First, since everyone already knows, let me be one of the last to congratulate Obama on a thumping victory over McCain. Obama inherits a horrendously bad economy, a tough situation on deficits, extreme panic and illiquidity and a looming recession that’s worse than anything in the last 25 years. It will take some work to get the US out of this, and I wish him all the very best. The toughest thing to do is to clean up someone else’s mess; and everyone’s hoping he does some magic soon. There won’t be much magic – just some hard decisions, and what better than a person who’s probably faced all odds to take these decisions.
Okay, back to markets. We had a violently volatile session today – from an opening of nearly 3298 on the Nifty future, down to 2971 or so, a drop of 10% intraday (of course, since we had a huge gap up it’s only 6% down officially. We have been trading a fund, and were really scared getting nine short positions! Luckily the market tanked and we closed up with a 1.6% profit. Early days, but good to see such strong intra-day trends.
So what’s news?
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- Google and Yahoo
- . Yahoo’s now at $14 a share, a long way away from the $33 Microsoft was willing to pay. Deal time again?
- Fantastic list of CDSs are out. Interesting to see gross versus net exposure and how a concentrated set of US defaults could simply destroy this world. Imagine, $33 trillion worth CDS in a world economy of what, $60 trillion?
- TED Spread at 2.09. Going below 2? That will be nice.
- US markets are down some 3% as I speak. The volatility hasn’t gone away!
