Matein Khalid There is no geopolitical risk premium in Brent crude even though history just went fast forward and literally ballistic in the Middle East as the IDF bombed Hamas into the Stone Age, decapitated Hezbollah’s command/communications networks, killed Nasrallah, forced Iran’s most valuable proxy militia to sue for a ceasefire in Lebanon, destroyed Iran’s Russian S300 anti-missile defense systems and escalated its air assault on the […]
Matein Khalid US money center banks/I-banks had their best year in 2024 since the pre-Covid Stone Age. My fav turnaround names Citi and Wells Fargo exceeded my wildest expectations while the prospect of light touch regulation and M&A/IPO underwriting jackpot made Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley go ballistic. Despite the post Dec FOMC fireworks, this sector will have winners if bought at the right price even though […]
Matein Khalid I am still puzzled by the frenzied selling in the bond market after the FOMC cut its dot-plot projections from 4 to 2 for 2025 at its Dec 18 conclave. Why? Mr. Market had already priced in two rate cuts in 2025 after he was spooked by the uptick in core PCE/CPI data. Inflation risk in Trumpnomics is exaggerated but with the President elect now […]
Matein Khalid sTrump 2.0 will be all the more potent in reshaping America’s economic destiny since the White House, the Senate and the House are all blood red. Tariffs/mass deportation can mean inflation shocks but deregulation, AI adoption and DOGE will have a disinflationary impact on the economy. Trump will apply punitive tariffs on a selective basis on specific countries (notably China) but his economic team is […]
Matein Khalid The dramatic events of last week in Syria have only boosted President Erdogan’s role as the preeminent regional powerbroker in the heart of the Arab Levant as Turkish armed/financed Sunni militias engineered their collapse of the 54-year-old Assad dynastic tyranny in Damascus. Syria is once again a de facto Turkish protectorate, as it was in the five centuries since Sultan Selim Yavuz vanquished its Mamluk […]
Matein Khalid The late summer and autumn of 2024 may well go down in history as the Berlin Wall moment for the Middle East as the collapse of the nightmarish Assad dynastic dictatorship will have a seismic geopolitical fall out across the region. Iran has lost its land bridge/weapon supply conduit to its proxy militia Hezbollah, itself decapitated and militarily degraded by the IDF in Lebanon. Baathist […]
Matein Khalid I wrote a column on Vornado (VNO) as a buy at 18 in Sep’22 as it was slammed by the pandemic, its debt load and the Fed’s draconian rate hikes. So VNO’s price ascribed a $450 a square foot value to its prime Manhattan office/Fifth Ave retail portfolio even though its occupancy rate was 91% as the pandemic raged. To help my Dubai friends grasp […]
Matein Khalid The S&P 500 Index was the ultimate Thanksgiving gift to investors in US equities though the party poopah sectors like Big Pharma were the proverbial turkey. The post-election spike was only the icing on a cake that has been a dream for investors in the SPX, now up 27% with 53 record closes. America is 4% of the world’s population and 25% of its GDP […]
Matein Khalid The weekend Crony Club dinners in the finest watering holes/pizzerias of Dubai are as long as they are liquid and our sole focus is to exchange money making investment ideas and wildest new jokes. So I found out that my buddies were more interested in my calls on the Mag-7 than in my philosophical reveries on MAGA. So paisanos, viola! I had outlined my Tesla […]
Matein Khalid Dubai lost a national treasure and I lost an old/cherished friend on July 8th. Dr. Ram Buxani had come to Dubai as a teenager in 1959 by ship and witnessed the meteoric growth of the emirate from an obscure Gulf trading port to one of the world’s most happening urban hubs, Arabia’s most globalized and networked haven. Dr. Ram’s social and business career was an […]
Matein Khalid The April jobs number and now the April CPI has reinforced convictions that inflation will continue to come down and thus the capital markets price two Fed rate cuts by year end. The 10-year US Treasury note yield has dropped to 4.40% though the 2-year note is still at 4.82%, making this yield curve inversion protracted even as retail sales slip and consumer credit metrics […]
Matein Khalid One thing is certain. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are not happy campers now that the yield on the 10-year US T-note, the single security most sensitive to expectation of shifts in Fed monetary policy, has jumped above 5%. This means that the bond market expects no FOMC rate cut tonight and for Chairman Powell to reiterate his current “higher for longer” interest rate […]
Matein Khalid I thought the US stock market was overextended last week after the FOMC statement endorsed Wall Street’s “three rate cuts in 2H 2024 consensus”. My problem was this could be derailed by one bad inflation number and that Goldilocks economy might find that its growth porridge was a tad too hot. This is exactly what happened with this week’s data and thus equities were slammed last night […]
Matein Khalid Bliss it was that dawn to be alive but to be long Nvidia was pure heaven. The ghost of William Wordsworth will forgive me for butchering his verse but he could have written an immortal homage to the AI annus mirabilis of 2023 had he lived in our era. After all, the S&P 500 was up 24% in 2023 and is up 10.2% in the […]
Matein Khalid As we go into Fed watch purdah for the FOMC announcement tomorrow, one thing is certain. King Jay and his merry knights of the roundtable in DC will not move on interest rates but what they say about inflation and growth could move the financial markets with a seismic shock. The consensus prices-in at least three rate cuts in 2024 but the macro data, with […]
Matein Khalid The spectacular bull market that resumed in mid-October has continued into the first 9-weeks of 2024. True, Nvidia at 919, Meta at 500 and Microsoft at 415 have all been catapulted from Wall Street to Valhalla (the abode of the Nordic Gods!) but Apple is down 14% in 2024 at 172 and Tesla at 177 are not exactly looking all that hot as they did […]
Matein Khalid Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss’s observation that we live in the best of all possible worlds definitely is true for those who held Nvidia (NVDA) into what prove to be another earnings blockbuster and now see the shares rise from 660 the night before D-Day to almost 823 at the Friday close. The problem with NVDA is that it is no longer on Wall Street but has […]
Matein Khalid Nvidia’s epic rise from 150 in Jan-2023 to 726 now is historic in Silicon Valley. Yet it is no exaggeration to state that the entire fate of the Mag-7, the chip sector or even Nas-100 now depends on what Jensen Huang reports and guides on Wednesday. Nvidia (NVDA) shares are just not positioned for any hint of a disappointment in revenue or EPS growth. While revenues are […]
Matein Khalid Saudi Arabia’s unique role in the oil market as Opec’s swing producer, the de facto central bank of oil, owes as much to its spare capacity as it does to its colossal reserves, the world’s lowest drilling cost and the sheer scale of its oil exports. However, the kingdom has also historically not hesitated to cut planned increases in spare capacity, when the Saudi government […]
Matein Khalid “Be careful what you wish for. You may just get it”. This is an apt metaphor for the SEC’s approval of ETF launches by Wall Street’s best and brightest (biggest/meanest) fund houses from BlackRock to Fidelity, Invesco to WisdomTree. It does not surprise me that Bitcoin fell from $47,000 to $42,600 now because buy on the rumour, sell on the news is a recurrent theme […]
Matein Khalid In the emerging markets financial jungle, fairytales are impossible without the right jungle guide. So when Alejandro A (gringo name Alex), one of my closest friends in life since we first met in New York in J.P. Morgan Chase’s capital markets training program decades ago and now the chairman of his own I-bank in Buenos Aires dissected President Milei’s blueprint for revolutionary energy reform, I […]
Matein Khalid If ever there was a year to make money in Big Tech, 2023 was it. My three big strategic calls all outperformed my expectations. Google rose from 85 to 142, Nvidia rose from 150 to 492 and Microsoft rose from 295 to 374. 2024 could well see several emerging markets beat the S&P 500’s stellar 26% rise this year, though the real fairytale has been […]
Matein Khalid I agree with The Economist that India and Indonesia are the two shining stars of Asia and both are due for historic elections where the outcome is preordained, as capital markets metrics and fund flows I track discount in real time now. Prime Minister Modi will win the Indian general election with a decisive majority in the Lok Sabha. This is not just a prediction but […]
Matein Khalid Brent crude has fallen to $78 in Asia while WTI is $74 even though the Israel/Hamas war has resumed in Gaza. The bear market in oil has seen 6-weeks of relentless selling in the futures markets and even the latest OPEC+ ministerial meeting failed to convince traders that an additional 900,000 barrel of promised output cuts will offset the tsunami of supply and weak diesel, gasoline and […]
Matein Khalid It is no coincidence that the yield on the 10 year US Treasury note plunged 60 basis points to its current 4.34% and the US Dollar index slumped to 103.40 as successive benign October inflation data and dovish central banker comments has led to a pivot in Wall Street interest rate expectations, with the consensus now projecting two rate cuts at the March and May 2024 FOMC […]
Matein Khalid The smoke signals from the FOMC conclave suggests that Jay Powell will not gift the Street a pacifier nor deliver an electric shock, so expect a hawkish pause with no rate hike. The trillion-dollar shrinkage in the Fed’s balance sheet (QT) amplifies the liquidity squeeze since the ECB, BOE, RBA, BOC and yes, even Ueda-san’s BOJ are also slimming down their bloated balance sheets. Is […]
Matein Khalid As the gods of war exact their grotesque ransom of human blood sacrifices in the Middle East, my mind resurrects the lyrics of a Vietnam era anti war John Lennon song from my boyhood. “All we are saying is, give peace a chance”. Something has gone very badly wrong in the Arab world since the death rattle of the Ottoman Empire a hundred years ago. […]
Matein Khalid The Treasury bond bloodbath is no longer about Fed policy, inflation mojo or the business cycle. It is impossible for the Powell Fed to meet its dual mandate 2% inflation target with even a 6.5% Fed funds rate as 3Q GDP was a shocking 4.9%. We are doomed to relive the stagflation nightmare of the 1970’s when the Fed consistently mismanaged its inflation fight while […]
Matein Khalid The horror story unfolding in China’s property developer stocks and shadow banking system is pure Lehman 100X whose contagion is now guaranteed to spread from the Dragon Empire on an intercontinental scale at the speed of light. Mr. Hui, once the richest Chinese alive after Li Ka-shing, is now in jail as Evergrande becomes the most spectacular property developer to fail in world history. Evergrande […]
Matein Khalid The greenback was a one way bet since June when I had strongly recommended selling the Euro at 1.12 and the British pound at 1.31 since relative interest rate spreads/economic data momentum and central bank monetary policy all screamed another “buy me” spasm for King Dollar. The macro tea leaves got murky last week even as the war in Gaza escalates to IDF bombing raids […]
