LDSF News and Press, First Trust Low Duration Strategic Focus ETF From 11/08/19

How much higher can bond yields go before equities are knocked off their perch? That's a question that's likely to be on the lips of many market participants in the weeks ahead assuming all signs continue to point to an interim trade agreement between the world's two largest economies. Ov...

Measuring The Backup In Interest Rates - Is This 2016? Since early September, after enjoying a historic rally, long-term Treasury rates have become increasingly volatile, rising nearly 30 basis points on the benchmark 30-year yield. Before deconstructing the move higher in Treasury rates,...

The Fed’s reluctant decision to flood the overnight market with cash in the coming months was surely a surprise, even for monetary policymakers. As explained in the last article , the run-up in repo rates of September was no surprise to market veterans. Repo run-ups around statement da...

Federal Reserve officials got a little “shock” in the banking week ending September 18, 2019. The reserve deposits that the commercial banks hold at Federal Reserve banks, surprisingly dropped below $1.4 trillion . This surprise caused Fed officials to go into “alert&...

Two weeks ago, many were worried about the market “bump” that the Federal Reserve had to deal with. The market disturbance came in the area of repurchase agreements and the Fed responded quickly, and, in my opinion, kept things quiet although some analysts wanted to make a bigger...

RECESSION ANGST VS. RECESSION REALITIES Global growth have been at the center of investor worries, but in some geographies, this is currently more a function of anticipation than hard data. Looking into the fourth quarter of 2019, we would break the world into two groups. Europe and some m...

Repogeddon Breitbart and ZeroHedge have been shouting that the financial markets are in chaos, disaster looms, over the spike in repo rates. This isn't actually a serious problem whatever is being said. Sure, there's a reasonable argument that we'd prefer not to have repo rates of 10% ...

President Trump's administration would like to achieve a “weak” dollar in order to spur on US exports and improve the US trade balance. This is the primary reason for the President's tirades against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. So far this year, the president is lo...

The BCI at 257.1is up from last week's downward revised 256.6, and remains below the previous high of this business cycle indicated by the BCIp of 91.9. However, the 6-month smoothed annualized growth BCIg at 10.2 is below last week’s downward revised 10.4. Both BCIp and BCIg are not si...

It's that D-word again. Deflation is knocking at the door of the global economy. But who is going to answer, and who is really at the door? (and so what??) In the following charts and paragraphs I will provide my take on the key drivers, the response, the ripple effects, and a base case scen...