Black Monday

Folks, the bottom just fell out on you.

Cue Kelly Evans:

To be clear, the stage was set for this and if you didn’t see the writing on the wall, well then I’m not sure what to tell you. Valuations are stretched the breaking point, political turmoil is lining up with Trump increasing the vitriol on Monday ahead of (another) shutdown deadline, debt limit jitters are back, the bond selloff has everyone worried, positioning is stretched, there are market structure issues that no one knows how to appraise (VIX ETP rebalance risk, the possibility of a systematic unwind), and on, and fucking on.

Although stocks did manage to turn green after a rocky open, losses begin to accelerate in the afternoon. There are innumerable factoids to pull out of Monday’s action, but one obvious point is that the S&P snapped the longest streak in history without a 5% pullback.

The index went negative for the year just after 3:10 in New York:

SPX

 

The Dow’s YTD gains… gone around the same time:

Dow2

 

After that, the losses began to pile up in earnest and the headlines became more alarmist. This is what “panic” looks like:

Dow

 

At the session low, the Dow was down 6%:

Dow4

 

By the time it was all said and done both the Dow and the S&P had careened lower by more than 4%. This was the worst single day for the S&P since 2011:

SPX

 

Same for the Dow:

Dow5

 

Worst day for the Nasdaq since Brexit:

Nasdaq

 

Gold and the yen were bid as the pain accelerated.

YenGold

 

And the paradox emerged: although the proximate cause for all the jitters has been rising yields, eventually a safe-haven bid emerged for Treasurys, driving 10Y yields lower:

Yields

 

As Bloomberg notes, “between 3pm-3:10pm ET, 266k TYH8 contracts traded in screens as 10Y yields reached 2.705% before rebounding to 2.75%, richer by 9bp on the day.”

“The turn in equities has now turned vicious enough that it has pulled U.S bond yields sharply lower, of which the yen has been the main beneficiary,” Deutsche Bank’s Alan Ruskin said, adding that “equities are so incredibly volatile – both the drop and immediate/current recovery – that tangential markets like FX are struggling to keep up.”

The VIX: parabolic:

VIX

 

“Don’t measure it in percentage terms!”, they’ll shout. But if you did:

You read that right. At one point, the VIX more than doubled to 35.7. That’s the highest since August 2015 and the largest one-day spike in history.

VIX2

 

Here’s the Nasdaq VIX:

VXN

 

Target managers-turned vol. sellers are getting their asses handed to them (note the annotation):

XIV

 

Oil: bloodbath:

WTI

 

Emerging market stocks: bloodbath. Worst day since December 2016:

EEM

 

That HY chart Jeff Gundlach said “looks like death” last week? Yeah, more of that:

JNK

 

Europe was closed by the time things really started to go awry on Wall Street, but the Stoxx 600 and the DAX are both negative for 2018:

Europe

 

At this point, it’s probably safe to say that what happened in Asia on Monday is going to get worse, at least at the open. I mean I could be wrong, but you read everything above, right?

But for those of you who need a reminder about the setup for all of this, the Nikkei had its worst day since the U.S. election on Monday:

Nikkei

 

And the Kosdaq plunged 4%, even as the Kospi generally help up ok:

Kosdaq

 

We used it earlier and it’s even funnier now…

Now let’s see how the White House reacts…

Disclosure: None of what I write here is to be construed as advice to buy or sell any kind of asset. It is merely my personal and not my professional opinion. Any asset can go to zero.

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