Blog
Reflation in Danger Due to Low Liquidity
Over the past few weeks we have expressed scepticism on the Trump reflation trade and we have argued that bank stocks should underperform. We have shown previously that when you look at the 3 and 6 month change in Commercial & Industrial lending as well as the...
read moreBuy USDJPY Dips
Fundamentals in Japan still support a weaker JPY. Yield differentials are one of the most important drivers of currencies and, as the top chart shows, this shows that USDJPY is becoming stretched to the downside. Also, as we highlighted in our Themes for 2017, the...
read moreChinese Excess Liquidity Rolling Over
Chinese excess liquidity does a good job of leading asset prices as well as China-related commodities. We define excess liquidity as M1 money growth minus Inflation minus economic growth. This captures how much excess money there is beyond what the real economy can...
read moreEquities and Margins
P/E expansion has been an important driver of US equity returns in recent years. The left chart shows the disaggregation of returns in 5 year blocks going back to 1996. As we can see, in the years 2011-2016, 55% points of the 79% return of the S&P in that period...
read moreExtreme Complacency on Russell 2000: Buy Puts
(from our Weekly of 21st February) As we have been noting, the market remains in a risk-on regime, with positive momentum, falling volatility and confirmation from various inter-market relationships such as cyclical stocks outperforming high dividend stocks, high...
read moreShort AUDCAD As Proxy China Trade
Although both AUD and CAD are commodity currencies, given Australia’s outsized exposure to China, AUDCAD can be used as a proxy trade on the Chinese economy. AUDCAD is approaching the top of its range just as Chinese liquidity is rolling over. In our March Leading...
read moreRising Inflation in China
PPI in China has swung from deflation to relatively high inflation over the last 6 months. Wholesale prices are rising fast, import prices are also rising due to the lagged effects from a weaker yuan are moving sharply higher. (CPI, especially core CPI, had been...
read more‘Soft’ Economic Surprises Running Far Ahead of ‘Hard’ Data
For the past few months, we have noted in our Leading Indicator Watch publications that financial market inputs to our leading indicators were running far ahead of actual hard economic data. The same is true for survey data vs real economic data. While we have seen...
read moreEURGBP: Deteriorating Rate Differentials
(from our Weekly Update of 14th February 2017) Rising inflation in the eurozone is driving real rates lower, widening the rate differential between the EUR and other DM currencies. We look at risk-adjusted real-rate differentials by dividing real-rate differentials by...
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