QuiCQ 08/04/2025
Winter is coming ...
“Winter is coming.”
— Ned Stark
Enjoying The QuiCQ but not yet signed up for The Quotedian? What are you waiting for?!!
Little over a year ago, I decided to start writing besides my weekly on macro deliberations focused Quotedian, a daily letter, published Tuesday to Friday, wisely by pure chance foreseeing an increase in daily market moves worth commenting. Born was the QuiCQ!
Today, I probably should be considering writing an hourly newsletter, with all that’s going on! Of course, I am only kidding and the QuiCQie :-) will never see the day of light, but boy o’ boy!
Just before we look at some of yesterday’s market movers, in a “best-effort” approach, and I encourage you to read yesterday’s Quotedian too (exodUS) for the full(er) picture, here are some headlines from this morning, that are really, really worrisome … regarding content and tone:
These are not headlines of “Everything’s apple pie and sunshine” ahead!
Onwards…
What a session it was! Again!!
But let me shock you and start with bonds instead of equities. With US treasury yields to be precise. Just when we thought how more volatile this can get, we got the biggest one day up move in US yields since 2022, when, as you will remember, bonds where at the height of their bear market:
I am not sure what the initiator of the move was and the lack of coverage in the financial press makes the whole thing even more ominous/worrisome. Keep a very close eye on this, because US treasury secretary Bessent is too and if yields fail to fall or even rise further … well… his whole plan of crashing the stock market in order to have lower bond yields for refinancing US debt would definitely be out of the window.
In equity markets, using the Nasdaq 100 as a proxy for everything else, the index was down nearly 5%, to then rally 10%, to then fall 6% followed by another 3% rally to end the day …. drumroll … FLAT!
In the S&P 500, there were about twice as much as many stocks down (342) than up (160) on the day,
with dispersion between best (communication services) and worst (real estate) in excess of 300 basis points:
These (nearly) bear markets always carry ‘amusing’ anecdotes with them. E.g., in the Swiss stock market, the stock of a small Private Bank (market cap CHF3.3 bn) known by the name of EFG International, dropped 65% in the opening:
Congrats to the guy on the bid; I fear the worst for the poor stud with the fat fingers …
The US Dollar was under pressure a bit again yesterday versus its G10 ‘competitors’, albeit to a more measured degree:
Gold has corrected to and just below the $3,000 level, but remains in its short-, medium and long-term uptrend:
So, after Manic Monday it is time for Turnaround Tuesday - go and enjoy, whilst it lasts!
Having reached and ‘exceeded’ (read: broken) all of our chart term targets higlighted only last week, would $480 on the SPDR S&P 500 tracker (SPY) be a good level for at least a short-term bounce?
