Cartoon by XKCD Responses are pouring in from my post Computers are the new Dumb Money. A few of the quants I know told me the link was hitting their inboxes all day from friends and colleagues around the industry. A few desk traders I talk to had some anecdotes backing my assumptions up. One…

Ethan Harris, US economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, put this out to clients two days ago: As the markets continue to sell-off, an increasingly popular view among investors is that the Fed won’t hike until next year. Global growth is weak, Chinese policy mistakes have destabilized their markets and the US equity market…

Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at Convergex, a global brokerage company based in New York, has this to say about the proliferation of “1%” days we’ve been experiencing in the stock market this year… The surge in volatility over the past week enabled this year’s aggregate number of plus or minus 1% moves in the S&P…

Five trading days in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and a roundtrip between here and the close last Friday. God forbid you had gone a few days doing something other than obsessing over the market. You’d take a look at the current level and conclude that not much has gone on. The hard part is…

Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s China Equity strategist, David Cui, isn’t terribly impressed with this week’s combined interest rate / reserve requirement ratio cuts. He notes that we’ve seen eight cuts to one or the other of these policy rates since late 2014 and they haven’t worked yet. Moreover, the only thing Chinese authorities can…

BBC: China has cut its main interest rate by 0.25 percentage points after two days of stock market turmoil. It’s the fifth interest rate cut since November. The People’s Bank of China also cut banks’ reserve requirement ratio by 0.5 percentage points. The Latin phrase Deus Ex Machina, literally “God from the Machine”, comes to…

It’s going to be bad this morning. China was down over 8% last night. Europe is down close to 5% this morning. As of this writing, the Dow Jones looks like it’s going to open down another 600 points, after losing 1000 points last week. It’s official, we’re experiencing the 28th 10% correction since WWII….