A question has arisen amid all the bank failures. How, with the bond market enduring its worst spasm of volatility in almost four decades, have benchmark-level stocks managed to glide along, oases of calm?
It’s a time-honored tale. A new force enters the market — quantitative easing, leveraged ETFs, high-frequency trading — and a cottage industry on Wall Street is born devoted to exposing the risks it supposedly poses for investors.
In telling their stories about how the future is bright for stocks, bulls point to solid earnings to justify the optimism. But cracks are forming in that narrative — in the trajectory of profits, and just as worryingly in the makeup of the profits themselves.
Professional speculators aren’t convinced that the worst is over for one risky corner of the stock market despite a rousing new-year rally.
A week after JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Marko Kolanovic issued a “Volmageddon 2.0” warning on the explosive rise in short-dated options, Bank of America Corp. strategists are pushing back.
Passively managed equity funds are on the cusp of marking a milestone that’s been more than a decade in the making: Globally, net assets in such products are about to exceed those of their actively managed counterparts, according to Societe Generale.
Professional speculators are turning risk-on by gobbling up technology shares, after largely missing out on the new-year rally in the stock-market’s biggest winners.
Quick: how did equity traders feel about inflation after Tuesday’s consumer price index hit? Depends on when you asked.
For months now, an uneasy truce has prevailed between the Federal Reserve and stock investors.
Just weeks after professional stock pickers celebrated their best year since 2017, the wind in the stock market has shifted, upending their fate.
Despite enduring a brutal start to the year for their portfolios thanks to a surprise market rally, two top-ranked fund managers are sticking to the bearish views that made them winners in the 2022 stock crash.
One of many things to break in last year’s market rout was a decade-long stretch in which gains in stocks overwhelmed gains in wages.
Behind closed doors, Federal Reserve policy makers worry rallying markets are impeding their efforts to control inflation. But every time Jerome Powell goes out in public he gives them more room to run.
The death of the cheap-money era is redrawing Corporate America’s earnings map - upending a decade of Wall Street wisdom over which stocks are the bargain buys or the high fliers of tomorrow.
Market watchers on Wall Street attribute this week’s stock selloff to the insidious threat of recession.
It’s as close to a sure-thing bet as markets ever offer. When the S&P 500 falls 20% or more, a recession is close behind
A disaster for bulls, the yearlong tumble in American stocks has in some respects been almost as rough for the other side of the trade.
The rising threat of an economic recession has done nothing to dissuade Corporate America from spending big on its own shares.
The US stock market will bottom by the middle of 2023 as the Federal Reserve tamps down inflation without causing anything worse than a “mild” economic recession, according to Byron Wien’s annual list of surprises.
Bulls reeling from the Federal Reserve’s still-hawkish tilt are about to lose a major force that helped tamp down turbulence in US stocks during this week’s macroeconomic drama.
For investors trying to gauge levels of hawkishness at the Federal Reserve, Wednesday was an example of words carrying more weight than actions.
Professional speculators with billions in bearish trades on the line endured a rough ride after Tuesday’s report on US consumer prices brought the latest sign that the Federal Reserve is making progress in its battle against inflation.
Order has been restored to the world for bearish traders, with their favorite targets under pressure again after surging during the recent equity rally.
Like stuck card players trying to win it all back in one hand, equity bulls are dialing up risk appetites at the tail-end of a brutal year.
One bad year in the stock market has turned Wall Street strategists into bears after two decades of bullishness.
Being glued to crypto news this week meant missing adventures in regular markets that while lacking the same high drama, made up for it in terms of money at stake.
The most crowded trade on Wall Street -- long inflation -- is suddenly getting crushed like never before in the post-lockdown era, sparking a spate of forced deleveraging among a broad cohort of institutional funds.
Fast-money quants were effectively forced to buy an estimated $225 billion of stocks and bonds over just two trading sessions, as one of Wall Street’s hottest strategies in the great 2022 bear market shows signs of cracking.
Politicians hate them, the tax collector is coming for them, and credit-market Cassandras say now is not the time to be blowing through discretionary cash.
Jamie Dimon says don’t be surprised if the S&P 500 loses another one-fifth of its value. While such a plunge would fray trader nerves and stress retirement accounts, history shows it wouldn’t require any major departures from past precedents to occur.
The fast money refused to join the crowd betting the Federal Reserve was about to make a friendly shift in monetary policy. It proved a prescient bet after Friday’s jobs report.
After a furious spate of retail selling unseen since December 2018 and beaten-down risk appetite, all the ingredients were in place heading into the big stock rebound Monday.
Unwavering profit projections. Benign chart patterns. Big hedges in the options market. All the things that bulls expected to put a brake on the worst equity selloff in 30 months have just summarily failed.
Bull or bear, in stocks lately, the punishment has been the same. Swift and brutal.
Traders watching price action in stocks might have noticed that the S&P 500 has slid toward the 3,900 level three different times Thursday, before holding its ground. The resilience can be attributed to Friday’s $3.2 trillion option expiration, one theory holds.
A valuation bulwark that had supported stocks relative to credit is starting to erode.
Seasoned investors, staring at a world clouded by war, inflation and economic uncertainty, are buying catastrophe insurance at a record clip.
After spending much of 2022 playing defense, professional speculators are reasserting themselves with aggressive equity bets on both the short and long side.
Worried? Yes. But investors have evinced few signs of panic amid a stock market drubbing that has wiped out $3 trillion, going by everything from fund flows to options trading.
Professional stock pickers are beating the market in a scale not seen in more than a decade.
Equity skeptics obsessed with everything from inflation to pie-in-the-sky earnings estimates have managed to miss a $5 trillion rally being amplified by trends in investor positioning.
The extreme pessimism that’s gripped American stock investors for much of the year is starting to dissipate. That might be reason for caution.
The biggest stock-bond rally in more than two decades has just raised the ante for investors betting Jerome Powell will send somewhat dovish signals at Wednesday’s high-stakes policy decision.
As if another inflation shock and earnings drama at big banks weren’t enough for stock investors, Friday brings a critical moment where many option traders must decide their next move on hedging.
Week after week of on-the-fly calculations about the intensity of inflation and the likelihood of a recession are preventing markets from finding equilibrium.
To state the obvious, it has been a good time to be short the market. But the success of bearish traders in 2022 goes beyond luck.
Options insurance. Hedging with Treasuries. Using sentiment to pick a bottom. The things that have lessened the pain of past equity selloffs are coming up short this time around.
While hedge funds were busy bailing from stocks at a record pace as the S&P 500 plunged into a bear market, Corporate America was furiously buying.
Despite a lot of confident predictions, nobody knows what will happen at the Federal Reserve Wednesday, never mind what the impact will be on markets.
Bearish investors are snapping up bullish options to ensure that their defensively positioned portfolios won’t be left behind if the latest rebound in US stocks proves persistent.
