The Evolution of Super Senior CDS

Posted by on Dec 12, 2012 in The T-Report | No Comments

Synthetic CDO’s Starting at the beginning is a good place to start. A synthetic CDO is a “CDO” made up of credit derivatives. A typical one would contain 100 “Reference Entities” or companies. They could be bigger, rarely were they smaller because that wasn’t optimal for the “tranching”. The “first loss tranche” or “equity” tranche […]

The T-Report: Will Ben Keep an Ace up his Sleeve?

Posted by on Dec 12, 2012 in The T-Report | No Comments

Ben Wants to Ease and Eventually Will David Copperfield doesn’t do the disappearing elephant as his first trick. Houdini probably did some sleight of hand before getting chained up and immersed in water. While Ben wants to ease, he may want to wait a little to bit. Ben is ready, willing, and able, heck, chomping […]

The T-Report: Lend Onto Others as You Would Have Them Lend Onto You

Posted by on Dec 11, 2012 in The T-Report | No Comments

Lend Onto Others as You Would Have Them Lend On To You We have moved fully into a world where lending decisions are based on who needs it and not who deserves it. I remember the days of deal roadshows where equity investors would come out excited, and the bond investors, more senior in the […]

Fixed Income Target Portfolio Revised Allocations

Posted by on Dec 10, 2012 in The T-Report | No Comments

Fixed Income Allocation Changes Leveraged loans down to 20% in CORE and 10% in each of Traded and Aggressive HY Short increased to 20% from 10% in Aggressive. Other “postion” reduced to 2% from 4% in other   Getting bearish here and taking advantage of the markets decision to ignore overnight concerns in Europe and […]

Weekly FI Overview & Strategy: Is CCC the new AAA?

Posted by on Dec 9, 2012 in The T-Report | No Comments

Is CCC the new AAA? No, CCC isn’t the new AAA, but the market is starting to trade it that way. It was a decent week for fixed income, but what stood out for me was the strength in the high yield market. I thought the demand for high yield debt would subside and that […]

Greek Bond Trading Strategy from Last Week

Posted by on Dec 7, 2012 in The T-Report | No Comments

One of the Best Performing Bonds With all that is going on, it is hard to remember, that Greek PSI bonds have actually had a good year. This is the 2023 maturity PSI bond. Is started out around 26.5 then dropped to below 15 after the elections that took the world into a summer of […]

A note on Greece from Last Friday

Posted by on Dec 7, 2012 in The T-Report | No Comments

Greece Update So I attended this Greek conference yesterday.  It was interesting in many ways.  Trying to sift through the hype and figure out the reality is a bit tricky, but here is what I take away. Samaras had a taped message that was very pro business.  His line about switching from Red Tape to […]

The T-Report: NFP, Yeah you know me.

Posted by on Dec 7, 2012 in The T-Report | No Comments

Great Report? My first reaction was that this was a great report. Big headline gain in the establishment report. The drop in the unemployment rate seems great too, but then you look at the household survey (that determines unemployment rate) and it is showing job losses of 120,000. I’m not sure where the jobs came […]

The T Report: Bulls are from Mars, Bears are from Venus

Posted by on Dec 6, 2012 in The T-Report | No Comments

One Market – Two Tapes Is this the start of the Santa Rally? I can’t believe how many times I heard that yesterday. Clearly the bulls were not allowed to look at Apple or the Nasdaq. Even the S&P couldn’t get back to Monday’s close and is down on the week? I thought my Traffic […]

Afternoon T: Traffic Jams, Learned Behavior, & Neon Gazelles

Posted by on Dec 5, 2012 in The T-Report | No Comments

How Traffic Jams Start One of the favorite bits of research I ever read was in college and it was study on how traffic jams form. I can’t remember the details, as it was my friend’s class not mine, but he test was to randomly hit the brakes and see how many traffic jams you […]