Thursday, October 21, 2010

It Pays to Front Run the Fed

Zero Hedge and Goldman Sachs concur, when Bennie is on a buying binge, get there just before he does. From ZH:

After a few months of breaking down what the simplest trade in the world is, that would be frontrunning the Fed for the cheap seats, Zero Hedge is happy to advise our readers that finally Goldman Sachs itself has capitulated and is now indirectly telling its clients to frontrun Ben Bernanke via POMO. No complicated value investor nonsense, no pair trades, no cap structure arbitrage, no hedging, no levered beta plays. Buy ahead of POMO. Sell. Rinse. Repeat.


From a GS distribution to clients:

On the interplay between the FED and STOCKS: Since Sept 1 – when QE was becoming a mainstream focus – if you only owned S&P on days when the Fed conducted Open Market Operations (in US Treasuries), your cumulative return is over 11%. in addition, 6 of the 7 times when S&P rallied 1% or more, OMO was conducted that day. this compares to a YTD return of 5.8%. the point: you would have outperformed the market 2x by being long on just the 16 days when – this is the important part – you knew in advance that OMO was to be conducted. The market's performance on the 19 non-OMO days: +70bps.

And there you have it - the top in frontrunning the Federal Reserve is now in.

The most recent Fed POMO calendar is linked (there is one tomorrow). Frontrun away.

Oh, and Ben, your criminal organization will one day pay for making a complete manipulated travesty out of capital markets.
Note: The mother of all front runs is to front run QE2.

1 comment:

  1. Frontrun King PIMCO has been loading up on MBS ahead of QE2. Why, if QE2 is about buying Treasuries and flooding the market with dollars?

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