Month: September 2017

High-yield has long been disregarded as a barometer for risk appetite after the last economic slowdown (2011/2008) as interest rate has been pushed to zero thus yield-chasing investor was indirectly forced to chase HY for some years now, perhaps even with asymmetrical risk and "guaranteed" return. Generally speaking, any given securities will falls under the … Continue reading Sept 2017: High-Yield Spreads as a Barometer + Bond Covenant Index & a commentary on relative non-absolute %

In the previous article we focus on some of the potential implications of the growing popularity of ETFs under the notion that they are better than the good old mutual fund simply because ETFs can be traded throughout the trading day. This is somewhat a true liquidity to the traders and ETF holders, but perhaps … Continue reading Implication and Price Discovery of ETF Hedge on Illiquid Securities & The US Treasury’s Public-Private Investment Program(PPIP)

ETFs have grown in popularity, in fact on a exponential scale, in the past decade or so but even more so in absolute term, after 2010. In the past ten years alone, we experienced an inflow of $1.40 trillion dollars into ETFs products and outflow of $1.20 trillion dollars from mutual funds. ETFs became real … Continue reading Potential Hidden Dangers of ETFs

The pension time bomb is something we have to watch closely as a country. For example, Illinois state bond is close to getting rated under a junk status. We are not talking about a failing city like Detroit, but a whole state. Pension fund is designed to not take financial slowdowns thus ever slowdown or … Continue reading Pension, Demographic Time Bomb

2017 has been a pivotal year for me, in terms of my professional progression. I decided to resign from my finance job at a tech company in early 2017 to embark on a startup building journey of no return. I have decided to launch 6 products in 6months, which equates to about 1 every 4 … Continue reading Launch 6 Products in 6 Month

De-dollarization Accelerates: China Readies Yuan-Priced Crude Oil Benchmark Backed By Gold. Three points of interests: 1) Equity Market Maturity - Their equity market does not have the maturity to sustain such a large liquidity, not to mention their public equity/debt market foundation is still work in progress. While we see headlines of huge rounds of … Continue reading De-dollarization Accelerates: China Readies Yuan-Priced Crude Oil Benchmark Backed By Gold