Trader’s Narrative

The S&P 500 index has been struggling at the 1110 level for a few weeks. This shouldn’t be surprising to readers of this blog since we looked at several technical reasons why further gains were difficult as recently as late October and in November.
Stock prices have barely eked out 3% further gains since I […]

The big new development today was the huge drop in short term Treasury bond yields. The benchmark 90 day T-Bill rate dropped to 0.005%. These are levels which we last saw just a few months ago when we were in the thick of the credit crisis:

The 30 day T-Bill rate 0.03% which is slightly higher […]

At the start of the week we contrasted the strange pessimism that has gripped the US retail investor to the levitation act of Wall Street. It is almost as if Wall Street threw a party and other than institutional investors, a few day traders and algo quant jocks jamming high frequency trades, no one else […]

The US financial system was resuscitated by the largess of the taxpayer. Without any real quid pro quo, transparency nor discussion, they were made whole. Their losses made public while their profits were guaranteed to remain private (as the recent obscene bonuses attest).
So now that the US economy is still on the ropes, fighting […]

The is an aggregate measure of the risks within the financial system. It incorporates yield spreads from money market, bond and equity markets. In one single number, it indicates the relative position of the current financial condition via the number of standard deviations from the average.
Similar to the TED spread, it peaked late last […]