- Well, it’s April Fool’s Day today and there certainly were a lot of fools out on Wall Street buying all the nonsense about the better than expected Non-Farm Payroll numbers
- Many of those fools were also fooled into thinking that these supposedly good jobs numbers puts a June rate hike back on the table
- In fact, these April Fools were out in force in March when several Fed officials were talking about the possibility of April being a live meeting, and they bought it; Janet Yellen potentially set them straight a few days ago, but then again they hear some numbers that they think are better than expected, and they think, “Aha! The Fed is about to raise rates.”
- When are they going to wake up and realize that none of these numbers matter – it doesn’t matter what they are, better than expected, worse than expected, the Fed can’t raise rates
- If the Fed could raise rates, they would have already done it.
- Yes, they did raise rates in December, they didn’t want to raise rates, they did it anyway, and look what happened
- Maybe you can think of that rate hike as a trial balloon, but it was the Hindenburg of trial balloons, it blew up, and there’s no way the Fed wants to launch another one
- The first quarter came to an end yesterday and the U.S. stock market actually managed to gain
- It was up about 1%, but the year started off as the worse year in the history of the stock market
- Back in February, U.S. stocks had the weakest beginning of the year in the history of the stock market – going all the way through the great depression
- That happened because the Fed raised rates
- Do you think they want to take that chance again?
- Why did the market recover? Because people then believed that the Fed was not going to be raising rates, in fact, the weakness in the market is one of the reasons they believe that
- So the market going down helped the Fed to change its tune, enabling the market to go back up
- Now they’re not going to take another chance to have to save it again
- Next time it goes down, it keeps on falling
- Beneath the surface, there was a lot of carnage in the market – there were a lot of stocks that got taken out and shot
- Some big hedge funds had horrible results in the first quarter
- Hedge funds were on the wrong side of so many macro trades this quarter
- For example, the U.S. dollar had its worse quarter in over 5 years
- You remember, that was one of the most crowded trades out there at the end of last year
- Everybody with a hedge fund was long the dollar and short the euro, short the yen, short the aussie, short the Canadian, you name it they were short
- Some of these guys were short the Chinese yuan – the yuan had a pretty good quarter – the strongest quarter in 2 years
- Everybody who was long the dollar and short another currency got killed in the first quarter
- The only people who lost more money than the ones shorting were the people shorting gold
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