Margin call rattles markets, the ship starts to move, and global Covid cases rise.
Tiger clubbed
The family office of former Tiger Management trader Bill Hwang was behind the unprecedented selling of more than $20 billion worth of shares on Friday, according to people directly familiar with the trades. The possibility of further trades looming combined with the usual end-quarter volatility means investors will be glued to their screens this morning. There have already been some large moves in Asia and Europe as Nomura Holdings Inc. tumbled after warning of a "significant" potential loss, while Credit Suisse Group AG fell after saying it may face a loss in the first quarter related to a U.S. hedge fund client defaulting in margin calls.
Ship shifted
The Ever Given container ship has been partly refloated, with maneuvers set to continue this morning to fully release the vessel. The salvage team said getting the front of the ship back in the water will be a challenge. The nearly week-long blockage of the channel has left billions of dollars of goods stuck on ships with 453 vessels queuing to cross the canal by yesterday evening. There is also a growing traffic jam on the other side of the world, with waiting times for ships to unload at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California lengthening amid shortages of equipment and labor.
Cases rising
Global cases of the coronavirus rose for the fifth straight week, with the death toll continuing to accelerate. India and Brazil are seeing some of their worst periods of the pandemic. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has threatened to exert federal authority over regions on Covid restrictions as cases mount. Some restrictions are being relaxed in the U.K. today, while the U.S. saw more than 3 million vaccine doses administered for the last three days in a row.
Markets mixed
Global equity markets are off to a bit of a nervous start to the week as investors try to gauge the extent of the fallout from Friday's trading. Overnight the MSCI Asia Pacific Index added 0.2% while Japan's Topix index closed around 0.5% higher. In Europe the Stoxx 600 Index was 0.2% higher at 5:50 a.m. Eastern Time with banks and financial services stocks among the worst performers. S&P 500 futures dropped, the 10-year Treasury yield was at 1.657%, oil was lower and gold fell.
Coming up...
Dallas Fed manufacturing for March is at 10:30 a.m. It is a quiet start to the week for monetary policy speeches with only Fed Governor Chris Waller scheduled to speak today. The big focus this week from the data point of view will be Friday's payrolls number, with economists expecting more than 600,000 positions to have added this month.
What we've been reading
Here's what caught our eye over the weekend.
And finally, here’s what Joe's interested in this morning
There are two things on my mind this morning related to the Archegos blowup.
1. It's not that unusual to see big banks take a hit on some kind of trade that's gone bad. What's weird about the potential losses incurred at Nomura and Credit Suisse, however, is that they're related to a client who made risky stock bets. Normally when you get headlines about banks taking a hit, it's as a result of some bet that everyone wrongly assumed was ultra safe, like a mortgage bond or a can't-lose arbitrage trade. With stocks, everyone knows they're risky and volatile, and as such, are rarely the locus of some surprise loss catching everyone offnguard. The lack of good risk controls makes you wonder if the "stocks only go up" mentality has been over-internalized.
2. When Viacom was crashing on Friday -- before it became clear what happened -- I went looking for headlines about what would have caused the stock to peak just a few days earlier and then plunge so rapidly. Did they come out with some kind of warning? Was there some new news development that caused a rethink of their business prospect? Not really. There were some downgrades. But downgrades happen and rarely have that kind of dramatic impact on price alone. There was also a stock sale earlier in the week, but again, none of the news seemed to justify such an extreme reaction in the stock.
However, it had rallied nearly 800% since the March bottom last year. And we know, in retrospect, that there was at least one very large, leveraged buyer adding fuel to the rally. The longer you have such extreme, one-sided action, the less it takes to disturb the whole thing. Some downgrades and stock sales in a normal environment would probably be ho-hum news. But in the wrong environment, little things can contribute to a much larger chain of events and then you have a wreck like this one.
Joe Weisenthal is an editor at Bloomberg.
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