Morgan Stanley: The Fed is Bluffing; Board the Ark

A powerful gale is coming from the east (extra Dickens) and it will blow out your piker portfolios straight out of the waters. The markets have traded sideways for more than a month now, unable to break out of its tight range–frustrating ardent longs and the canaille pretending to be important, who are instead from the Third Estate.

Morgan Stanley is out with a note suggesting to ignore the Federal Reserve, them and their petulant ham and eggers, faking hawkishness. Instead of selling bonds, like a moron, and getting long stocks, Morgan suggest that you board the ark and reserve seating next to the giraffe and the leopards.

“We found little at Jackson Hole to sway our view on the U.S. Treasury market,” Morgan Stanley strategists Matthew Hornbach and Guneet Dhingra wrote in a client note. “While August payrolls present an obvious risk, we continue to believe market-implied probabilities for a September rate hike will end at zero, not 100.”

There are several preferred ways to play this. I will highlight some of my favorite ideas.

For a straight forward allocation into long duration treasuries, without leverage, buy TLT. It pays a monthly divvy, annualized at around 2.5%, and is at the epicenter of all large money managers daily buying programs.

If you’re not interested in the income aspect of treasuries and only want the price action, go with the zeroes, ticker ZROZ.

3x long datedTreasuries: TMF

2x long dated Treasuries: UBT

US Treasury strips: EDV

7-10 yr Treasuries: UST

Before I started doing finance news, my world was secluded to a very small, unexciting, corner of the world. You had to deal with my caprices, either through my bitching and whining or discussing the glorious nature of my victories. After 8 years, believe me, it got boring. Ever since I started to write news, I’ve felt a renewed vigor in my prose and a strong desire to paint a narrative for all of you out there. Granted, none of you are able to understand, let alone realize, that I am in fact painting a masterpiece. But you will in due course.

Tonight I throw shit at the canvas and label it ‘fucking art.’

Dennis Gartman went on the teevee, with his fucked up, non-bespoke clothes, and talked a whole lot of gibberish.

Stocks to go higher, ‘lower left to upper right.’

‘Oil has no choice but to go lower.’

Gold is going higher too, but only in euro terms. Trust me when I tell you, 99.999% of traders don’t bother to convert into a foreign currency before going long gold. Also, it was one of iBC’s own, J from Australia, who gave Gartman that whole cockeyed idea of going long commodities in different currency denominations.

Also, he’s calling for a 15% drop in the yen. Yeah fucking right. Good luck with that. And, on top of that, he thinks the dollar is heading for parity with the euro. That’s more than 10% from current levels. Ha!

With the dollar viagra’ing its way higher, he still thinks stocks will rip tits to the upside. Lastly, oil has no choice but to trade lower, naturally.

FUCK!!! (head explodes)

Earlier this morning, I tweeted this.

Then after the close, Rich Ross, professional yarn weaver at Evercore, went on CNBC and said this shit.

What’s with all the perfect storm references? That movie wasn’t even great. It was okay, but not good enough to obsess over. Why can’t we just have regular storms? Why the perfect one?

New record highs. The only problem with these records is the lack of actual traction in a very wide swath of the market. According to Exodus, the median gains for the past month is just a little bit more than 1%.

Semiconductors are higher by 18%. The banks are all higher by 5%. And apparel stores are higher by 4.5%–all over the past month.

Offsetting these gains are losses in gold -10%,  internet service providers -7%, home healthcare -7% and telecom -5.5%.

The largest sector by market cap, Drugs-Major, are showing losses of 2.7% for the month. Major oil and gas, the second biggest sector by market cap, was higher by 2.8%.

The NASDAQ, as a whole, is up 1.5% over the past month and flat over the past two weeks.

Over the past 3 months, the NASDAQ is higher by 6.5%, while treasuries are higher by 8.5%.

QED

CNBC.com has an article up right now which doesn’t speak to a Hillary landslide predicted by Wall Street. It actually is more about the polls tightening in the months to come, which might lead to a small sell off in markets. The overarching theme is a Clinton victory and GOP controlled congress, which would equate to gridlock aka status quo.

The analyst cited in the article says gridlock is good, so that’s that. Nowhere in the actual contents of the puff piece did it say the win would be such a landslide that the dems would take back the congress.

“You have a Democrat president, and a Republican controlled Congress which means you have gridlock in Washington. The market is pricing in this gridlock, meaning it’s going to be that much of the burden of supporting the economy falls on the Fed,” said Woo, head of global interest rates and foreign exchange strategy

This is yet another example of the main stream media conducting public relations operations on behalf of the Clinton campaign.

Meanwhile, as the market tips to new highs, the ark floats, with an effervescent magnanimity one would expect from a vessel crafted by God himself.

The Clinton News Network (CNN) broadcasted a tweet that Trump sent out, challenging H. Clinton to release her medical records. The only issue with their broadcast is that it was edited to exclude Trump’s term of endearment for her: ‘Crooked Hillary.’

Can you imagine the shit these fuckers were pulling before the internet was around to check them?

What the fuck is a ‘shariah compliant’ note anyway. In this BBG article, they describe the debt as being compliant with the tenets of the Koran. Really, JP Morgan? I mean, what the fuck?

Since crude has been spiraling lower, the jackasses who issue islamic notes have been undergoing buyer disinterest.

So, like the good little lap dogs they are, JP Morgan is trying to stoke interest in this religious debt, by adding them to it indexes.

“We’ve already received several queries from clients who previously have not invested in sukuk and now want to understand the product,” said Hasif Murad, an investment manager at Kuala Lumpur-based Aberdeen Islamic Asset Management Sdn. JPMorgan’s step “will potentially lead to a wider acceptance of sukuk for investors” that don’t want to risk performance diverging too far from their benchmarks, he added.

The inclusion in JPMorgan indexes “will foster stronger market participation for sukuk,” said Angus Salim Amran, the Kuala Lumpur-based head of financial markets at RHB Investment Bank Bhd. “This is market positive. Funds that benchmark against these indices will be required to increase allocation to sukuk.”

“Sukuk will gain more attention from now on, but the market may need variety in terms of offerings to sustain the momentum,” said Sedco’s Fakrizzaki. “Issuers may now consider issuing benchmark sizes and to be rated.”

It’s not known whether JP Morgan will permit women to buy this debt. However, it is widely believed that this product will not be marketed to gays or persons of the Jewish persuasion, as that would be blasphemous and wholly against the will of allah.

According to wikipedia:

Since fixed-income, interest-bearing bonds are not permissible in Sharia or Islamic law, Sukuk securities are structured to comply by not paying interest. This is generally done by involving a tangible asset in the investment. For example, by giving partial ownership of a property built by the investment company to the bond owners who collect the profit as rent, which is allowed under Islamic law. Upon expiration of the Sukuk, the rent payments cease.

Sounds capitalistic. Where do I sign up?

The Dow is higher by 125 and the gorillas are very active this morning, throwing feces at one another. Taking a look under the hood of today’s action, the biggest winners are found in high yielding stocks and bonds–namely REITs, utilities, long dated treasuries, even gold.

How does that make sense with the dollar higher by 0.2%?

Buying financials because you think rates are going up is utterly retarded, if in fact the spread of the yield curve is tightening. That’s exactly what has been transpiring, with spread now just 76 bps between the 2-10yr.

REITs highlight today’s winners in financials.

The ark floats, asshole.

Even overvalued utilities go higher in a negative interest rate world of wonder.

Granted, plenty of other stuff is going higher with these risk off assets. But, it bemuses me to see these assets elevated in price after months of relentless rallies in stocks. The death of the bond trade has been predicted far and wide, for years, and all to no avail. Maybe, just maybe, it is the desired outcome for cash strapped, debt laden, governments to see their borrowing costs as cheap as possible–maybe even profitable via negative rates. After all, don’t you shop for the lowest possible rate when taking out a mortgage or a line of credit?

Scott Mather, CIO of U.S. core strategies, is suggesting investors use this slow grind higher to reduce risk, selling out of higher yielding fuckery in exchange for ‘safer’ stuff. This, of course, is the thinking of a rational man, but also one of a coward. He cites the fact that markets wouldn’t be doing so good, if it weren’t for the explicit rigging of markets by central banks.

Can anyone argue with that?

The trillion dollar question is when will the central banks stop rigging markets? People have been pondering this question dating back to 2009. For nearly half a decade, pundits have been saying ‘The Fed is pushing a string.’ Meanwhile, here we are in 2016 and the central bank hegemony over markets is stronger than ever. They’ve managed to completely eradicate credit risk in Europe, something–at first–thought to be an impossible task. Yields have gone from elevated levels to negative. Markets are at record highs and nothing seems to deter them, not even news!

Commodities are weaker this morning, in spite of a sharply higher stock market.

WTI is off by 1.7% and the dollar is, once again, strengthening v the euro. This comes after expectations for a September or December rate hike soared, given Yellen’s most recent remarks.

This morning consumer spending came in at 0.3%, matching expectations. There is a glow around stocks now that is hard to shake. Even though a stronger dollar and weaker oil price is bad for the fundamentals of the economy, investors are buying stocks regardless.

Like I said last night, don’t expect much of a move this week, until the Friday jobs report. It’s the last week of August. The Bears have been flayed and festooned all over Wall Street. This is nothing less than a celebratory victory lap in the face of harrowing headwinds.