Blog Maverick – The Idiots Guide to High Frequency Trading What has changed is this. In the past people used their speed advantages to trade their own portfolios. They knew they had an advantage with faster information or placing of trades and they used it to buy and own stocks. If only for hours. That… Continue reading HFT For Dummies
Real Time Economics – Fannie, Freddie Overhaul Will Translate Into Higher Mortgage Rates At a 5.5% interest rate, the monthly payment on the median priced home is around $100 higher than current levels, while a 6% rate would boost payments by $150 per month. Messrs. Colton and Carliner estimated that could knock out between 6%… Continue reading Higher Mortgage Rates And The Fannie, Freddie Overhaul
The Wall Street Journal – Investors Return to Emerging Market Bond, Equity Funds Emerging market bond and equity funds both experienced inflows for the first time this year in the week ending April 2, a further sign that optimism is growing toward developing world assets. Investors plowed $2.44 billion into emerging market equity funds in… Continue reading Investors Return To Emerging Market Funds
The Wall Street Journal – Bitcoin’s Boosters Struggle to Shore Up Confidence Bitcoin is neither legal tender nor endorsed by central banks, and the technological spine of the virtual currency’s infrastructure is maintained mostly by volunteers. There are no large, publicly traded bitcoin companies, no bureaucracy, no headquarters and no code of conduct. That puts… Continue reading Bitcoin
Real Time Economics – Can Twitter Predict the Economy Better Than Wall Street Economists? Yesterday we highlighted research out of the University of Michigan that analyzed tweets about job loss and attempted to estimate the number of initial jobless claims that the Labor Department reports every Thursday morning. The method predicted 342,000 people would file… Continue reading Using Twitter To Predict The Economy
MoneyBeat (WSJ Blog) – Ignore ADP ADP said private businesses added 191,000 jobs last month, a modest pace of hiring that should be a positive sign for the labor market. But at least one economist says investors shouldn’t really care what ADP has to say. “It’s a shame that April Fool’s Day fell yesterday and… Continue reading Our Monthly Reminder To Ignore ADP
<Click on chart for larger image> MoneyBeat (WSJ Blog) – New Pipeline Buoys Oil Prices, But Local Kinks Still Snag Thanks to a new pipeline, Cushing supplies have fallen for eight straight weeks…But in other regions, pipeline capacity is still insufficient. For example, when two large refineries in West Texas closed units for maintenance at… Continue reading Inefficiencies Still Exist In Crude Oil Market
FT Alphaville (FT Blog) – The ‘Crude Wall’ cometh These two charts come from Citi’s commodities research team. They’re important. The reason being…well, we may have become used to talking about Saudi America, but we haven’t yet figured out the longer term consequences of America’s oil production resurgence. According to the charts, not only is… Continue reading Foreign Dependence On Oil
MoneyBeat (WSJ Blog) – Why Worry? Stock investors shouldn’t fret if the Federal Reserve intends to raise interest rates sometime next year. If anything, they might want to get more bullish ahead of that development. Since the early 1980s, the S&P 500 has gained 22%, on average, in the year before the Fed started raising… Continue reading Historical Market Performance Prior To Rate Hikes
The Wall Street Journal – Investors Clamor for Risky Debt Offerings Risky debt is flying off the shelves. Investors are snapping up low-rated securities backed by companies, home mortgages and car loans at a clip rarely seen since the financial crisis, as fund managers and others tire of paltry yields on safer assets. Buyers poured… Continue reading Reaching For Yield
Bloomberg.com – High-Speed Trading Used to Be for the Birds Many people were shocked -– shocked! — by reports this week that some on Wall Street are trying to get what may be an unfair advantage by engaging in high-frequency trading. Please. Yes, markets can be rigged. But leveraging speed to exploit information asymmetries has… Continue reading The Good Old Days Of HFT