The near-$5 trillion hedge fund industry is having one of the toughest years in decades in convincing fee-conscious investors to fork out cash for new market players.
The passive-investing juggernaut is picking up speed — and it’s stirring up fresh angst about the dangers posed by the index-tracking boom across Wall Street.
To those who argue that value investing has gotten too hard in today’s momentum-chasing, passive-driven world, Scott McBride’s results are a bit of a conundrum.
Take a snapshot of markets right now, and it’s a picture of health. Stocks are at records, corporate bonds show no signs of worry and commodities remain buoyant on global economic optimism.
If investors had known in advance the size of the Federal Reserve’s latest interest-rate cut, would they have made big money on stocks and bonds trading on this market-moving intel?
An action-packed week on Wall Street ends with a bang as index-tracking funds are set to reshuffle $250 billion of shares, just as a “triple witching” trading event hits.
Jerome Powell delivered exactly what traders up and down Wall Street had long hoped for: A big interest-rate cut that would justify this year’s steep rally in stocks and bonds as the era of tight monetary policy finally began to reverse.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has a message for benchmark managers who are weighing big reshufflings of their indexes to account for a handful of stocks growing to interstellar size: slow down.
The Big Tech boom is causing headaches for all-powerful index providers on Wall Street, who can send billions of benchmark-tracking dollars on the move with just a stroke of the pen.
Warren Buffett’s sudden sale of a huge pile of Apple Inc. shares has come with a surprise silver lining for investors in the iPhone maker: Its influence in major stock indexes is set to be fully unleashed.
Time and again, Jerome Powell has made it clear. Financial conditions, the Federal Reserve’s key lever for cooling the US economy, are tight.
Two years after Wall Street’s love affair with fast-twitch stock options began, Bloomberg’s latest Markets Live Pulse survey suggests the unprecedented boom still has room to run — even as almost half of respondents fear an eventual blowup.
Signs that inflation has yet to release its grip on markets have simmered for weeks. Now they’re boiling over after Wednesday’s hotter-than-forecast consumer price index sent stocks and bonds reeling.
A steady march higher in markets was snapped by a stretch of jarring volatility as traders gave hints there’s a limit to their appetite for hot economic data.
Forget the artificial-intelligence frenzy — the most-exciting trade on Wall Street right now might just be betting on boring.
It’s been blamed for fueling stock volatility and dismissed as the latest case of market speculation gone too far.
Six years after a famous blowup in the volatility market shattered a lengthy calm in US stocks, the latest Bloomberg Markets Live Pulse survey reveals growing Wall Street concern over a new boom in trades that bet against equity turbulence.
Hedge funds are paid big bucks for making smart market bets. Yet these days, a simple feature of the financial plumbing — largely overlooked on Wall Street during the low interest-rate era — is helping juice industry returns.
The never-ending rise in technology megacaps is driving stock-picking pros to do something they don’t want to do: give up on beating the benchmark.
Fast-money bears are feasting in the new-year equity selloff as traders recalibrate bets on the path of Federal Reserve policy.
Roaring inflation and rapid rate hikes have brought a welcome return of the kind of big swings and dislocations beloved by investing’s smart set, but it hasn’t been a blessing for every breed of quant.
Bill Harnisch, whose $1.5 billion hedge fund delivered a market-beating 31% gain last year, is betting the recent bout of euphoric stock buying will peter out.
Traders hoping that a pan-markets year-end rally would pick up where it left off got the opposite on 2024’s first trading day, a session that featured one of the worst-ever concerted drops in stocks and bonds to start a year.
This year’s hottest options trade is catching on with Wall Street’s nerd contingent.
For two decades, Amy Wu Silverman has tracked fear and greed across Wall Street by keeping a close eye on the twists and turns in the Cboe Volatility Index.
The two-month selloff in US stocks threatens to intensify as options dealers on Wall Street and fast-money traders both turn against the market.
The fate of stock options with a face value of trillions of dollars is being influenced by unusual trading activity in the S&P 500 outside regular market hours, new research has found.
As the cross-asset sell-off engulfed Wall Street last week, hedge funds ramped up their bets against stocks while one measure of their market positioning plunged the most since the March 2020 crash.
There’s an invisible force driving the most popular options trade of the year — one that gives Wall Street pros and day traders alike the power to turn a $1 investment into a $1,000 stock bet.
All week, stock traders have shrugged off everything from hot inflation data in the US to another recession-threatening hike in interest rates over in Europe.
This year’s hottest options trade has found its way into the $7.4 trillion ETF arena for the first time, in the latest push by the financial industry to tap booming demand for stock investments with an income stream.
Day traders are far more active in the booming world of zero-day stock options than Wall Street realizes, according to the exchange at the center of the frenzy.
The heated debate on the threat posed by the boom in stock derivatives that expire within 24 hours is pitting two of Wall Street’s biggest banks against each other.
The fresh boom in stock options that expire within 24 hours has grabbed all the attention on Wall Street trading desks — spurring a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. warning that the activity is fueling the recent market selloff.
Look closely at the contours of Tuesday’s tumble in the S&P 500 and fingerprints of a new market force come into focus.
The craze for fast-expiring options is ramping to unprecedented heights in a stock market that has lately been given to severe intraday moves. It’s probably not a coincidence.
All of a sudden, the short-volatility trade is back on Wall Street as billions of dollars pour into options-selling ETFs like never before.
Of all the signs out there that the US will manage to dodge a recession once deemed inevitable, perhaps none is more convincing than this: CEOs across the country are opting to reinvest more of their profits in expansion projects rather than handing the money back to shareholders.
While US stocks may pull back in coming weeks amid concern over Federal Reserve policy, the S&P 500 will reassert itself around September before climbing to an all-time high, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s trading desk.
For stock-picking hedge funds coping with 2023’s loopy markets, risks are starting to outweigh the rewards.
To stand a chance of winning in this market, stock pickers need big tech exposure. Not all of them can get it.
The likeliest outcome of Wednesday’s Federal Reserve announcement is also one that is apt to lift stocks, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s trading desk says.
Last year’s plunge in the S&P 500 made uber bear Mike Wilson the most celebrated stock forecaster on Wall Street. It’s a role he has failed to reprise in 2023.
It made sense at the time. Jerome Powell was waging war on inflation. The bond market was flashing dire warnings. Practically everyone saw a recession coming.
An out-of-cycle rebalance in the Nasdaq 100 is adding another layer of wrinkles to stock trading with a flood of options expiring Friday.
When a “special rebalance” of the Nasdaq 100 Index was touched off to curb the dominance of the biggest technology stocks, Meta Platforms Inc. was the only mega-cap to fall below a crucial threshold for downsizing. Now it seems the social media giant will be pared back anyway.
With the S&P 500 up 25% in nine months and sitting at its best level since April 2022, people want to know: is an all-time high next? John Flood, a partner at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., thinks so.
America’s biggest tech companies have become too large even for the stock index tracking America’s biggest tech companies.
For people looking on anxiously as stock wealth converges in an oligarchy of high-tech juggernauts, some perspective: It’s nothing new.
