Hope all goes well… “The market is not positioned for a big move to the upside,” said Roadrunner, the industry’s biggest equity vol trader. “We’ve seen massive volume in options, someone’s selling skew, distorting volatility in way you almost never see.” The consequence is option traders are heavily short futures. On weakness they buy. On a strong rally, they’ll scramble to cover. “If volatility picks up as the S&

Opened the hatch and he bolted. A dead run. Off I jogged, in steady pursuit. The two of us on a rainy morning, deep into the woods, sublime spring glory. Shackleton’s a golden, a generous spirit, nine months old. Meaning he’s equal part heaven and hellion. Barking, bolting. Chewing, humping. He loves rabbits, deep mud, and dreams of going Guantanamo on the squirrels that terrorize his long days, confined to our yard

Hope all goes well… “Jackson’s so dumb, he threw a rock at the ground and missed,” taunted Teddy. “Teddy’s so stupid, he put a ruler next to his bed to see how long he slept,” countered Jackson. “You’re both so ugly that when you entered an ugly contest, they said, no professionals allowed,” chortled Charlie, wiggling in. I turned our Suburban’s radio up. “Yo Mama is so done with you boys that when we get home you al

Overall: “I’m deeply shocked and embarrassed by Prime Minister Cameron’s claims,” declared Muhammadu Buhari, former military dictator turned elected President of Nigeria, going for a spin in Africa’s biggest money laundering machine; London. “Is Nigeria as fantastically corrupt as Prime Minister Cameron says?” asked some reporter. “Yes,” answered Buhari, letting it fly. But Cameron didn’t just insult Nigerians. He in

“Fear is a great motivator,” said the plumber, returning from Washington. “So before presenting my thoughts on market liquidity, I did an 8,000 page literature review,” he continued, hiking his belt, concealing crack. “The SEC wrote an amazing 1987 post mortem. There had been an ecosystem change they hadn’t understood.” New derivative insurance products had proliferated, and were poorly thought through. “When the S&a

“Central banks were created to be the banks for banks,” said the CIO. “They were structured to influence the economy by increasing or decreasing the attractiveness of lending money.” If central banks wanted to spur banks to lend to the real economy, they reduced the interest rate they could earn from parking their money at the central bank. If they wanted to reduce bank lending, they increased the attractiveness of m

Hope all goes well… “I am the king of debt. I do love debt. I love debt and I love playing with it,” stammered The Donald, lips pursed, sitting in his sandbox, now nearer than ever to toying with mankind’s most prodigious pile of the stuff. “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal,” he cried, knowing all too well that if you owe someone $1bln it’s your problem, but if you owe them $

“Not a week goes by without someone extolling the virtues of the equity market because there’s no credible investment alternative with interest rates near zero,” said Stanley Druckenmiller, the investing legend. “If one applied the average interest rate settings of Volker and Greenspan using standard Taylor rules, today’s Fed Funds rate would be 3%; this is the least data-dependent Fed in history,” he continued. “Thi

Hope all goes well… “Amazon and Facebook are two of the top GDP destroyers,” said Lithium, hands-free on Highway 1. “They’re run by brilliant guys, obsessed with innovation, creative destruction.” Their earnings were great; frightening for competitors. “Apple was a GDP destroyer, but no longer, they’re too large, they’ve saturated the market.” Apple’s performance sucked tailpipe. “Think deeply about what these earnin

Overall: “We have created new tools to determine whether an economy may be pursuing foreign exchange policies that could give it an unfair competitive advantage against the United States,” announced the Treasury, late Friday. “China, Japan, Germany, and Korea will be closely monitored as a result of a material current account surplus combined with a significant bilateral trade surplus with the United States. Taiwan w