Category: Stockie Dokie

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. The post Versailles British and French imperial inheritances in Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria,

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 war, revolution and two exogenous oil crises led to the end game of 20%

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 has $350 billion in debt that is now toilet paper and its Hong Kong shares

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 in south Lebanon, Damascus/Aleppo airports, new kill zones in West Bank refugee camps and

Matein Khalid The discovery of an elephantine oil gusher in a Damam salt dome in 1937 by Chevron (once Standard Oil of California) geologists is the greatest black swan event in modern Arabian history. This oil gusher heralded the birth of Saudi Arabia as the new geopolitical fulcrum and financial superpower of the Middle East and Washington's closest ally in the region other than Israel and the Shah's Iran. In 2023, the ghosts of John D. Rockefeller haunts the boardrooms of

Matein Khalid The cruel killers who constitute the high command of Hamas should now be renamed Dumbass. Did these deranged fools really think that sending death squads into Israeli towns and villages to slaughter house wives, babies, 260 teenagers/Gen-Z kids at a music festival, burn entire families in their homes would do anything but trigger the moral revulsion and disgust of the world and bring global shame to the very legitimate political plight of the Palestinian cause they profess to champion

Matein Khalid While hardly news to the cognoscenti of Dalal Street and Planet Desiwalla, India’s stock market has been on a roll and it seems as if everyone of the 330 million gods in the Hindu pantheon were cheerleaders for its bullish macro ballast. If James Bond has a license to kill, India is a license to make money since the end of the near biblical macro havoc of the pandemic. After all India was one of the few EMs other

Matein Khalid The chickens have finally come home to roost at Goldman Sachs after CEO David Solomon's succession of strategic blunders triggered a 33% slump in Q3 earnings. This is the 8th successive quarter of profit decline at the fabled Wall Street investment bank that was once known as the planet’s most profitable hedge fund that just happened to have an NYSE listing. In essence, Goldman took the hit for Blankfein/Solomon failed gamble into consumer lending, specially the botched acquisition of the

Matein Khalid Anguished at the atrocities in Israel/Gaza, I turn to a happier and happening EM, my obsession du jour in deal heat. Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver and Billy Kwan's tale of love and betrayal in the twilight of Sukarno's Jakarta, the year of living dangerously. My interest is now beyond hanging out in the beach clubs of Uluwatu and Kota amid the mysticism and Aussie sheilas of Bali. For Manju and I, this is the year of getting to know

Matein Khalid Once again, the gun has vanquished the olive branch in the Middle East. The dawn assault by masked Hamas gunmen who infiltrated Israeli towns, villages and kibbutzim across the Gaza border and went on a rampage of indiscriminate killing against civilians asleep in their homes and farms. Any act of calculated violence against an unarmed civilian population is an act of terror, whether it was committed by Menachem Begin's Irgun against the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin in April

By Matein Khalid Something is dangerously wrong in a world where the price of crude oil can drop 5.6% in a single session, as it did last night in New York. My short idea on crude oil three days ago and the dissection of the Dubai property cycle was savaged by critics who assured me that I did not understand that Saudi Arabia's command is Biden's demand and that the laws of economics, let alone gravity have been repealed in the

By Matein Khalid Congress has averted a government shutdown in October but the political circus will resume in mid November. The risk of a US and thus global recession has never been higher, this time the wolf is here. Why? One, every major US recession since 1974 has been preceded by a sharp rise in oil prices. Brent crude was $70 in early June and is near $95 now. The onset of winter coincides with a 3 MBD supply deficit in the

Matein Khalid My short idea on Mr. Market was a beauty in Sept, with the S&P 500 down 4.9% and Nasdaq down 5.8%. Even though Street folklore, sentiment U-turn and seasonals argue that the index will mean revert now, I believe we will drop to 4200 level and violate the 200 DMA trendline. If so, all hell will break loose. There are too many matador swords dipping into the bloodied flesh of the crazed, dying bull and the ghost of Papa

By Matein Khalid India is the crown jewel in the MSCI EM index, just as it once was for the British Empire. Yet Nifty now trades at the same stratospheric valuation as it did in December 2007, not exactly the best month in Vedic history to go long Bharati equities. Two metrics make me go gaga on Modinomics. One, the free distribution of sanitary pads to millions of poor women have led to a plunge in cervical cancer rates for 40

Matein Khalid Lord Rothschild's advice to "buy when there is blood on the street" is perfectly apt in the bombed out carnage of US office REITs, where stocks have fallen on a quantum scale more than the value of the underlying brick and mortar. Vacancy rates have spiked in the post pandemic, remote/hybrid work zeitgeist of 2023, the Fed's draconian monetary tightening has gutted valuations and the sector faces huge refinancing risk as 70% of all CRE loans are made by

Matein Khalid It was a mini Black Thursday for debt/equities last night but it was macro nirvana for me as four trade ideas I have rhapsodized ad nauseum in the past three months have now proved, "the mettle of their pasture", to borrow from King Hal's speech to his English archers on the eve of Agincourt. With Taiwan Semi and AMD down 25% from recent peaks and even the AI cosmic icon Nvidia, down $106 from its post earnings high of

Brent crude's meteoric 35% rise from $70 in early June to $95 as successive Saudi Arabian/Russian output cuts and a 3MBD supply deficit in the wet barrel market, have rewritten the monetary equations of global finance. This is a brutal tax on the global consumer that slams growth and boosts inflation at a time when China's property crisis threatens a Japan style lost decade deflation, Europe's industrial colossus Germany faces both stagflation and a credit crunch, dozens of emerging markets

Matein Khalid Blackstone (BX) was founded with $500,000 in 1985 by two Lehman partners after a civil war at the I-bank forced its sale to American Express. BX had a meteoric rise from a small LBO boutique in Manhattan to the world's first true alternative asset management colossus with $1 trillion in AUM. I have rhapsodized about Blackstone in the Gulf/UK media ever since its shares fell from its catastrophic IPO price of 32 at the height of the credit bubble to