitted by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,