Posts Tagged ‘Hedge Funds’
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Widowmaker’ Oil Trade Lives Up to Its Name
commodities – ‘Widowmaker’ Oil Trade Lives Up to Its Name – CNBC
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- Estimates for U.S. onshore oil production growth are continually revised up
- In Asia, Chinese oil demand continues to beat expectations
- With floating inventories of crude and products continuing to whittle away, oil fundamentals appear to be tightening. Onshore commercial inventories would be the next to draw, which should be supportive to oil spreads in general.
- Ethanol shortages in 2011 look increasingly possible, which would be supportive for gasoline, particularly in Brazil and the U.S.
- Gas is expected to remain in a competitive position versus Coal all winter long and throughout 2011.
- Germany will reach 2008 level power consumption by the end of 2011 if current growth trend is sustained.
Clive Capital On Commodity Outlook
Also read:
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Cracks showing in business oasis Switzerland
A shortage of affordable homes and international schools, along with a prolonged row over tax, threatens to weaken Switzerland’s magnetic pull for foreign firms.
“The new Eldorado has become even more of a magnet and there is a risk that this could result in a social crisis,” Emmanuel Fragnière of Geneva’s HEG School of Business Administration told swissinfo.ch earlier this month.
“Politicians are very happy to collect the new taxes, but they need a coherent policy to promote the location that takes into account structural difficulties.”
Problems are also showing up in Zug and in Rolle, situated between Geneva and Lausanne.
Noise control
“They are not really creating local jobs. The housing market is like a jungle. House prices have shot up unbelievably and infrastructure – transport, roads and schools – is really behind.”
Local complaints have also been matched with anecdotal evidence of foreign workers finding it tough going in their newly adopted country. The British magazine, the Economist, interviewed newcomers complaining of boredom and a lack of places in international schools.
“You need muscle to get kids in international schools,” said one financier named only as Alex. “Otherwise it’s a Swiss school, where your kids will find it hard to settle.”
Others experienced problems adapting to stricter Swiss regulations on noise and refuse collection than they were used to at home.
Geneva-based relocation expert Francois Micheloud acknowledged that the huge influx of foreign firms and workers had created some structural problems, made worse by slow planning and construction rules.
Tax uncertainty
“We are not like Monaco – a small piece of rock where you cannot build any more,” he told swissinfo.ch. “Bottlenecks will be resolved by companies spreading out to areas that are still within reach of Geneva airport.”
Switzerland’s vaunted tax competitiveness is also coming under sustained pressure from the European Union. The Swiss authorities have made noises that the corporate tax system could be revamped to meet some EU demands, but nobody knows how this could be done.
“Companies interested in relocation to Switzerland should know what the tax rules will be like in future,” tax expert Stephan Kuhn of Ernst & Young told swissinfo.ch. “They would not come to Switzerland if the tax system is unpredictable and subject to major increases.”
British-based companies, on the other hand, received a boost from Wednesday’s budget announcement that tax rates would be cut by two per cent in the next three years, a full percentage point more than previously thought.
Incentives remain
In a recent interview in the British Observer newspaper, the chief executive of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, Andrew Witty, chided British firms for heading to cheaper tax regimes, saying they had broken their bond with society.
“We could go, in theory, anywhere for a low tax rate. But first of all, how do you know that country isn’t going to change its tax rate in ten minutes?” he said.
However, Britain’s new 23 per cent rate would still be higher than the Swiss burden. Depending on where a company is based, combined effective federal and cantonal rates vary between 24.5 and 14 per cent.
Francois Micheloud is convinced that the relocation of foreign firms to Switzerland will continue “for many years to come”.
“The incentives for companies to come to Switzerland remain the same as before: competitive tax rates, excellent transport links, a central European location, access to a highly skilled work force, clusters of business competence and flexible labour laws,” he told swissinfo.ch.
“And Switzerland is still a delightful place in which to live.”
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On Tomorrow’s Secret Meeting To Plot The End Of High Frequency Trading
The SEC’s “definitive”(ly worthless) report on what happened on May 6th was a dud, and was nothing more than a distraction-based smear campaign against Waddell and Reed (an experiment in which we can only hope W&R participated involuntarily): a firm which did something that was completely in its right to do. But is this unexpected? After all had the SEC confirmed that it is indeed HFT who is responsible for a broken market structure, it would have effectively destroyed itself: if and when the SEC does indeed confirm that the entire market topology over the past 5 years has been hijacked by young and pustular math Ph.D.’s with fast computers, the implications to fair markets would be orders of magnitude worse than the fallout associated with the Madoff scandal, and could serve as grounds for the unwind of the SEC itself, which would have to explain why it has been avoiding calls against HFT impropriety for years. So in a sense Mary Schapiro’s conclusion is nothing less than a lass desperate act of self preservation. Which however means nothing in the grand scheme of things. Tomorrow, as the WSJ [1]reported a week ago, the Investment Company Institute, better known to Zero Hedge readers as the guys who track the now permanent weekly outflows from capital markets, is holding a secret meeting in which some of the participants “are determined to push for a plan to restrict high-frequency trading” (furthermore, the ICI was rather pissed about this particular leak, implying that things are really serious). While the SEC may have declared a market structure truce, and is peddling its usual worthless solution of circuit breakers (more on this below), actual market participants have had enough of seeing their profits plunge and seeing HFT extract more capital out of the market than the much maligned ten years ago market makers and specialists ever did.
Read the rest of the story here:
The MasterFeeds: On Tomorrow’s Secret Meeting To Plot The End Of Hi…
Second Leg of Crisis Beginning: Hedge Fund Manager
CNBC Senior News Editor
“We are seeing one of the most challenging years for investors ever,” De Noronha told CNBC Tuesday. “Major investors are simply leaving the market. When it looks like markets are about to fall off the cliff they rally and vice versa.
“The regulators used 6 percent as the threshold for defining the minimum capital ratios, but that 6 percent number includes non-cash assets such as deferred tax assets and goodwill,” he said. “If you use only tangible book equity the 6 percent of the biggest offenders turns into closer to 2 percent which implies a leverage ratio of 50 times. That is hardly conservative for current the current economic reality.”
Global Economy – Second Leg of Crisis Beginning: Hedge Fund Manager – CNBC
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The MasterBlog
>Oh, poor “Demonized Algos” !!!
Demonised ‘algos’ push the surge in FX trading
By Jennifer Hughes, Senior Markets Correspondent
Published: September 1 2010 00:04 | Last updated: September 1 2010 00:04
So far, however, attention has focused on the role of these high-speed traders in the equity market. Outside the glare of that publicity, it is less well known that on May 7, FX trading volumes reached records, straining the plumbing of these markets.
Some participants argue these strains were partially caused by algorithmic, or algo, traders.
Exactly how much of this can be attributed to algo trading is unclear. However, there is no question that high-frequency traders are a fast-increasing force in FX markets, which is sparking a fierce debate as to their value to the market.
On Tuesday, the Bank for International Settlements reported that average daily turnover in the FX market has jumped 20 per cent in the past three years to $4,000bn a day. Its survey was taken in April, so missed the May spike, which related to the eurozone sovereign debt crisis.
The BIS-reported gains were led by a near 50 per cent leap in spot trading – deals for immediate delivery – to $1,500bn a day. This jump was powered by increased activity from “other financial institutions”, a group that includes hedge funds, pension funds, some banks, mutual funds, insurance companies and central banks. This will also include algos.
While all categories of “other” could have increased their trading, it is likely a significant proportion was driven by algo traders, who favour the deep, liquid spot markets and particularly currency pairs such as eurodollar and dollar-yen, which between them account for 42 per cent of all currency trading.
The question for the FX market is whether high-frequency dealers improve the market by adding liquidity, or whether they are instead merely price takers who contribute little.
“Algos have been demonised, but they’re an important part of the growth story,” says David Rutter chief executive of Icap Electronic Broking, which runs EBS, the main FX interbank trading platform. “What we’ve found is that they add pressure at each price point so that instead of getting big price gaps on shocking news, trade is more orderly.
“With FX, there are a lot of other flows such as global trade, so there is good underlying liquidity that the algos can enhance.”
Algos initially appeared in FX markets almost a decade ago, attracted by the deep liquidity and increasing use of electronic trading. They were generally welcomed, particularly by banks looking to build their prime brokerage businesses. However many banks soon grew disenchanted when they found the fast-moving shops were profiting from banks’ own slow systems by exploiting brief, tiny price differences between rival platforms.
Some banks went as far as ejecting offenders from their platforms but banks’ views have since become more nuanced. They have generally reached an accommodation, helped by technological improvements which make it easier to monitor client dealings and offer client-specific prices.
“The facts are that algos have made the markets more efficient and have helped ensure there’s one virtual price,” says Jeff Feig, global head of G10 FX at Citigroup. “They do cause banks to be smarter and we’ve had to work harder to be more efficient, but that’s ultimately to the advantage of the end user.
“I think that to some extent, algos have pushed banks and the result has been enhanced transparency and increased liquidity.”
Algos mean many different things in the FX market. While high-frequency traders are the best known – typified by one senior banker as “five smart guys in a room in New Jersey,” – banks are increasingly adept at developing their own algorithms to make their internal FX deals more efficient. These “internalisation” trades too will have provided a boost to the BIS numbers.
Most players say algos are now a fact of life in currency markets.
Unlike the equity market, which is split into hundreds of stocks, they believe the FX world’s focus on a relatively small number of currency pairs means it would be far harder for a single group of participants to move the market significantly, intentionally or otherwise, as some watchers fear happened during the “flash crash”.
“Also trading can happen anywhere there’s an electronic execution system and a volatile market,” says Alan Bozian a former FX banker and now chief executive of CLS Bank, the FX settlement system. “The question is, which markets adapt well and I don’t think it’s necessarily the stock market.”
FX markets have proved generally good at adapting. Systems such as CLS, introduced years before the financial crisis, have helped minimise settlement risk and since May, participants have been working again to improve their processing systems to cope with increased volume.
Significantly, for a market that is very much built around a hub of big banks, the BIS report showed that, for the first time, interaction of the main banks with “other” financial institutions overtook trading between themselves.
This could be a pointer to the market of the future, where banks are likely to remain the hub, but as much for their trade processing abilities as for their liquidity.
This would allow the winners to build profitable volume without taking on huge trading risks – suiting the current regulatory mood.
“The banks want to continue being the price providers, but they’re getting much more interested in the infrastructure and improving that,” says Mr Bozian. This evolution is likely to apply to high-frequency trading too.
Mr Rutter believes algos are only in their “late teens” in terms of development. “The early algo trading was about super-fast dealing and chasing inefficiencies. That’s largely gone,” he says.
“Now its about math and science being thrown at the market – there’s a rich pool of data and I think we’ll see algos evolve so its not just about milliseconds, but about longer-term predictive math.”
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World Gold Council Report ( WGC)
WGC- China’s gold investment demand grew by 121% in 2Q- Central Banks buy more gold-
CONCLUSION: the WGC just reported its 2Q report ( see attached). Three key things:
1- ONE OF THE KEY NEW TRENDS IS CHINA WHERE RETAIL INVESTMENT DEMAND JUMPED BY 121% ( SEE PAGE 11). We continue to believe that deregulation of the gold market in China could OPEN a major new market for gold.
2- ANOTHER INTERESTING TREND IS THAT INDUSTRIAL DEMAND FOR GOLD CONTINUED TO IMPROVE BY 14% MAINLY DRIVEN BY ELECTRONICS UP 25% ( see page 10).
3- CENTRAL BANKS WERE NET PURCHASERS OF 7 TONNES OF GOLD DESPITE THE IMF SALE OF 47 TONNES DURING THE QUARTER. RUSSIA WAS AMONG THE LARGEST BUYERS ( 34 TONNES). The philippines also bought more gold.
Gold Demand Trends for Q2 2010 out (see Enclosed file), and WGC press release below>
INVESTMENT DEMAND WILL CONTINUE TO SUPPORT ROBUST GOLD MARKET DURING 2010
Demand for gold will remain robust during 2010 as a result of accelerating demand from India and China, as well as increasing global investment demand driven by continuing uncertainty over public debt and economic recovery, the World Gold Council (“WGC”) said.
According to the WGC’s Gold Demand Trends report for Q2 2010, published today, demand for gold for the rest of 2010 will be underpinned by the following market forces:
* India and China will continue to provide the main thrust of overall growth in demand, particularly for gold jewellery, for the remainder of 2010.
* Retail investment will continue to be a substantial source of gold demand in Europe.
* Over the longer-term, demand for gold in China is expected to grow considerably. A report recently published by The People’s Bank of China and five other organisations to foster the development of the domestic gold market will add impetus to the growth in gold ownership among Chinese consumers.
* Electronics demand is likely to return to higher historic levels after the sector exhibited further signs of recovery, especially in the US and Japan.
Marcus Grubb, Managing Director, Investment at the WGC commented:
“Economic uncertainties and the ongoing search for less volatile and more diversified assets such as gold will underpin investment demand for gold in the immediate future. Further, in light of lingering concerns over public debt levels and the euro, European retail investor demand has increased significantly.
“Over the past quarter, demand for gold jewellery in key Asian markets has been challenged by rising local prices. Nevertheless, we are seeing a deceleration in the pace of decline in demand, providing a strong outlook for ongoing recovery in this crucial market segment.”
GLOBAL DEMAND STATISTICS FOR Q2 2010
* Total gold demand1 in Q2 2010 rose by 36% to 1,050 tonnes, largely reflecting strong gold investment demand compared to the second quarter of 2009. In US$ value terms, demand increased 77% to $40.4 billion.
* Investment demand2 was the strongest performing segment during the second quarter, posting a rise of 118% to 534.4 tonnes compared with 245.4 tonnes in Q2 2009.
* The largest contribution to this rise came from the ETF segment of investment demand, which grew by 414% to 291.3 tonnes, the second highest quarter on * Physical gold bar demand, which largely covers the non-western markets, rose 29% from Q2 2009 to 96.3 tonnes.