First China comes through on its threat of disposing US securities, now Europe is rapidly isolating Wall Street from participating in European sovereign bond offerings. The Guardian reports that "for the first time in five years, no big US investment bank appears among the top nine sovereign bond bookrunners in Europe, according to Dealogic data compiled for the Guardian." Curiously, just the one bank which has recently found itself out of favor with domestic investors, Morgan Stanley, has a notable presence in Euro sovereign league tables (at number 10). The biggest loser - the dynamic duo of vampire squid and Fed Jr.
Now that the market is fully back to its usual melt-up gimmicks, when fundamentals do not matter in the least, and the only potential stock drivers are technicals, which for the market dominating algos typically reduce to such simplistic signals as stock price momentum (and reversion) and short interest as a % of share float, we present our summary of the worst of the worst. The following 40 companies are those names (among the Russell 2000) that have underperformed the market either by a little or a lot, now that the S&P is flat for the year, and which still carry a substantial short interest as a % of the total float (with a 20% of float short minimum)
You say you need a catalyst for the next leg up to Dow 36,000? Heeeeere's Goldman, proclaiming that a CNY revaluation is virtually a certainty
Consensus estimate per Bloomberg, based on 82 "economists": -68k, per Reuters: -50k; and Goldman: still at an unrevised -100k. For a Bloomberg interview with Goldman's Jan Hatzius discussing his prediction, click here .
Yesterday we had the Cleveland Fed posting videos complete with the Ben Bernanke doodles of 3 year olds explaining how the Fed should (but does not) work.
Either Goldman is desperate to raise $3.1 million (it's not), or the firm is offering investors a 300% leveraged surefire way to make money in a rising market via an investment in Leveraged Index-Linked (interest-free) Notes due 2011 .
No better way to spike the market with no ETF flows than to gun ES volume. And we mean VOLUME
Update: Goldman is advising Brook stone field. Explains it all
If you are one of the unlucky few forced to buy and sell stocks for a living, based on some sort of "analysis", be it fundamental, technical, lunar, sun-spot, haruspicate , or on any other divination of the future, you have our condolences. That said, should you find yourself in this sad predicament, more than anything you probably want to know if what you are buying (having made the decision to buy it, or heaven forbid, short) is the right stock based on what other BSDs, aka hedge funds are buying, i.e., if the name you have shorted has 95% short interest and is about to go up by 10,000% overnight after yet another Goldman "conviction buy" upgrade-based short squeeze, if hedge fund groupthink momo cliques are about to bail en masse from the latest and greatest "sliced bread" stock, and many other such considerations. Well, you are in luck, Goldman's David Kostin has just released his quarterly hedge fund trend monitor, and it is chock-full of tens of charts of valuable information.
In a speech before the UK Treasury Select Committee the Chairman of Goldman Sachs Bank, Gerald Corrigan , who also happens to be a former New York Fed President (and people still wonder where Tim Geithner will end up) noted that it is not Goldman who is at fault in the whole Greek swap fiasco but Eurostat, "which was consulted on the transaction at the time it was entered into and which offered no objection." What is troubling is Corrigan's revelation that " Goldman Sachs was by no means the only bank involved with countries in these types of transactions... These transactions were not limited to Goldman Sachs and Greece . " Just whose debt numbers will be put under the microscope next?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
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