Hello my friends today is August 5th and this is an emergency market update today with such an exciting day in markets I figured that we needed an emergency update Now it looks like we're ending the day at about 3% down for the S&P 500 not too bad But honestly, it wasn't always like that Now the first thing I do every single day when I wake up is I reach from my phone and I check the markets And let me tell you I turned it on this morning. It was It was not down 3% Looking at the NASDAQ futures some few 500 futures or four or five percent almost 6% for the NASDAQ futures at some point it was kind of scary actually but not anywhere near as scary as At Japanese investor would have felt Because the big news today wasn't actually in the US. It was in Japan
You had the Nikkei their major stock market index down 12% now 12% that is a legit stock market crash That is something that should not happen That is when you should have everyone panic what we see in the US not so much I Think it's largely just Re-reborations of what happened in Japan now as we've been talking about on my Saturday updates a couple really big trades The market was in has been unwinding the past week one of course is the yen carry trade and the other is the short ball trade Now the yen has been appreciating against dollar pretty significantly over the past two weeks and On Friday we had big appreciation market sold off and the Nikkei futures were also sharply down lower
Now it's always hard to know how much leverage is in the system how much it needs to deliver But it looks like Friday was not enough because when the Tokyo markets opened the yen further appreciated immensely and the of course as we mentioned the stock market sold off a lot now in the global markets everything is connected through the balance sheet of global investors, so what does that mean so If you are a Japan based investor You you know likely hold a global portfolio of equities own Japanese stock You own us stock and so forth and so when you are Japanese stocks are imploding you have losses and Usually you are a levered trader. So that's how it works. Usually if you are a large institutional investor So what happens you have to cut down your positions? You have to deliver because there's more volatility in the market and that means selling a lot of stuff Mostly whatever is liquid that could be the S&P fire in Madrid Which is one of the most of the most liquid equity market in the world It also means things like gold and maybe on the margins even stuff like crypto And so again if you have a stock market crash in Japan, it's going to impact global markets through the portfolio holdings of global investors
Now the same thing in the US member Friday Even as Japanese investors were asleep and you have a lot of US investors investing in Japanese stocks selling the yen When they get hit they also have to deliver and they also hold a whole bunch of stuff So what you're seeing right now is just white-celled Delivering of of a lot of people and this has a cascading impact Because let's say that I'm an investor and I hold a whole bunch of Japanese equities US equities when I sell to raise cash Because I'm afraid or I need to make margin payments that act of selling Pushes down the prices of financial assets, which of course may reduce the Net worth of another investor and force them to sell as well and then they sell the price goes down further you have these Delivering cycles that are honestly very common throughout finance throughout history. So this is totally normal
I guess whatever one wants to know is When does this Ellen stop? now, I don't know and honestly, I'm surprised it continues so much because a Lot of these big investors big brokerage houses. They have pretty tight They have pretty tight risk limits so risk management is super important for any institutional investor And so after having the big losses through Friday I would have thought a lot of them have delivered if not, I'm pretty sure I'd have to get out today so I Don't think there's all that much of delivering from that trait to do honestly if you Honestly, you've already sustained such huge losses. I can't imagine a risk manager and not cutting down losses by now Now that leads me to an update on the other trade we talked about now Let's look at the VIX now the VIX was actually another thing that totally totally Scared many market participants now intraday We saw the VIX surge to as high as 60 now that is a really really high number
Now if you zoom out a bit historically this only happens when we have tremendous crashes For example when we had in March 2020 now intraday VIX sold off a lot from 60 back down to 30 Which is more in line with what you would expect for a market that is going up and down 2-3 percent now That tells me that again you have all these guys who are shorting vol who are you know selling insurance Collecting pennies in front of a steamroller those guys really got squeezed They really have to cover and when you cover of course you're buying VIX and that sparks a huge huge rise in volatility so Yeah, are those guys done delivering? I have no idea, but really it's it's hard to imagine someone Being able to hold such a large spike in volatility again This is just one second of the market you have all these other guys who let's say because volatility is higher They have to adjust their positions. Maybe they're not done delivering So it's a it's a complicated ecosystem. It's not super clear
That being said though now even though I view fundamentally what's happening in this entire sell-off as just a large scale Delivering which is something we see over and over again It's also something that I think changes psychology of the market and so I think that extends the Extends a time frame for us to recover because we have taken some Some damage in the markets. So I look at this in a couple ways First off again if you have a lot of people who lost a lot of money Obviously, they're going to be a lot more Redicent they're less reluctant to go and now go risk on again and more importantly their portfolios are much smaller And so they have less Assets to go and lever up. It's just a mechanical thing So the capacity of the market to to further climb is hindered when you have these big drawdowns Secondly now the bearish people to the extent that there are bears that survive the tremendous rally we've had throughout the year They're going to be looking at Opportunities to sell because from their framework. They'll be thinking that yeah, you know what? I think the market is going down bear market. We're all going to implode by gold by guns by stuff like that So that's one thing as well
Now the good news is that if you look at these huge surges in in volatility They usually Usually again go down slowly volatility historically if you look at that chart comes down slowly in a corresponds with gradual rises in the in-risk assets Now to be clear Volatility tends to cluster. So when you are in a volatile regime I use tend to get bigger volatile moves big updates big down days and so forth looks like we should get Some meaningful bounce simply because we've down been down so much but this volatility takes some time to I Guess calm down now historically again. Just look at the VIX over the past few decades It takes time to come down. It usually does and that usually corresponds to a rise in risk assets, but it takes time
Okay, a couple other things I think are worth noting is that we also got economic data today And again, it's positive economic data We got the services PMI services is the largest part of the US economy and services PMI really are quite good continue to show expansion and the employment sub component also Continues to show expansion as well. So the underlying economic Conditions of the economy by all again GDP growth looking at PMI data and so forth seem to be okay Now the last thing I think it's worth noting is how the Fed will respond to this so First off if you think it is going to be an emergency rate cut you need to wake up That is not going to happen. The Fed does have emergency cuts sometimes That's usually when the world is really falling apart like we saw in the the pandemic in 2020 Three percent drop from the for the S&P 500 is not an emergency For context the S&P 500 is still up around nine percent year to date so I Don't see the reason for an emergency cut and we had some Fed speakers Basically, honestly downplayed the weakness in the employment report on Friday
My best guess is that we are of course embarking upon a rate cutting cycle And I wrote about why and to what extent in my piece today but We are at five and a half interest rates and there's a lot of room for the fed to cut and that's something that we haven't had over the past Decade we're at zero rates Going for five and a half percent down to zero or three or two or whatever That is a lot of potential stimulus for the financial markets because it's going to significantly raise the market value of fixed income assets and that gives investors More net worth and more collateral to pledge to lever up. So I think we are in a very different situation again I don't believe This is the beginning of a bear market or anything like that But I think the damage today is significant and It will take time for us to work through and again Looking through time. It's There are still many favorable things in the economy and in the sense of monetary policy that are supportive But again, we're early in the week. Let's see how the rest of the week turns out. I'll be back on Saturday for markets weekly. All right guys Be careful out there.