Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
The posse of fools in the Eccles Building is so petrified of a stock market hissy fit that it has more or less created a Wall Street doomsday machine.
After trolling on the zero bound for 89 straight months now, the FOMC falsely believes that it has levitated the U.S. economy to the cusp of full-employment via massive liquidity and wealth effects pumping.
The single biggest event overnight was the PBOC's devaluation of the Yuan to the lowest since March 2011, setting the fixing at 6.5693, the highest in over 5 years and in direct response to a stronger dollar, which however if one looks at the DXY remains well below the recent highs in the 100 range, suggesting for China this is only just beginning.
Submitted by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,
Over the last several weeks, I have discussed the markets entrance into the “Seasonally Weak” period of the year and the breakout of the market above the downtrend line that began last year.
The rally from the February lows, driven by a tremendous amount of short covering, once again ignited “bullish optimism.”
In a world in which hedge funds are increasingly struggling to come up alpha, not to mention original investment ideas, last week we showed what the top stock holdings of the 50 top hedge funds are.
Today, using Goldman data, we flip this data, and show the Top 50 stock holdings among the entire hedge fund universe. Not surprisingly, the usual suspects regain their top positions, led by the FAG stocks, namely the Facebook; Allergan, and Google, with Apple and Microsoft in 4th and 5th spot. Here is the result.
Yesterday's weak dollar headfake has ended and overnight the USD rallied, while Asian stocks dropped to the lowest level in 7 weeks and crude oil fell as speculation returned that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates as early as next month. The pound jumped and European stocks gained thanks to a weaker EUR.