Thursday, January 29, 2009

Now the Hard Part

The market has been up for the last five trading days in a row. Today the futures are down meaningfully, which poses an interesting challenge for the bulls. A modest pullback is fine, a bigger decline would be troubling.

I was talking to a Superbear friend of mine last night who said something like, "I'm worried that Obama is going to do such a good job fixing it that I'm going to have to pull back from my bearish stance."

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There's a interesting new Madoff-related story over at NY Times. Apparently JP Morgan strucured some derivatives to give clients 3x leveraged exposure to some funds including Madoff. In order to structure and/or hedge the products, JP Morgan for a time also invested its own money in Madoff funds.

JP Morgan was lucky or smart enough to sell its position months before Madoff blew up. The problem is that they didn't tell their clients, who still had exposure.

You might want to get some popcorn for this one.

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