Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Election Bounce

The Financial Times (Lex) had the following trading advice for people willing to make financial bets based on political hunches (I can't link to it because the FT is very cagey on allowing links):

Obama wins: buy Treasuries, (sell gold as hedge), sell stocks
Romney wins: sell bonds, buy dollar and stocks

Obama won, stocks opened down, Gold is up, and Treasuries are up. Not bad advice.

8 comments:

Mercury said...

Treasuries continue to go up in large part because the Fed buys up a huge amount of what gets issued. In January Fed mortgage buys are going to ramp up as well(that will be ~$85b per month combined –unsterilized-) and I don’t see why stocks would remain some sort of sacred cow if that’s what they thought is needed to further “fix” things.

Perhaps some of the sharper pencils here can explain how a balance sheet of that size will one day be unwound.

No way gold goes down from here although private ownership might be made illegal (again) very soon.

Anonymous said...

Why would Fed buying ever have to be unwound? It is just a bookkeeping entry that tracks money printing.

Mercury said...

Well unfortunately they don’t have to do anything but some of us are of the mind that indefinite money printing and zero interest rates won’t end well.

Plus, other than generating commish for primary dealers (who just park the proceeds back at the Fed anyway) the Fed’s buying up ~all the debt the Treasury issues seems like little more than a circular wire transfer that builds up inflation and interest rate risks like brush on the forest floor. I mean, how has that plan been working out in Europe?

Anonymous said...

How did stocks do during Dear Leader Obama's first term?

Mercury said...

This market's leader is Bernanke not Obama.

Anonymous said...

stocks up 100% during Obama reign of Error

Anonymous said...

So one-day drops reveal deep connections between the Presidency and the markets, but multi-year rises indicate that there is no connection at all. Got it.

Anonymous said...

erm, what was the treasury/gold/equity hedge ratios?

besides don't be such a shill, anyone who was paying attention knew BO had a 90% probability of winning going into election day... the election was practically a non-event.

but yeah we can discuss all day the causation of a 1 data point correlation