In addition to the spate of disappointing headline economic numbers this week, there’s been an effusion of bearish sentiment in the news. The doom and gloom first buzzed my radar on Saturday, with the New York Times story, “In Striking Shift, Small Investors Flee Stock Market”.
Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group.…
This is one of those off-message rants that marks, I guess, one of the real differences between “blogs” and “old media,” and if you’re only here for the options stuff, you can skip this post.
From 1990 to 2006, the GDP share of the financial sector in the broad sense increased in the United States from 23% to 31%.
-Már Gudmundsson, Bank for International Settlements, 2008
This point has been made many times before – and…
Wall Street evidently neglected to read beyond the headlines Friday stating, as The New York Times put it, “Jobless Rate Holds Steady, Raising Hopes of Recovery”. One need look no further than paragraph two to find the other side of the story that the rest of us already know: “The monthly snapshot of the job market released by the Labor Department on Friday was hardly cause for celebration....”
A major story in late 2009 was the negative correlation between equities and the U.S. dollar. In the chart below, I show the correlation of the logarithmic daily price changes of the S&P 500 and the U.S. Dollar Index futures composite. It appears the attention has been well deserved: both the 3-month and 1-year rolling correlations are the lowest they’ve been in at least two decades.
No sooner than some investors began noticing the negative correlation, others started calling…
Marco Arment comments smartly on this NYT story describing the arrangement among stores like H&M and Wal-Mart and their suppliers, whereby the suppliers give stores credit for unsold products and instruct stores to destroy the items instead of sending them back:
It’s unfair to criticize these two companies for a practice that’s incredibly common in the entire industry, spanning nearly every product category and nearly every major retailer.
The wastefulness of this is disgusting,…
Friday, August 27, 2010
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