Mega plano orçamental foi promulgado por Trump

[Ulisses Pereira]

Random Thoughts: The Cross-Faced Chicken Wing!
By Todd Harrison
Sep 19, 2011 9:45 am

"Worlds collide on a Monday morning.



Please forgive me if today's prose is "A-S-D-F-G"-centric as I'm still operating with a sling on my right wing following Thursday's elbow surgery.

While I thought I would be close to 100% by the time this week's five-session set rolled around, I may have impeded my progress when the Bills last-second touchdown ended my Raiders' improbable perfect season. Just break-my-heart, baby!

Some top-line vibes as the "long discomfort--short medication" trade takes root, in no particular order:

There was out-sized open-interest heading into Friday's options expiration at S&P 1200, 1250, and 1150 and I offered last week that while S&P 1200 was the intuitive pin, the perception of a Euro "solution" (dollar-backed liquidity mechanism) could trigger an upside bias, or a "pull" toward the higher strike.

The key, once again, will be how the market responds to the post-expiration hangover later today and tomorrow after remnant puts (and calls) have been read their last rights. Please give the tape some time (after dealers "square" their risk) for a truer tenor in stateside equities to emerge.

The bull case into year-end is the passage of Euro Bonds (of the perception thereof), which would alleviate contagion concerns for the immediate future. The probability of that outcome down-ticked over the weekend, however, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party was defeated in the Berlin State Election.

That -- along with European finance ministers ruling out efforts to "stimulate" their faltering economy, effectively thumbing their nose at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner -- is why futures are indicated lower this morning and why the German market is again trading below the all-important DAX 5500 level.

I would also draw your attention to the vernacular of Austrian Finance Minister Maria Fekter, who "found it peculiar" to be lectured by a representative from a country (USA) with higher aggregate debt than the Eurozone. Nah, there are no sour grapes in Europe, which is weird given all the wineries in France and Italy.

Minyanville scored some secret footage from the EU meeting, if you have an interest in a smile.

The "bull case 1-A" for equities? We're seemingly at the "acceptance" phase of our Five-Step Guide to Contagion, which we touched on last Wednesday when we asked, "Can Europe Avoid a Sovereign Sequel?"

I suppose the only question -- and it's a biggie -- is whether we see a "Bear Stearns" or a "Lehman Brothers" in cause and effect. The goal is to avoid ad-hoc, one-off solutions (as we saw in the first phase of the crisis) and address this mess with a comprehensive plan. You know my take -- debt destruction and/or reorganization is the only true medicine -- but you know it won't come easy. The toughest, and typically right decisions rarely are.

We quietly touched on gold two weeks ago, and the reaction was anything but quiet! An intuitive reaction to the weekend news (and morning malaise) would be to see gold materially higher, and indeed it was when I awoke. It's now flat, and while I'll again say that I have no axe to grind in the metal -- and no position to boot -- we can perhaps learn a lot just by watching.

Wall Street -- the physical road and the metaphorical industry -- has been "occupied" for the last three days as protesters converged on lower Manhattan to voice their "displeasure" over all things financial. While this too can be viewed as a contrary indicator (I'm seeing big-ticket brokers starting to address the root causes of financial literacy), I was pleased to continue our house-hunting over the weekend.

BKX 35-40 is the channel to watch. Barclays (BCS), UBS (UBS), and Deutsche Bank (DB) are overseas proxies, while JP Morgan (JPM) , Bank America (BAC), and Goldman Sachs (GS) are stateside tells.

It's not often that an eight-pound feline could send shivers through the spines of billion dollar money managers. Just goes to show you, it's not the size of the cat in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the cat.

I remember when ABC (DIS), CBS (CBS), and NBC (CMCSA) were networks before MSN (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO), and AOL (AOL) emerged as their digital equivalent. Now, every person has the ability to create their own network and customize their content experience, frequency, and delivery mechanism to individual tastes. And what were once networks have since morphed into channels.

We talked about this evolution in the 'Ville (as it pertained to trading) in 2005. "The ability to provide and package information, filter unwanted noise, and offer dynamic real-time insight throughout the trading session -- all in the context of total transparency -- is perhaps a precursor to the next generation sell-side model." There will be winners in the post-crisis world, most of whom weren't leaders heading into it.

We asked a bit back from atop the grassy knoll: Will the next war be bullet-less? According to Army Gen. Keith Alexander, commander of the new US Cyber Command, future computer-based combat likely will involve electronic strikes that cause widespread power outages and even physical destruction of thousand-ton machines, and offered that massive losses of private and public data in recent years to computer criminals and spies represent the largest theft in history.



As always, I hope this finds you well.
R.P."

(in www.minyanville.com)