Opening Bell: 3.21.17
Wall Street Bull artist calls BS on ‘Fearless Girl’ statue (MarketWatch)
The artist who sculpted Wall Street’s iconic “Charging Bull” is seeing red over the statue of the defiant girl placed in his snorting beast’s path – and says she should be carted away immediately. The bull is art, Arturo Di Modica said of his bronze behemoth. The girl is, well, bull. “That is not a symbol! That’s an advertising trick,” the 76-year-old Sicilian immigrant said, clutching his heart.
The New York Stock Exchange just had a trading snafu (BI)
NYSE suffered an outage that meant it couldn't carry out a closing auction for a number of exchange traded funds on one of its markets Monday. "The matching engine crapped out in the last few minutes, and the closing auction didn't get done," one market participant told Business Insider.
Rise in new form of ‘portfolio insurance’ sparks fears (FT)
“The activity is gussied up under a fancy but incomprehensible title like alternative beta, crisis risk offset, or tail risk protection,” Mr Harding wrote in his letter, and warned: “If the odd institution wishes to protect itself in this way there is no contradiction, but if they all do, the risk of destabilising short-term market behaviour will once again be high.”
The Fed Is Stuck in the Past With Its Forecasts of the Future (WSJ)
“All these years they’ve had these bullish views and they’ve had to downgrade,” says Stephen Jen, co-founder of Eurizon SLJ Capital. “Now just as the world economy seems to be gaining traction they are moving the other way.” Put another way, the Fed’s economists may have fallen into the classic psychological trap of recency bias, putting too much weight on the postcrisis period.
David Rockefeller, Banker and Philanthropist, Dies at 101 (WSJ)
“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interest of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global structure—one world, if you will,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote in his 2003 memoir. “If that’s the charge, I stand guilty and I am proud of it.”
How to Spot Switzerland's Truly Rich: An Insider's Guide (BBG)
Switzerland doesn’t allow vanity plates, so special or lucky numbers have an added value and sell for thousands of francs. “After the two license plates LU 100 were stolen from my son’s car -- despite being more securely bolted-on than required -- we attached our own LU 40 plate even more elaborately,” says Vreni Haeberli, who lives in the canton of Lucerne. “We would never sell them, they’re now part of our family heritage.”
Covered Interest Parity (Grumpy Economist)
It turns out that European banks only need capital against quarter-end trading positions. US banks need capital against the average of the entire quarter. Thus, one week before the end of the quarter, european banks will not enter into any one-week bets. And one week before the end of the quarter (red line, top graph), the spread on one week covered interest parity zooms. One month before the end of the quarter, the spread on one month covered interest parity zooms.
An Analyst Compared Netflix to Jesus (Fortune)
“A wise investor once remarked to us: If Jesus were a stock, he’d be Netflix. You either believe or you don’t," Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger wrote in a Friday note to clients. “You either believe in the 10+ year story, or you don’t. We believe.”
The Case Of The Missing Tom Brady Super Bowl Jersey Has Only Gotten Better (Deadspin)
All of this allegedly puts a former Mexican tabloid executive in the locker rooms of the last three Super Bowls, surreptitiously nabbing incredibly valuable sports memorabilia right from under the noses of at least dozens of people, only to get caught a couple years later. This is the greatest story.