Introduction 2018 will be remembered by many investors as a difficult year. In sharp contrast to 2017, when S&P500 was performing spectacularly (+19.4% YoY), 2018 brought a bitter disappointment to many. Not only in terms of absolute performance (-7% YoY), driven heavily by the impressive sell-off in the last quarter Read more…
US During the trading week S&P500 and Nasdaq have increased their market value while the Dow Jones 30 has been quite steady. The S&P500 has closed the week at 2940, increasing by 1%, while the Nasdaq, in the same period, moved from 7980 to 8148, rising by 2.1%. The Dow Read more…
Intro Recently, fears for an “European Japanification” have regained popularity due to raising concerns about the growth’s slowdown and similar underlying long-term dynamics of the two economies. In this article we aim to walk through Japan’s “Lost Decades”, and the following Bank of Japan’s response to figure out monetary tools, Read more…
India, the world’s largest democracy with 900 million eligible voters, is currently engaged in one of the most complex voting exercises around the modern democratic world. The sheer logistics of the largest election on earth is, naturally complex; the election is being held in 7 phases, spanning from 11th April Read more…
US This week, the two major economic data that we see important at the US are: the monthly CPI which was recorded as 0,1% ,slightly below the 0,2% expectations, and the monthly PPI which was recorded as 0,6% , beating the 0,6% expectations. Next week retail sales and Philadelphia FED’s Read more…
“Make all the trades through the dark pools so it masks what we’re doing. That way we’ll preserve our head start, which will not be a long one.” This is how Bobby Axelrod instructs his traders to get rid of his natural gas positions in the latest episode of the Read more…
How does the Delta of a lookback option behave? What is Cross-Gamma? Is the Vega of a digital option ever negative? And furthermore, how do these exotic greeks (“greexotics) evolve as time passes and implied volatility changes? In this series of articles, we would like to give the reader a Read more…
US With the beginning of the earnings season this week FactSet reported that in the first quarter analyst lowered earnings-per-share estimates by 7.2%, the largest decline since 2016 Q1. One of their main fears is that the record rise in wages which has outpaced the PCE for the previous quarters, Read more…
In this article we will skip the introduction of the very fundamental characteristics of ETFs and focus on the more advanced mechanics, here meaning the different replication methods accompanied by a glance at current developments in the respective section. With an understanding of these more advanced mechanics, we will then Read more…
In this article we analyze how to set up trading strategies on listed football clubs exploiting the peculiar behaviour of returns and implied volatility in correspondence to UEFA Champions League matches. In particular, this article is structured in four parts. In the first part, we briefly introduce the link between Read more…
US S&P closed the week at 2,834, up 0.7% during the day and marks its best performing quarter in the last 10 years being up 14% from December. On Friday, DJIA closed 0.8% higher at 25,929. The Nasdaq Composite climbed 0.8% to close at 7,729. 10-year Treasuries ended the week Read more…
History of Turkey’s crisis Over the course of its history, Turkey has been continuously striving towards beneficial economic relations with Europe. Turkey became an associate member of the European Economic Community in 1963, and later joined the Customs Union in 1995. As a result of a period of very high Read more…
As one may have noticed, over the not so recent past the German benchmark index DAX has trailed its major European country equity indices. An investor who invested four years ago in the DAX would have lost about 4% while the French CAC 40 returned 21%. With Germany as so Read more…
US The week just ended has led losses to US equity indices: the S&P 500 fell 2.16% to 2,743, thus failing to break the resistance line at 2,800-2,815. Similarly, the NASDAQ lost 2.46% and the Dow Jones decreased by 1.80%. This week has not brought major news for what concerns Read more…
Introduction The US Dollar Index was created by the Federal Reserve in 1973. The index was initially intended to provide an external bilateral trade weighted average of the US Dollar as it freely floated against major global currencies. Consequently, the US Dollar Index [ticker: U.S.DX® ] (USDX hereon), is a Read more…