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This remarkable editorial from the Saudi Ambassador to the UK is tantamount to a call to arms.  We have been buying some of the oil companies (APA, APC, OXY, CLR as they have sold off nicely on the fear of an oil glut developing much like the natural gas price collapse that occurred in North American gas. There are two reasons why this will not happen.  Unrefined petroleum products are not really landlocked like natural gas.  For example there is no restriction (practical or legal) on refined petroleum products.  In fact exports are at record highs.  Second and that is … Read more

Mar 2015 Feb 2015 YTD 1 Year Avg Index / Sub Strategies Currency Value ROR Value ROR Return Return Annl* Std Dev* Sharpe* Credit Suisse AllHedge Index USD 135.96 0.39% 135.43 0.93% 1.79% 3.20% 2.97% 6.55% 0.24 Convertible Arbitrage USD 116.88 -0.44% 117.40 0.72% 0.00% -4.48% 1.50% 10.65% 0.01 Dedicated Short Bias USD 39.78 -0.40% 39.94 -6.07% -4.10% -4.35% -8.40% 15.08% -0.65 Emerging Markets USD 172.58 1.19% 170.55 0.15% 2.59% 13.12% 5.33% 12.92% 0.30 Equity Market Neutral USD 82.05 0.06% 82.00 -0.49% -0.92% -3.78% -1.87% 9.00% -0.36 Event Driven USD 157.80 0.26% 157.39 2.35% 1.26% -4.43% 4.44% 7.57% 0.40 Fixed … Read more

If I had to call it, I’d say buy the tapering.  But we don’t trade the market we trade in individual ideas.  None the less the market has been week due to its preoccupation with Fed easy money and a plethora of supplies in newly minted IPP.  The S&P 500 March contract is testing 1753 where the 50 day moving average awaits.  It will probably undercut this and set the market for a nice Santa Claus rally.  Stocks are still the only game in town and nothing much is going to change that this year.   12 Dec 2013 North … Read more

  Sunday, 15 Dec 2013 | 5:02 PM ET CNBC’s Sri Jegarajah takes you through the results of this week’s forex sentiment survey. Dollar bulls are betting the Federal Reserve will start cutting stimulus measures as early as this week, CNBC’s latest poll of currency traders, analysts and strategists showed. The Fed may reduce the monthly pace of bond purchases by between $5 billion and $10 billion at its policy-setting this week – Chairman Ben Bernanke’s last before his term expires at the end of January 2014 – as recent data suggests that the economy is gaining momentum. “Mr. Bernanke … Read more

The view from the Bund of Shanghai, the Pudong section of town.  To get some idea of the scale, the tall building under construction to my right is the Shanghai Tower. It is the tallest of a group of three supertall buildings in Pudong, the other two being the Jin Mao Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center.  At the time of its topping out in August 2013, the Shanghai Tower was the tallest building in China and the second-tallest in the world, surpassed by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The video below was shot from the observation deck of the 100th floor of the Shanghai World Financial Center. That’s the highest observation … Read more

By STEPHANIE BANCHERO CONNECTUpdated Dec. 3, 2013 7:12 a.m.ET I just returned from 10 days in China.  The last part of the trip we visited a family friend and former intern of mine, Max Leary.  Max is enrolled in the Business and Financial Services Program at Hong Kong Polytech.  It’s no surprise to me that Shanghai students now rank #1 in the world in public education.  The Chinese people are ambitious, serious, and there is no social media.  The kids study a lot.  I mean a lot.  The PISA scores show that.  And Shanghai, the city, blew our mind.  The … Read more

All for One: China’s New Deal What appears to be the country’s generous new bargain is actually a move to strengthen the state By ANDREW BROWNE CONNECT Updated Nov. 22, 2013 7:53 p.m. ET China announced both economic and political reforms to pave the way for the country’s future. The WSJ’s Andrew Browne tells Deborah Kan what Xi Jinping’s China is shaping up to look like. If human figures were represented at all by the ancient masters of Chinese landscape painting, they appeared as black specks—mere spatters of ink on a silk scroll. This rendering of people with the flick of a brush was intended to demonstrate man’s insignificance before the power of nature, but it also mirrored a political reality that has endured to this day. In Chinese civilization, the … Read more

I am on a short 10 day trip through China’s major cities, Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. I wanted my kids to get a sense of the Asian imperative, the thousands of bright ambitious young Chinese swelling the ranks of our universities. The Chinese are coming and what better way than to get a feel than to come to them.  First observations is that there is a very pervasive and scary form of Internet censorship.  I can’t get the New York Times but I can get the Wall Street Journal from the hotel wifi. I think if I had told … Read more

If insiders are the smart money, no one told that to the Chairman of the Board,  William Macaulay as he bought $3.1 million dollars worth of stock nearly 7% higher than where it closed on Tuesday only three days ago.   I quote from the 14k ” William E. Macaulay has been the Chairman of our Board of Directors since October 2004. Mr. Macaulay is the Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and a Managing Director of First Reserve Corporation (“FRC”), a private equity firm focusing on the energy industry, which he joined in 1983. FRC was an affiliate of our former indirect parent, … Read more

One of my favorite clients sent me this article.  This is something we have known to be true for a long time of course as we are the”insider’s fund”.  What is conspicuously absent from the reporters’s story is the revelation of the “short swing rule”.  This is the game changer and what makes insider buying such a timely indicator. Insiders Can Give an Edge By FRANCESCO GUERRERA CONNECT Nov. 18, 2013 3:04 p.m. ET Michael Babich seems like the right kind of insider trader—the legal kind. In mid-August, Mr. Babich, chief executive of the pharmaceutical company Insys Therapeutics Inc., INSY … Read more

Our outlook: The current political headlines about the budget impasse and Government shutdown we just maneuvered reminds us of 2011 and the famous line from The Great Gatsby when he was reminded that you can’t repeat the past, Gatsby replied incredulously, Can’t repeat the past?” “Why of course you can!” TO THINK THAT WE ARE GOING TO REPEAT THIS BUDGET FIGTH COME THE NEW YEAR DEFIES IMAGINATION. We can only wish for such chaos and nonsense, as this seems to keep the Fed out of the picture and interest rates low.  Obviously the market loves cheap money. And therein lies … Read more