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Conversations with Garis

  • When trading Forex the most important skill is to master the reversal.
  • Unlike shares of individual companies, due to heavy daily trading volume price movements goes both ways
  • It makes better sense to execute on the reversal instead of opting to totally exit the market
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Thoughts on Crude Oil

General overview

Event types

Trading approach

  • Establish presence of bullish/bearish trend by observing MACD line in 5D/1M/3M view
  • Buy OILU when  90 day MACD trend turns bullish or bullishness gains momentum
  • Sell when OILU when 90 day MACD bullish trend losses momentum
  • Buy OILD when 90 day MACD trend turns bearish or bearishness gains momentum
  • Sell OILD when 90 day MACD bearish trend reverse losses momentum
  • Exit OILD when WTI price drops below USD45
  • Exit OILU when WTI price rises above USD60
  • Enter OILU when
    • WTI USD40-45/barrel – when no deliberate flooding by OPEC+
    • WTI USD26/barrel – when deliberate flooding by OPEC+

Observations on employing trading approach

  • Deliberate market making activities by operator to balance funds on OILD and OILU is disadvantageous for trading.
  • Correlations of ETF prices to actual WTI prices is delayed
  • The bulk of the price action occurs pre-market and post-market during time slots where placement of position is not possible
  • Delays are observed between placing and filling of orders

Related References

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Chat with Joe and his dad

On Kaoshiong

  • KaoShiong is where the bulk of industrial manufacturing occurs
  • Taiwan is a Japan trend follower

On strategy

  • When macro economic environment is not conducive for continued operations, stop operations to conserve resources for future opportunities.
    • Decision to close wooden frame manufacturing factory
      • Europe became more environmentally conscious
      • Malaysia reduced the yearly quota of timber to be harvested
      • These two trends reduced demand for wooden frame and increased cost of raw wooden material

On personal growth

  • Adversity in youth provides an opportunity to build character and gain experience.
  • restricting the amount of resources your offspring has access to might be a good thing but it breeds resentment
  • Good things come from seemingly bad experience too

on DDP policy in KaoShiong

  • Too radical in their actions and lacks calibration in their policies. Really good at manipulating the press
  • Stance
    • Anti China
    • Pro resource less young
    • Pro taxing businesses for social welfare
    • Pro reducing pension to retired
  • Equally corrupt as the KMT but too aggressive in their policies leaving nothing for the business to continue operations
  • manufacturing businesses has been negatively affected with over regulation and rising administrative cost
  • Worker protection makes overtime illegal severely restricting the throughput volume businesses are allowed in their operations
  • Workers not making enough from their day job due to such restrictions are forced to take on a second job on top of their main one
  • 30,000 to 40,000 businesses have failed within the KaoShiong area over the past 12 months at the point of writing with more set to fail if policy should persist
  • While GDP growth rate has been reported at 2% in 2019, shipping volume through KaoShiong has continued to drop

On KMT

  • A more mature party with measured policies which lost leadership due to lackluster performance
  • Stance
    • Pro-China
    • Pro-business
    • Pro-protecting pension of the retired

Social security system and the aging population

  • Social security system is in a state of flux. Employers are required to contribute to two systems. The contribution for the old system is 5X the new system and was too much overheads for the employers.
  • Retirees are concerned their pension will get cut while the young are concerned their contribution to the social security system is to heavy a burden

On China

  • China has imposed restrictions on independent Chinese tourist to Taiwan
    • Chinese tourist are easy customers who engage in indiscriminate spending
    • Night markets looked empty
    • Quite a few restaurants have closed down along the main street due to the lack of tourist spending
  • The bulk of Taiwan’s export has been to China it makes economic sense for both territories to become unified
  • noteworthy to observe Joe’s shift to a pro Chinese stance the on Chinese Taiwan relationship as compared to the high school days.
  • Observation of Taiwan style politics in contrast to Chinese style politics leads me to have reservation about how these two systems can be resolved.
    • the Taiwanese have no reservation with injecting outrageous humor into the legal framework afforded to them by their political system with candidates as outlandish as Mr Crazy Friday and Mr Fortune God
    • China’s one country two system need to become more robust for this undertaking
    • Recent HongKong riots has caused concern for Taiwanese and has lead to increased support for the DDP whose leader English Tsai is known to be a strong negotiator

On Korean Japan trade war

  • Huge influx of Korean tourist observed during this period of tension (Sept 2019)
  • Korean tourist are more discriminate in their spending, hence a lower per capita spending as compared to the Chinese tourist.
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Book summary: The dollar crisis

Following the  end of world war two, with US being the world’s largest creditor, countries started largely denominating their debts in USD. US in turn pegged USD to a fixed exchange rate with Gold. This agreement was formally known as the Brettonwood Systems.

US experienced difficulty backing this exchange rate during the oil crisis of the 1970s when OPEC started artificially reducing it’s supply of oil thereby driving it’s price in USD. This had a strong downwards pressure on value of the USD which the US propped up through use of their foreign reserves.

Seeing this weakness in US foreign reserve, thereby an discrepancy of the USD against gold, other trading partners started exchanging US dollar for gold. This added further pressure.

To provide relief on their foreign reserves US finally decoupled the fixed exchange rate between USD and gold. This resulted in the collapse of the Brettonwood Systems, leaving USD as the official reserve currency in the world without any underlying backing.

What followed were decades of global growth largely funded by the US government through control of the world’s reserve currency.

Developing countries would sell goods to the US in exchange for USD. Instead of buying US goods in exchange for the USD earned, they would buy US Treasury bills, notes and bonds. This had the effect of maintaining favorable exchange rates for these countries while keeping their products competitive in the US market.

This widespread practice had the long term effect of driving balance of trade deficits in US with it’s trading partners. While negligible in times of strong US domestic GDP growth, this system has of late started exhibiting difficulty sustaining. This is largely due to slow down in US domestic growth and its inability to scale to support trading partners that 4 times times the population size of the US.

It is advised countries which had long relied on this approach to domestic growth transit their economies to become net importers as soon as their economy gains the necessary growth momentum to do so.

Related readings

  • Fault lines, Raghuram Rajan
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Federal Reserve interest rate cut decision 20191030

Outcome

Core inflation at 1.8% continues to run below target 2%.

Federal reserve decides upon another 0.25% cut in interest rates, targeting range of 1.5% to 1.75%.

Action is taken to provide meaningful support to the economy in response to global economic slowdown and the increasing disinflationary pressure felt from around the world. The special characteristics of this particular slow down is a lack of any large imbalances in the economy.

Dual mandate of the federal reserve

2% symmetrical inflation target

  • Stable prices
  • Low unemployment rates

economic indicators

  • Consumer confidence remains strong
  • Unemployment rate is at historic low
  • Business fixed investments has slowed
  • Global exports has slowed
  • Manufacturing compared to a year ago is down

macro environment risk

  • protracted US/China trade risk is down
  • No deal Brexit risk is down

economic health monitor

  • Leverage in financial system: low
  • Funding risk in banks and non-banks: low
  • Asset prices: no major bubble, high in some
  • Leverage in non-financial sector
    • households:  gone down
    • businesses + corporate debts: historic high

Liquidity concerns

  • Concerns in Overnight Repo markets persist.
  • Banks have liquidity in excess of required reserves level but choose not to participate in the markets.
  • Federal reserve will seek to inject short term liquidity into the system
    • build up short term treasury reserves
    • buying into short term treasury bills thereby boosting treasury reserves
    • opposed to the standard QE mechanism which entails buying up of assets and securities with longer maturity periods

Related readings

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General thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg’s warning of the internet’s role in Authoritarianism displacing Democracy

  • The polarization between democratic systems and authoritarian systems is becoming more apparent as China leverages its growing middle class to project it’s influence on the world stage a strategy that US has been utilizing for the past decades.
  • Facebook is a vehicle for projecting American values overseas.
  • The African continent remains a land grab for the two different regime types. Thus far, China has won out on the physical infrastructure and government level while FaceBook has won out on the community grassroots levels.
  • For the C Suite especially CMOs to execute their jobs well they need to be focused on what’s happening out there in the world as opposed to what’s happening within their own functional organization. It’s the VP of marketing’s job to handle what is within their own marketing organization.
  • Its a time when US companies will need to navigate the international markets while managing the challenges to their American values.
  • The Chinese government has done a better execution on that front with their One Belt Road initiative by clearing the path at the government level to facilitate the unhindered expansion at the commercial level by its enterprises.
  • Western media is working at full Rev to control the narrative frames that drives public opinions.
  • Mark Zuckerberg has masterfully leverage recent trends to reframe Libra as a champion of democratic ideals as opposed to a disintermediation force on central banks around the world.

Related references

Zuckerberg Warns China’s Censored Internet Could Still Win Out
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-17/zuckerberg-warns-china-s-censored-internet-could-still-win-out

Apple bows to China by removing Taiwanese emoji

https://qz.com/1723334/apple-removes-taiwan-flag-emoji-in-hong-kong-macau-in-ios-13-1-1/

Christian Dior apologizes for omitting Taiwan from Chinese map

https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/10/17/china-bullies-christian-dior-apologizing-omitting-taiwan-map/

China exerts pressure on NBA to fire key executive for tweet on Hong Kong unrest

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/sports/basketball/nba-china-adam-silver.amp.html

Solomon island switches relationship to China from Taiwan

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/world/asia/solomon-islands-taiwan-china.amp.html

Kiribati switches relationship to China from Taiwan

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/20/taiwan-loses-second-ally-in-a-week-as-kiribati-switches-to-china

Southeast Asia balances between Chinese Markets and US defense

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/09/world/asia/china-us-asia-rivalry.html

Facebook Warns Washington That Beijing Wins If Libra Plan Fails
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-17/facebook-warns-washington-that-beijing-wins-if-libra-plan-fails

 

 

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Simultaneous inflation and deflation pressures in China

China simultaneously experiences imported deflation and inflation. 

Drop in global demand for exports causes credit to unwind within the manufacturing sector. 

Swine flu and depleting foreign reserves causes price pig to increase. 

This will be a useful case study to observe the monetary and fiscal policy China implements to deal with simultaneous inflationary and deflationary pressures. 

China Factory Deflation Worsens as Pork Drives Consumer Prices  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-15/china-factory-deflation-worsens-as-pork-drives-consumer-prices

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Bloomberg does AB testing

Fascinating AB testing observed on the entire world’s population by major news networks. 

Barely 72 hours after the announcement of phase 1 trade deal, its accompanying mass euphoria and surge in world markets, the almost same exact photo with some slight changes in copyrighting and background color is released into production. 

It will be fascinating to observe the world’s reaction to this new AB year variant that just got released and the corresponding market price levels. 

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Observed unwinding of credit in the market

Priori

  • Federal reserve starts reducing debt bought and brought onto their balance sheet during 2008
  • Federal reserve went on a series of interest rate hike from the period of 2016 to 2018
  • Trump starts Trade war in 2017 resulting in reduced global demand for American exports

Liquidity concerns experienced in sections of the markets around the world

Riots and unrest

Related readings