Promoting Useful Knowledge

I want to open with a statement here. I can in no way attempt to know how much the events in Europe impact the people of the Ukraine and even the normal Russian citizens. We see videos on the television and read about it in reports, but I’m sure it’s even worse being there than most of us can even imagine. As I write this on Sunday, I’m hoping we can have a quick end to this and cooler heads with prevail. In the links and comments below, I will only attempt to give you some information around how these events impact financial markets and data. This is a horrible situation for any of those involved in the region. I’m sorry for them and I wish I could do more to help. It seems heartless to even be writing about things like this, when these events happen. There are so many antiwar songs that I thought about using for my headline this week, but rather than be angry I thought the Black-Eyed Peas song would be a better representation of how I wished things would be. Where is the love? Tryin...

  Nothing, yet everything has changed in the last week. Where’s James Bond when you need him? Russia and Ukraine tensions are still in the news with the back and forth there driving markets in the short term. I’ll have more on why Russia below. I also read a point of view of why we should worry about these events less, when it comes to our investment portfolios. Canadians are still just hanging out with their trucks in the middle of everything. Inflation and the Fed are still a major concern for global investors. Last week bond traders, different bond now, were a little aggressive betting on a 50bps hike from the Fed in March. Now the probability that it’s just a 25bps point hike is at 78%. I still think there’s too much aggression here, as some think there’s a chance of a pre-meeting hike. I will be VERY surprised if that were to happen. Retail Sales came in rather high again last week, but off the outlandish numbers we’ve been seeing. I’ll be joining The Big Conversation this we...

I don’t even know where to start. We started the week out as normal one, then it turned into Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey park. If you don’t know what that means, check this out . I spent the entire weekend trying to figure out how each market interacted with one another. Rates, Energy, Currencies, and Equities were all involved in this party. It was a true global macro event last week. I’m never going to cover it all, but it was one wild week. CPI ripping, Rate volatility, Energy continuing its run, the Dollar dominated most currencies, and equity markets were shaken on the Ukraine news. There's also a bit of a different format for all the info in this post. Sit back and enjoy. I have a ton of content to share.  I’ll skip the normal markets update, because I could be here all week. The first thing I’m going to highlight is the Eikon Interest Rate Probability app, which is showing bets on a bunch of hikes coming across the globe. The thing is, if you look closely, there’s som...

  I saw a good word to describe last week, whipsaw. A title didn't immediately come to mind, so I hit the ole interwebs and found this . That's legendary trend following trader, Ed Seykota. Things were quite insane in the US equity space last week. Facebook lost more notional value ($230B) in one day than any stock, EVER. That’s more than value than 99% of companies in existence. Heck, that's larger than the GDP of Greece, New Zealand, and the Ukraine, just to name a few. Amazon smoked its bottom-line estimates and was up 13.5%. Peloton was down 14% on the week until about mid-day Friday. Then it started to creep up and exploded after the close on acquisition rumors. Snap went to the moon surging 58% a day after being down 23%. I’m not touching an opinion on the whole Spotify situation, but the stock was all over and did see some upside during the week for the first time in a while. Paypal was the worst performer in the S&P 500 this week, falling 23%. In the wider mark...