Monthly Archives: March 2014

Trading

Why Are So Many #Traders (Literally) Killing Themselves?

This column is not about working too hard, or the dangers of high cholesterol, or lack of exercise. It is about a rash of suicides within the financial community. What this actually means is less certain than the reporting on it might imply.

Yesterday, 47-year-old Edmund Reilly, a trader at the Vertical Group, jumped in front of a Long Island Rail Road train, and was pronounced dead at the scene. That led to an article from the New York Post reporting that this was one of many recent suicides of people in the financial industry. IBT had a headline last fall “Suicide Among Bankers Appears To Be On The Rise Again As Pressures To Get Banks And Businesses Back In The Black Takes Its Toll.”

The Post was so kind as to include a list of a half-dozen other suicides this year by people working in finance. A quick search reveals many other finance suicides in recent months. “Banker Suicides” even has its own Wikipedia page.

http://www.bloombergview.com/

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USA

The Massive Drop In The Fed’s Custody Holdings Of Treasuries This Week Reminds Us Of The Russian Invasion Of 1957

Talk that Russia could be behind the bulk of the more than $100 billion drop in the Federal Reserve’s custody holdings for foreign central banks in the week ending Wednesday has many observers scratching their heads. This would represent about eighty percent of their dollar holdings.

As we noted earlier, rather than selling the Treasuries, Russia simply transferred them from the Federal Reserve out of the U.S. The incentive would be the threat of sanctions following this week’s Crimean referendum.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/

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    On Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen promised the House Financial Services Committee "a great deal of continuity" in monetary policy as she fills the shoes of Ben Bernanke.   However, Yellen is not Bernanke. And depending on her read on the economy, she will use her powers to influence…
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  • 11 Ugly Charts That Confirm China's Dramatic Slowdown
    58
    11 Ugly Charts That Confirm China's Dramatic Slowdown During the National People's Congress, China's policymakers announced that it would target 7.5% GDP growth target for 2014. This is down from 7.7% growth in 2013, and the recent data shows that the economy is clearly off to a slower start to…
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  • Stock market is regarded as the leading indicator of the economy
    53
    I will let you guess where we are in this "cycle". Within a fractional reserve banking system, if the Federal Reserve decreases the discount rate and the rate is lower than the long bond rate by enough of a spread, the banks get motivated to borrow at or close to the  discount rate and loan…
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Trading

#FX market manipulation – new software unveiled

Software AG  today unveiled the latest addition to its Apama market surveillance solution with alerts to identify FX (foreign exchange) market manipulation and benchmark fixing. Developed in partnership with tier one banks, these new alerts provide compliance and market monitoring personnel with in-depth monitoring of FX trading, to identify benchmark fixing, cross-liquidity venue manipulation and other suspicious behaviour. In addition, it enables trading institutions to customise real-time detection scenarios to meet business specific needs and to evolve surveillance in response to the latest regulatory demands.

http://www.fx-mm.com/

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  • Currency Traders’ Strategies Foiled as Trends Go Missing
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  • THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION YOU HAVEN’T HEARD OF
    72
    In less than three weeks, the most important election of the year will take place in Switzerland, and you haven’t heard of it. While the U.S. focuses on the recent Republican victory, the financial markets are facing an earth-shaking event on November 30th. This Swiss election seeks to challenge the…
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  • There Will Be a “Significant Market Event… Something Big Is Going To Happen” Are you prepared for that day?
    71
      With the Federal Reserve printing trillions upon trillions of dollars to keep the economic system afloat, many investors and financial pundits have surmised that the fundamental economic problems facing the United States during the crash of 2008 have been resolved. Stocks are, after all, at historic highs. But the…
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bitcoin

How shockingly perfect the #Bitcoin bubble was by @finansakrobat

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 9 months, you’ve heard about Bitcoin, and often in relation to massive moves in price action. Either up (for a long time) or down (as it has been going of late).

Despite all the warnings from financial professionals, the recent downfall for Bitcoin – and most notably the Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox – seemed to come as a total surprise.

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we can see that the warnings heeded by many turned out to be remarkably correct.

http://goinfront.com/

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  • Bitcoin plunges after major platform indefinitely halts withdrawals
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    The price of the digital currency bitcoin slid to its lowest level in nearly two months on Monday after bitcoin digital marketplace Mt. Gox said a halt on withdrawals it announced on Friday would continue indefinitely after it detected "unusual activity." http://www.reuters.com
    Tags: bitcoin, mt, gox, price, months
  • ‘Dark Wallet’ Is About to Make Bitcoin Money Laundering Easier Than Ever
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    Government regulators around the world have spent the last year scrambling to prevent bitcoin from becoming the currency of choice for money launderers and black marketeers. Now their worst fears may be about to materialize in a single piece of software. On Thursday, a collective of politically radical coders that…
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Trading

Traders Beat #Market Indexes Borrowing Tools From Sports

Graham Davidson was in a slump, the worst he’d ever known.

In 15 years as a foreign-exchange trader in Sydney, New York and London, he’d always made money. Now, in the winter of 2011, he seemed to have lost his touch, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its April issue.

Davidson’s trades were all in the red — screaming, fire-engine red. And his mood had turned black. Self-doubt haunted every decision. He hesitated to put trades on. He jumped out of positions at the first hint of trouble, only to see the market turn again, racing ahead without him.

http://www.bloomberg.com/

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NoTrading

Here’s what happens when the #readers choose the front page story

What if front pages were selected by newspapers’ readers instead of their editors?  At NewsWhip, we’re always interested in the news stories people are choosing to share – and how those stories differ from the normal news stories editors put on the front pages of big newspapers. So we ran a little experiment.

http://blog.newswhip.com/

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emerging, Trading

11 Ugly Charts That Confirm China’s Dramatic Slowdown

11 Ugly Charts That Confirm China’s Dramatic Slowdown

During the National People’s Congress, China’s policymakers announced that it would target 7.5% GDP growth target for 2014.
This is down from 7.7% growth in 2013, and the recent data shows that the economy is clearly off to a slower start to the year.

Before we launch into the data, it’s important to remember that part of the slowdown is intended by China’s policymakers as they try to clamp down on lax lending standards and rebalance the economy toward domestic demand driven growth.

 

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-economic-slowdown-in-11-charts-2014-3#ixzz2vslB3lLH

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/

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emerging, Trading

China’s central bank is prepared to take its strongest action since 2012

China’s central bank is prepared to take its strongest action since 2012 to loosen monetary policy if economic growth slows further, by cutting the amount of cash that banks must keep as reserves, sources involved in internal policy discussions say.

A cut would be triggered if growth slips below 7.5 per cent and towards 7.0 per cent, they said, and would come on top of money market operations and currency intervention via state banks that traders say has already loosened monetary conditions.

Apart from supporting a stumbling economy, the stronger action of cutting bank reserves would provide a cushion against any shocks from financial reforms that the central bank is widely expected to push through this year, including a widening of the yuan’s trading band to give the currency more room to rise or fall each day and allowing banks more room to set deposit rates.

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/

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Trading

Business Banking The foreign exchange trader: ‘the closer you get to 4pm, the less the risk’

Caspar Marney, a veteran of forex desks, now teaches others how the impenetrable markets work

“Banks don’t have to beat the market to make money. They just have to beat their customers.”

So says Caspar Marney, a foreign exchange trader of about 20 years’ experience, including spells at major City banks such as UBS and HSBC.

The former paratrooper has been playing those markets using his own statistical methods on behalf of private clients since 1999, and gives lectures to others keen to learn how this impenetrable scene really works – which seems to be in a very different way to how most of us imagined.

On Tuesday, Bank of England governor Mark Carney admitted that allegations of exploitation in foreign exchange markets could prove to be a bigger scandal than the manipulation of Libor, following last year’s revelations that the £3tn-a-day global trade in currencies might have been rigged.

“A bank’s spot [currency trading] desk doesn’t generally beat the market,” Marney adds. “They extract profit from their orders. Orders are information. Every bit of information stacks the deck. And the closer you get to 4pm, the less the risk [of the price moving against you].”

http://www.theguardian.com/

 

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Trading, USA

Explore 60 years of budget deficits in one chart

When President Obama took office in 2009 at the height of the recession, the annual budget deficit came in at 10.1 percent of gross domestic product — a level not seen since the end of World War II. In the five years since, the budget deficit has been sliced more than half. New figures in Obama’s just-released budget put it at only 3.7 percent of GDP in 2014. Explore 60 years of deficits – and the occasional surplus – in the interactive chart below.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

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