Bloomberg – Bitcoin Exuberance Is Even More Dramatic in Its Lone Investment Trust If you need evidence that bitcoin mania is getting extreme, look at the lone investment vehicle available to institutional investors. Grayscale Investments’ Bitcoin Investment Trust, which trades over-the-counter in the U.S. and offers direct exposure to bitcoin, surged 85 percent last week,… Continue reading Bitcoin Mania
The Financial Times – Falling tax receipts pose a debt-ceiling dilemma The federal government’s tax collections haven’t been growing much recently. That could be a warning about the health of the American consumer and, by extension, corporate earnings. It also has some implications for the Treasury’s upcoming collision with the debt ceiling. Until recently, analysts… Continue reading Falling Tax Receipts Impact The Debt Ceiling Timeline
The Financial Times – Departures signal a changing of the guard in HFT Quantlab’s Smith is looking for ‘fun’ elsewhere and he is not the only one With market volatility at historic lows and ever rising IT and data costs, the situation is a far cry from the boom years of 2008 and 2009, when slow… Continue reading Strong Connection Between Implied Volatility Synonymous with Fed on Hold
Bloomberg Business – This Is What the Demise of Oil Looks Like “In a nutshell, the industry is going to evolve more in the next 10 years than in the last century,” said Gilles Normand, head of electric vehicles for Renault SA, in an interview. If electric cars attain a “cool factor” on a par with… Continue reading Electric Cars & The Oil Industry
Bloomberg View – Mark Grant: The Pain Trade Is Alive and Well My belief is that they will be business people, and the days of the Ivy-Leagued economists running the Fed will end. Pragmatism is coming, which for the bond market means “lower rates for longer and lingering.” The notion of the theoretical “return to… Continue reading The New Normal
Near Record Low Volatility, Bucking Historical Tendencies The charts below show the impact of changes in global economic growth, inflation, and FOMC rate hike timing on implied volatility (i.e. smooth functions). Economic growth and inflation variables are represented as indices measuring changes relative to one-year averages. Inflation Expectations Over-Shooting Recent Declines in Realized… Continue reading The Stubbornness of Low Volatility
Short volatility ETFs are in the spotlight as we search for reasons behind the low volatility conditions we are enduring lately. There is evidence that a growing pool of ETF investors are looking for opportunities to sell volatility. This is happening alongside “buy the dip” responses we see in leveraged long equity ETF funds. These opportunistic… Continue reading Eager ETF Investors Sell Volatility and Buy Dips
Ben: There’s a question about fund flows into short vol, and how that’s reinforcing and also who’s taking the other side of that trade. Pete: That is certainly a good question, Jeremy. I don’t necessarily have a good answer. Obviously, to some degree we have flows coming into long and leveraged long volatility ETFs… Continue reading Q&A From Our June 1, 2017 Conference Call
On June 1, 2017 at 9 AM CT (10 AM ET, 7 AM PT and 15:00 BST) Bianco Research, in conjunction with Arbor Research & Trading, will be hosting a webcast/teleconference moderated by Jim Bianco. Join us Thursday as Jim Bianco leads a discussion with Ben Breitholtz and Peter Forbes about concentrated returns in the… Continue reading Low Volatility & Concentrated Returns
The Financial Times – The Federal Reserve’s conundrum: stubbornly low inflation San Francisco bank president warns against reacting to ‘one or two months’ of weak data Even as the Federal Reserve lays the groundwork for the fourth increase in short-term interest rates since the crisis, it is struggling with one of the key conundrums of America’s… Continue reading Inflation Expectations Over-Shooting Recent Declines in Realized Inflation
Bloomberg Business – Too Soon to Price in a Sept. Fed Hike? Investors Think Maybe As the next meeting of Federal Reserve policy makers in mid-June draws near, investors are putting the chances that they’ll raise interest rates at nine in ten. Still, despite many officials’ insistence that they would like to raise rates twice… Continue reading Odds Of A June Rate Hike Dip