Long bond futures, open interest. There really shouldn’t be much to glean from just the raw count of US Treasury futures contracts at any given time, yet throughout the past quarter-century you could tell something was up whenever this particular contract’s open interest went up. More of long bond OI, the more it seemed (and still seems) trouble lurked (lurks).I [...]
Little noticed at the time, October 2012 was quite the roller coaster. Most anyone cared about was QE3, the wonderful, awesome flood of liquidity kindly wise-man Chairman Bernanke had restarted for reasons that didn’t seem so important. Did it matter to the public that the repo market went haywire late in that very same month, at the very same time [...]
Nervous people tend not to sit still. The term nervous energy means just that. When you’re worried about something, your mind is telling you to use up the resources your body is providing to search for a fix to whatever it is that’s bothering you. Mitigation at the very least. It really is a simple thing sometimes. In the UST [...]
It’s seems like a very long time ago now, back on March 1 the UST curve un-inverted. While most have been focused on the 2s10s, it was the middle front of the yield curve which has been out in front signaling growing distress (liquidity hedging). The difference in yield between the 5-year note and the 52-week bill had tumbled throughout [...]
On December 12, 2007, the Federal Reserve announced its entry into emergency “non-standard” policy measures. In a belated attempt to “address elevated pressures in short-term funding markets”, the US central bank would begin auctioning reserve funds “against the wide variety of collateral that can be used to secure loans at the discount window.” The Term Auction Facility (TAF) would become, [...]
I have to hand it to my colleague Joe Calhoun. In recent months, he’s been able to almost perfectly predict the Trump Administration’s response tactics to all this trade war stuff. Back in July, it was mere comments on the dollar. Not long thereafter, aid to farmers caught up in the China dispute. When that happened, Joe predicted it wouldn’t [...]
You do have to wonder to whom the increasingly shrill bond market declarations are being directed. It’s very likely that Bloomberg’s now daily haranguing “the yield curve can’t possibly be right” tirades aren’t meant for UST investors. Rather, it is perfectly evident that the treasury market is going to do what it does regardless, and that the media, in general, [...]
Over the past month, crude prices have been pinned in a range $50 to the high side and ~$46 at the low. In the futures market, the price of crude is usually set by the money managers (how net long they shift). As discussed before, there have been notable exceptions to this paradigm including some big ones this year. It [...]
It is often said that the market for US Treasuries is the deepest and most liquid in the world. While that’s true, we have to be careful about what it is we are talking about. There is no single US Treasury market, and often differences can be striking. The most prominent example was, of course, October 15, 2014. In truth, [...]
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