Skip to main content

Tuesday: Back in the saddle

It's back to business here in the US, as we finish this first stock trading session of the week following our Labor Day holiday.

Let's survey the financial scene and see what's shaking as we head into a new trading week and the start of the fall season. Here are a few recent stories and market updates I've been keeping up with:

1. Investment Postcards offers up their latest global stock market performance round-up.

2. Bear Mountain Bull provides us with a Tuesday market wrap-up, and some thoughts on energy prices and the direction of some major market indices.

3. BusinessWeek anticipates the post-Labor Day market activity and highlights some important trends that are currently foremost in market participants' minds.

4. John Mauldin shared some thoughts on the credit markets and widening credit spreads this past weekend in a piece entitled, "Who Holds the Old Maid?".

5. Red-Hot Resources offered up some charts of oil, gold, and the US dollar, along with some commentary on the impacts of Hurricane Gustav (less than feared) and the effects of the recently strong dollar on commodity prices.

6. FT: Asian issuers show preference for renminbi.

"The renminbi has for the first time supplanted the dollar as emerging Asia’s most popular currency for fixed income corporate funding, reflecting a surge in local currency issues by Chinese companies."

Will the recent strength in the dollar undermine this trend, or is this a sign of things to come in Asia's fixed-income markets?

7. Hedge funds are caught in a tight spot. Wall Street Journal reports that investor money flows into hedge funds have slowed as the industry has its worst performance year since 1990.

As the WSJ graphic shows, a few of the firms' largest funds are doing well, and some firms who run multiple funds are seeing positive performance YTD in individual funds. Still, overcoming past losses and "high-water mark" levels for performance-based profits are now a problem for many hedgies.

8. Bloomberg: Citadel, SAC Capital get pick of casualties as carnage worsens. The larger hedge funds that are well capitalized and doing okay have their pick of employees defecting from other firms.

See anything important that we might have missed? Feel free to add it to our comments section, along with your thoughts. Thanks!
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Lessons from Hedge Fund Market Wizards: Scott Ramsey

Today we continue our series, "Lessons from Hedge Fund Market Wizards" , with a look at Jack Schwager's interview with Scott Ramsey of Denali Asset Management.  Ramsey, a futures trader and CTA who works on the island of St. Croix, spoke to Schwager about his first foray into the markets, his evolution as a trader, and the process he stands by to protect and grow his clients' money. 1) . Ramsey started trading in college. He was roped into the OTC metals market via a broker's ad in the Wall St. Journal. The broker charged customers a flat fee to buy and sell as much as they wanted in a particular market for six month. At the time, Scott was a novice and didn't know about futures, so he traded metals in this fashion through the inflationary run-up of the late 1970s. 2) . Scott had to rethink his trading strategy after he bought silver at $50 an oz., only to watch it collapse to $26 following a long string of limit-down days. He sold as soon as the market...
Read more

Round trip stocks: momentum booms and busts

" No tree grows to Heaven ." - Old proverb adopted by Wall Street. What happens to hot momentum stocks when their rocket fuel runs out? How long can they continue to fly before they come crashing back down to earth? Why is the stock that you paid $100 a share for now trading at $39? These are questions that many novice traders and investors may be struggling with in the wake of the most recent market correction. Momentum stocks have been hit hard as the Nasdaq 100 and Russell 2000 indices have moved lower in recent weeks. Caught unaware by the recent slide, some traders may be wondering when their beaten-down stocks will snap back and allow them to exit with smaller losses (or even reach the mythical "break even" point).  While growth stocks still firmly within their uptrends may form constructive technical bases and move higher after this correction, others may experience sharper pullbacks or break down into full "stage 4" declines (see chart below...
Read more

Finance Trends 2019 Mid-Year Markets Review

Email subscribers of the Finance Trends Newsletter receive the first look at new articles and market updates, such as the following piece, sent out to our email list on Sunday (6/14).   Hello and welcome, everyone! If you received our last email notice over the July 4th holiday, you'll know that this weekend's newsletter will serve as a mid-year market update and a follow-up to issue #29, " How to Reinvest in a Rising Market ".   Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, let's start the show...  Finance Trends Newsletter: Our Mid-Year Market Review When we last spoke, back in February, the U.S. stock market was rallying off its December-January lows. As the S&P 500 and Nasdaq reclaimed their 200 day moving averages in February and March, it became increasingly apparent that a lot of retail investors (and perhaps some institutional investors) were left under-invested while watching this recovery move from the sidelines.  The U.S. stock ...
Read more