ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
On Friday, CNBC’s Fast Money asked the question “Has Goldman Bottomed Out?” The answer to these kinds of questions is always a “maybe” or a more resolute “perhaps/perhaps not” but I was a bit amused at the reasoning provided for guessing that Goldman Sachs (GS) has reached a bottom: It acted well on Wednesday by … Read more
Earlier this week, I suggested setting up a pairs trade between Goldman Sachs (GS) and Deutsche Bank Ag (DB) to take advantage of an apparent growing divergence in performance between the two financial giants. My main recommendation rested on a put spread for GS and a call spread for DB. After thinking about the structure … Read more
When news broke of SEC charges of fraud against GS, investors quickly dumped DB out of fear that the SEC would soon target DB for its involvement in creating toxic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). While the selling in GS has gained momentum, the selling in DB has ever so slightly reversed. On Monday, GS broke … Read more
I have a lot of respect for fund manager Doug Kass. His latest piece, “The Ramifications of the Goldman Sachs Case,” contextualizes the current push for financial reform, and it provides a succinct indictment of the practices that helped ignite the recent financial panic. However, I disagree with Kass’s casual link between the SEC’s charges … Read more
The news has rippled across the globe that the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) finally got around to charging Goldman Sachs with fraud: “The SEC alleges that Goldman Sachs structured and marketed a synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO) that hinged on the performance of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS). Goldman Sachs failed to disclose to … Read more