Baltic Dry Index. 1727 +25 Brent Crude 65.55
There can be few
fields of human endeavour in which history counts for so little as in the world
of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is
dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to
appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.
John Kenneth Galbraith.
The Great Nixonian
Error of fiat money, communist money, is well into its final act. Speculative
gambling on high leverage, has become virtually the only game in town. Why bash
metal knocking out cars for a pittance, when in a single day in bitcoin futures
you can make more than Croesus did in his lifetime.
Buy and buy more! If
we all buy the same thing, bitcoin, the FANGs and the crypto-currencies, what
can possibly go wrong? Rarely do we get what we deserve. Maybe this time it
will be different.
For those seeking a
little relief from the greater fools all rushing into bitcoin madness, scroll
down to the end of the Technology Update.
“Men of conservative
temperament have long suspected that one thing leads to another.”
John Kenneth Galbraith.
December 12, 2017 / 12:10 AM /
Updated 18 minutes ago
Asia shares take a time out, Brent breaks above $65
SYDNEY
(Reuters) - Asian shares took a small step back on Tuesday after three straight
sessions of gains, with markets consolidating in the hope an upswing in global
growth could outlast a likely hike in U.S. borrowing costs this week.
The
latest promising news came from China where banks doled out a surprisingly
generous dose of credit in November, which could bode well for a pick up in
retail sales and industrial output due later in the week.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS drifted off 0.3 percent, having bounced 2 percent in the past three sessions.
Moves were minor across the region, with blue-chip Chinese shares down 0.5 percent .CSI300 and Australian stocks up 0.2 percent. Japan's Nikkei .N225 eased 0.3 percent, after the index scored its highest close in 25 years on Monday. [.T]
Spread betters pointed to a modestly firmer start on most European bourses, while E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 ESc1 were up a slim 0.04 percent.
Wall Street had been led higher by technology and energy stocks, with Apple Inc (AAPL.O) making the biggest contribution. The Dow .DJI rose 0.23 percent, while the S&P 500 .SPX added 0.32 percent and the Nasdaq .IXIC 0.51 percent.
More
Bitcoin's First 24 Hours on Wall Street Feed Euphoria and Doubts
By Hugh Son, Sonali Basak, and Hema Parmar
11 December 2017, 23:08 GMT
Bitcoin’s triumphant debut on Wall Street hasn’t ended the financial
industry’s skepticism.The new breed of futures contracts that launched on Cboe Global Markets Inc.’s exchange late Sunday quickly became a 24-hour microcosm of bitcoin’s own wild ride this year, marked by technical glitches and surging valuations. The first day left true believers cheering, yet kept many mainstream financial professionals peering uneasily from the sidelines.
While the derivatives were a success by some key measures -- they didn’t blow up -- their 24 percent rise in price in the first session also bolstered longstanding misgivings about speculation. The contracts offer an easier way for investors to short the cryptocurrency, but instead buyers bid them up as much as 13 percent higher than the underlying asset -- setting off two temporary trading halts along the way. That gave new oomph to the rally and debate.
“The premium is a bullish indicator,” said Michael Kazley, co-founder of Crescent Crypto Asset Management, acknowledging he assumed the contracts would more closely track the cryptocurrency. “It can be explained by demand for exposure to the price of bitcoin from investors who otherwise cannot or do not want to own actual bitcoins."
More
'Well, there's no limit on it': Ohio student makes a fortune buying Canadian-invented ether cryptocurrency
Eddy Zillan, 18, has made over $500K betting on the virtual currency
By Anne Gaviola, CBC
News Posted: Dec 10, 2017 5:00 AM ET
Last Updated: Dec 10, 2017 5:00 AM ET
Eddy Zillan is an 18-year-old high school senior in Cleveland. He loves
going to car shows and he plans to attend dental school after he graduates to
become an orthodontist. In many ways, he's like most students his age except
for the fact that he's made a fortune buying and selling cryptocurrencies.
In about three years, Zillan has turned about $12,000 US into more
than $500,000. It all started with gifts he got at 13.
"A portion of the money I received for my bar mitzvah, I used it to
fund my investments," he says in an interview on Nov. 30.
"Also, I used to work as a tennis instructor and I invested that money as
well."
Chances are you've heard about bitcoin and its meteoric rise and wild price swings. Zillan looked into bitcoin years ago but decided to invest most of his cash in another, lesser-known virtual currency invented in 2013 by Russian Canadian Vitalik Buterin called ether.
After months of research and talking to people who knew a lot more than he did about virtual currencies, Zillan decided to put his money on ether.
"I thought that maybe there was something like bitcoin but different, which there was. It's called ether," he says. "I realized that it could have a lot of potential."
Luckily for Zillan, ether has seen its price spike more or less in tandem with bitcoin's. But the price of ether has gone up more than 5,000 per cent in the last year, while bitcoin's price has shot up about 2,000 per cent.
"I don't want to disclose the exact amount because its value is going up and down and some days it might increase a lot," Zillan says. "But I would say just off of ether, I've probably made over half a million dollars based on its current price of $471." (Ether's price fluctuates and soared to as much as $479 and as low as $420 on Friday.)
More
December 11, 2017 / 2:11 PM
Breakingviews - Bitcoin futures set scene for more gambling
LONDON
(Reuters Breakingviews) - Bitcoin action is now available without the bitcoin.
CBOE Global Markets launched its futures on the crypto-currency late on Sunday.
It opens fresh avenues for trading, but for now the new contracts have little
utility beyond speculation.
The one-month future surged more than 20 percent from the open before
trading below $18,000 on Monday morning – still a premium to the
crypto-currency itself. Considering the price of bitcoin has risen two-thirds
this month alone, that seems fairly sedate. Volume was roughly $50 million,
Breakingviews calculates, less than 0.5 percent of actual bitcoin trading in
the prior 24 hours, according to Coinmarketcap.com.
Futures have real-world value, for example allowing producers or
consumers of a commodity to insure themselves against price movements, or
helping investors to hedge their positions. In the bitcoin world, there are
so-called miners with investments in processing power and hefty costs like
electricity who could use the contracts this way, but that’s about it. And with
bitcoin soaring more than 15-fold in 2017 to well over $16,000 early on Monday,
selling bitcoin futures short is likely to be prohibitively expensive.
Most market players will be cautious until the contracts settle down.
There are, though, other reasons for concern. Bitcoin futures aren’t perfect
proxies for the real thing, partly because they will be settled in dollars not
the crypto-currency, which trades at different dollar prices in different
places. CBOE settlements, for example, will be based on bitcoin’s value on the
Gemini Exchange, established by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss of Facebook fame.
CME’s
futures, launching next weekend, will settle at a reference price drawn from
multiple exchanges. One opportunity could be arbitrage, exploiting the pricing
discrepancies. But it will take time for any patterns to emerge.
More
Opinion: Four lies about bitcoin futures that stock investors need to know
By Nigam
Arora
Published: Dec 11, 2017 5:50 p.m. ET
----Contagion
If bitcoin goes to $1 million, as many bulls contend, then there is no problem. However, what happens if bitcoin goes much higher and then crashes? In plain English, contagion simply means a crash in bitcoin affecting other assets such as stocks, bonds and gold. In such an event, your beloved Nvidia NVDA, +1.66% and AMD AMD, +2.21% stocks may be cut in half; gold ETF GLD, -0.40% and silver ETF SLV, -0.74% along with gold miner ETFs GDX, -0.78% and GDXJ, +0.10% may fly. Investors who are engaged in the popular volatility trades of buying the ETF XIV, +3.52% and short-selling the ETF V, -0.20% may be crushed.
The propaganda is that bitcoin is simply too small to affect other assets. The following are the two problems with this:
• In my 30-plus years of investing, I have repeatedly observed investors’ behavior of selling an unrelated asset that can be easily sold when they suffer losses on a different asset that they cannot or do not want to sell at a loss. The anecdotal evidence is that many retail investors who are heavily invested in bitcoin also are aggressive investors in momentum stocks.
• Popular momentum stocks such as Netflix NFLX, -1.23% Micron Technology MU, -0.46% and Facebook FB, +0.02% have risen a lot. There is a lot of air between their present prices and major support levels. Sentiment can change very quickly if some investors start selling them because of their losses in bitcoin.
More
A Manager of $42 Billion Fears Bubble in World's Biggest Stocks
By Jonas Cho Walsgard
Updated on 12 December 2017, 00:00 GMT
The world’s biggest companies could be hiding the biggest risks.That’s because companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd are overvalued, according to Robert Naess, who manages about $42 billion in stocks at Nordea Bank AB, Scandinavia’s largest bank.
“I’m a bit worried about the valuation of these very popular companies,” Naess, portfolio manager, said in an interview in Oslo on Friday. “The big stocks have become more expensive. There’s danger of a bubble in them.”
Naess and his partner, Claus Vorm, quantitatively analyze thousands of companies, investing in those with the most stable earnings and avoiding expensive stocks, a strategy which has delivered a 10 percent return for the Global Stable Equity Fund this year. It has returned 12 percent on average in the past five years, beating 75 percent of its peers.
More
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
John Kenneth Galbraith.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, Tulipmania debunked. But CBOE bubble futures, bubble on.
“It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity. If there must be madness something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."
John Kenneth Galbraith. The Great Crash: 1929.
There Never Was a Real Tulip Fever
A new movie sets its doomed entrepreneurs amidst 17th-century “tulipmania”—but historians of the phenomenon have their own bubble to burst
By Lorraine
Boissoneault September 18, 2017
hen tulips came to the Netherlands, all the world went mad. A sailor who
mistook a rare tulip bulb for an onion and ate it with his herring sandwich was
charged with a felony and thrown in prison. A bulb named Semper Augustus,
notable for its flame-like white and red petals, sold for more than the cost of
a mansion in a fashionable Amsterdam neighborhood, complete with coach and
garden. As the tulip market grew, speculation exploded, with traders offering
exorbitant prices for bulbs that had yet to flower. And then, as any financial
bubble will do, the tulip market imploded, sending traders of all incomes into
ruin.
For decades, economists have pointed to 17th-century tulipmania as a
warning about the perils of the free market. Writers and historians have reveled
in the absurdity of the event. The incident even provides the backdrop for the
new film Tulip Fever, based on a novel of the same name by Deborah
Moggach.
The only problem: none of these stories are true.
What really happened and how did the story of Dutch tulip speculation
get so distorted? Anne Goldgar discovered the historical reality when she dug
into the archives to research her book, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age.
“I always joke that the book should be called ‘Tulipmania: More Boring Than You Thought,’” says Goldgar, a professor of early modern history at King’s College London. “People are so interested in this incident because they think they can draw lessons from it. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.”
But before you even attempt to apply what happened in the Netherlands to more recent bubbles—the South Sea Bubble in 1700s England, the 19th-century railway bubble, the dot-com bubble and bitcoin are just a few comparisons Goldgar has seen—you have to understand Dutch society at the turn of the 17th century.
For starters, the country experienced a major demographic shift during
its war for independence from Spain, which began in the 1560s and continued
into the 1600s. It was during this period that merchants arrived in port cities
like Amsterdam, Haarlem and Delft and established trading outfits, including
the famous Dutch East India Company. This explosion in international commerce
brought enormous fortune to the Netherlands, despite the war. In their newly
independent nation, the Dutch were mainly led by urban oligarchies comprised of
wealthy merchants, unlike other European countries of the era, which were
controlled by landed nobility. As Goldgar writes in her book, “The resultant
new faces, new money and new ideas helped to revolutionize the Dutch economy in
the late 16th century.”
As the economy changed, so, too, did social interactions and cultural
values. A growing interest in natural history and a fascination with the exotic
among the merchant class meant that goods from the Ottoman Empire and farther
east fetched high prices. The influx of these goods also drove men of all
social classes to acquire expertise in newly in-demand areas. One example
Goldgar gives is fish auctioneer Adriaen Coenen, whose watercolor-illustrated
manuscript Whale Book allowed him to actually meet the President of Holland. And when Dutch
botanist Carolus Clusius established a botanical garden at the University of
Leiden in the 1590s, the tulip quickly rose to a place of honor.
Originally found growing wild in the valleys of the Tien Shan Mountains
(at the border where China and Tibet meet Afghanistan and Russia), tulips were
cultivated in Istanbul as early as 1055. By the 15th century, Sultan Mehmed II
of the Ottoman Empire had so many flowers in his 12 gardens that he required a
staff of 920 gardeners. Tulips were among the most prized flowers, eventually
becoming a symbol of the Ottomans, writes gardening correspondent for The
Independent Anna Pavord in The Tulip.
more
more
Technology Update.
With events happening fast in the
development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as
they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy
mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards?
RENEWABLE ENERGY RISES ACROSS ASIA
Q4 2017
Much of the world’s energy transformation will hinge on the continent’s fast-growing markets.
The world’s largest continent is where
renewable energy use is expanding fastest.
It is where renewables have the most room to
grow, along with driving development. Asia is
also is where they can most decisively help to
curb carbon emissions and mitigate climate
change.
China’s rise as a renewable energy powerhouse
is indisputable. Others like Southeast Asia’s
“Tiger cub economies” (Indonesia, Malaysia, the
Philippines and Thailand) are gaining valuable
experience in the sector. Central Asian countries
have recognised the value of renewables to spur
future growth.
----This edition of the IRENA
Quarterly Newsletter
explores the exciting challenges and opportunities
in some of Asia’s emerging renewable energy
markets.
More
And now for a little light relief from all the speculative frenzy. When
things go wrong they go wrong.
Exploding Oregon Whale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk
Once again another year draws
to a close. If you are one of the regular reader of this six days a week update
that helps support my efforts with the occasional donation via the Paypal
button, once again I sincerely thank you. If you are a regular reader who finds
the LIR informative, interesting, occasionally amusing or entertaining, please
consider making a small donation via the Paypal button on the LIR website. For
obvious reasons in our new age of almost rampant fake news, I want to keep the
LIR advertising free. But in any event thank you for reading and sending in
helpful suggestions.
21st
century adage: Is that true or did you hear it on the BBC?
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished November
DJIA: 24,272 +243 Up. NASDAQ: 6,874 +289 Up. SP500: 2,648 +189 Up.
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