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US stocks catch a big bid in the final 15-minutes of trading to limit the damage

Dramatic move late

The S&P 500 finished the day down just 24 points at 2954 in a big win for the bulls late in the day.
The index gained more than 70 points in the final 15 minutes of trading in a huge bid, that was likely helped by month-end rebalancing. The huge rallies in bond and selling in stocks this month left pensions and other balanced funds heavily overweight bonds, so they’re forced to buy to get back on target.
There may also be hopes for an emergency Fed cut on the weekend or some good coronavirus news. There’s no doubt the market could have overshot this week, with the S&P 500 posting its worst weekly performance since October 2008 — when Lehman Brothers collapsed.
The intraday chart shows the huge reversal that kicked off a test of the earlier low of 2880.
SPX
On the day:
  • S&P 500 -25 points to 2954 (-0.8%)
  • Nasdaq – flat
  • DJIA -1.4%
On the week:
  • S&P 500 -11.5%
  • DJIA -12.4%
  • Nasdaq -10.5%
The weekly chart is still ugly but at least the bulls have some lift as we closed off the weekly lows:
SPX weekly
We will have to get back above the 200-dma at 3046 to generate any real optimism.

IMF WARNING: Britain could follow Greece?

There were fears that Britain could follow Greece into a financial crisis after a global finance chief warned of economic “contagion” spreading across Europe.

The head of the International Monetary Fund urged politicians to finalise a bail-out for the debt-laden Mediterranean country, saying that every day lost in resolving the problems risked spreading the impact “far away”.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s comments came amid more evidence of Europe’s mounting fiscal problems after Spain’s debt was downgraded – a move recently applied to its under-pressure neighbour Portugal as well as Greece.

On Wednesday, shadow chancellor George Osborne raised the spectre of the crisis affecting the public finances of the UK, which faces dealing with its own £163 billion mountain of public borrowing. (more…)

Psychopaths

Every once in awhile the wrong person ends up working at a Wall Street firm and lives to tell their story upon exiting.

Ben Younger, the auteur behind the 2000 film ‘Boiler Room’ had, in fact, trained at one – the film is more autobiographical than you might have thought. he was an outsider and it didn’t take him long to realize what was going on around him. My own experiences have been chronicled here and in my book – it had taken me too long to realize that I couldn’t be a “good broker” no matter how hard I tried because the entire business model is set up to reward conflicted action and avarice – he with the least scruples and fear of regulators wins.

This weekend we hear from former Lehman Brothers trader Nicholas Chirls. Nichols worked at the epicenter of credit bubble psychosis in the 2007-2008 period and was every bit as out of place as I was, mainly owing to his possession of a soul and priorities other than compensation… (more…)

My Time at Lehman

I started at Lehman Brothers on June 1st, 2007 as a first year analyst. It was my first job out of college. Dick Fuld, the CEO at the time, publicly discussed “the road to two-hundred,” in which he would not retire until the stock reached $200 per share, almost three times the price when I arrived. Everyone at the firm believed this as though it were a fact – that there was something special about Lehman Brothers stock – it always went up.

I joined Lehman for a few reasons. The first was personal. My mother worked on Wall Street and passed away when I was a teenager. I felt, somewhat misguidedly, as though following in her footsteps would bring me closer to her. The other reasons were simpler. I had been interested in the stock market as a kid (though I went to work trading bonds and credit derivatives), I wanted to make good money, and I thought maybe, just maybe, it would be a bit of fun. (more…)

Howard Marks On Luck And Skill In Investing

When Howard Marks graduated from the Booth School of Business of the University of Chicago, he was turned down for the one job he really wanted. That, he said, was the luckiest moment of his career. The firm that turned him down was Lehman Brothers.

Marks is the co-chairman and founder of Oaktree Capital Management. He spoke to an audience of investment professionals and MBA students at the annual MIT Sloan Investment conferencein Cambridge on February 20th.

His talk was moderated by Randy Cohen, a senior lecturer at the Sloan School. Marks and Cohen discussed a range of topics, including his luck and skill in career choices, the lack of efficacy in forecasting, the importance of second-level thinking, investing in the current interest rate environment and the ingredients for investment success.

On luck and skill in career choices

Marks said he was not the kid who started reading prospectuses at nine years old and then invested his bar mitzvah money. Before deciding on a career in finance, he considered being a history professor, an architect, an advertising man and an accountant. Before graduating from the University of Chicago, he interviewed for jobs in corporate treasury, banking, investment management, investment banking, accounting and consulting. (more…)

Hendry takes a big bet on China crash

Hugh Hendry, the voluble hedge fund manager well known for his bearish but highly successful calls on the global economy over the past two years, has taken a big position that is designed to profit from a crash in China.

Mr Hendry’s London-based Eclectica Asset Management has constructed a “short credit” portfolio that stands to make gains of 250 per cent for his flagship fund in the event of a slump in China’s growth.

Eclectica is also poised to launch a standalone fund to benefit from the strategy next month, the Financial Times has learned.

The new fund will stand to deliver even larger gains than those for the main fund if successful.

“The investment team and I have carefully constructed a short credit portfolio made up of over 20 single-name industrial, cyclical businesses that have the dubious distinction of suffering from gigantic financial leverage and Asian/commodity overdependence,” Mr Hendry wrote to investors in his monthly letter this week. (more…)

Taleb reveals unsettling truths

How fragile we are. Five years on from the Lehman Brothers collapse, political and regulatory errors have made the world’s financial system even more fragile.

This alarming line of thought comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, best known for The Black Swan, which explained markets’ difficulties in pricing extreme events for which they had no precedent.

 Mr Taleb, who spoke to me in London last week, divides opinion. For some he is a genius, for others a charlatan. What seems clear, however, is that his gloriously charismatic act and polymath choice of imagery, drawn from philosophy, mathematics and the Classics, can get in the way of underlying ideas which are not in fact far-fetched. Indeed they contain a hard kernel of commonsense truth.

Here, then, is an attempt to render Mr Taleb’s poetic arguments in prose.  (more…)

Lessons from Hedge Fund Market Wizards

1. Steve Clark was “brutally honest” in his interview with Schwager. In the opening, Clark describes his background; raised in a council house on the outskirts of London, no father in sight, no university degree, and no initial trading experience. Clark was installing stereo systems when a friend told him about trading jobs in the City.  Sometimes interest and motivation are more important than “pedigree”.
2. He worked a series of back-office jobs and assistant roles before getting a shot at running a market-making book. He got his first chance to trade the book while filling in for a trader on holiday…during the week of the October 1987 crash. Trial by fire situation.
3. Steve learned a valuable lesson making prices on October 19, 1987: the price is where anyone is prepared to deal, and it can be anything. Steve found he had to quote prices so low until sell orders dried up. He still lost several million pounds on his book that day.
4. Eventually he became the most profitable trader in his group. Steve credits this shift to his ability to cut positions that were down or “wrong”. He also traded around news to orientate himself on “the right side of the market”. Plus, he was inexperienced and didn’t have the fear that cripples people who’ve been in the business for a long time. 
5. Traded on order flow info and screened for stocks making moves on big volume. He also used charts to see what happened when stocks reached certain levels in prior periods. Clark cautions that he is not a big believer in predictive chart analysis.  (more…)

Patience, persistence and presence of mind are what you need

Sitting at a desk a stone’s throw from the former Lehman Brothers building in London’s Docklands, it felt pretty good to make $1,898.50 by moving my finger twice. As somebody who works for a monthly pay cheque, it was the fastest two grand I’d made in my life.

But a day’s training as a City trader taught me more than the simple lesson that money moves fast in the Square Mile. It’s also about persistence, patience, presence of mind – and making a shrewd bet.

At a beginners’ trading session at futures specialist Amplify Trading, participants could deal in currencies, oil or the widely followed S&P 500 index of US shares. I chose foreign exchange. Aware of the upheaval on the bonds market as the weak economies of Ireland and Portugal came under pressure from speculators, I chose to “go short” on the euro – a bet that the European currency would fall against the US dollar. But after trading two “lots” – a specific volume – my trade immediately went bad. Disaster.

My “professor”, managing director William de Lucy, urged against instantaneously hedging by betting in the opposite direction. He smiled and explained that trading was as much about staying the course as making the right choices. Buying and selling randomly or reacting to headlines was a recipe for failure, he said.

A few minutes later, the euro started to fall. I was exultant, without thinking for a second about family and friends in my native Spain becoming poorer, in dollar terms, as I was getting richer. Tempted to take some early profits, I thought of hedge fund manager John Paulson, who made $6bn by betting on the collapse of the US sub-prime mortgage market – and then waiting two years to close the trade. Patience.

At the risk of stereotyping, the firm says testosterone-fuelled men tend to be more active – even if there is little activity in the market – while women are more patient, consistent and selective. De Lucy says his firm tries to stop traders thinking they will make instant fortunes, reiterating that the job is a marathon, not a sprint.

“This is like a tennis match: you can’t smash the ball all the time, as you will miss the hit when the right time comes,” he said. Trading rooms as a bear pit of loud Cockney barrow-boys? That was the 1990s. They are quieter and more diverse now, he says.

So, as a trader who ticks two boxes for diversity (female and foreigner), I decided to be patient, watching my trade become more and more profitable. To distract myself, I joined the chatroom on the right of my screen, connecting former Amplify students around the world, now working at different banks and trading rooms. Since some were in Spain, I asked them what would be tougher: to bet on the financial markets or on Real Madrid winning the league?

My fun was only interrupted by the complaints of my heavy-trading, money-losing colleagues, one of whom carried out a hyperactive run of 87 trades in euros, oil and stocks to net a profit of just $6.25. After a much-needed cup of tea, my professor suggested I take some profits. I agreed, as I had already made quite a lot and, frankly, things were getting boring. Where was the craft in this job?

I took $750, thinking about one of De Lucy’s remarks: “Psychology is more than half of this game.” I looked at the towers of Canary Wharf, once full of bankers and traders who thought their systems could never go wrong.

Becoming my own chief risk officer, I called it a day half an hour before the closing bell. I had made far more than anybody else in my group, gone twice for tea, had a chat about football – it was time to cash in my chips and go.

A swift reality check ensued – it was all, of course, a paper profit. Leaving Canary Wharf, I felt the way thousands of traders must feel: that it’s all a game. With two clicks, I had made more than billions of people around the globe live on for a year. But in a sense, it’s not all paper: profits on the financial markets mean a loss to others, people I don’t know. I looked at the financial pros leaving work in a rush and wondered whether they were aware of the people and circumstances beyond their screens. Have we still not learned to consider the human factor?