Manufacturing output across the 17-country eurozone shrank again in August, according to a widely-watched survey.
The Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) showed the region's manufacturing sector contracted despite factories cutting prices.
Markit's final PMI was 45.1, above July's three-year low of 44.0.
However, the figure was the 13th month in a row that it was below the 50 mark that indicates growth.
The latest figures from China showed its manufacturing activity fell, too, to a nine-month low in August, adding to fears that its economy is slowing faster than estimated.
China's PMI fell to 49.2, the lowest reading since November 2011.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the downturn in manufacturing unexpectedly eased last month as domestic orders boosted output, with its PMI rising to a four-month high of 49.5 in August from a downwardly revised 45.2 in July.
All banks in the eurozone would be supervised directly by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt under new EU proposals to be unveiled next month.
The European Commission wants to create a single supervisory mechanism for the 6,000 banks, with the ECB at its heart.
It would replace the current system of national regulators supervising banks. But it requires EU leaders' approval.
In many cases the national authorities failed to foresee and deal with banks that got into funding difficulties.
The banks then needed to be bailed out by national governments. This in turn increased the pressure on public finances.
The Commission proposals form a crucial part of the plans being worked on to help stabilise the single currency, and to avoid a repetition of the current chronic debt problems damaging public finances across the region.
Officials hope it could be in place by early next year.
It is one step towards creating a genuine banking union for the euro. Policy makers say such a union is necessary to help convince markets that mechanisms are in place to safeguard the single currency's future.
For the first time, companies including Nissan Motor Co. (7201) are building products abroad to ship home as a stronger yen, aging workforce and improved skills overseas erode a century-old mantra that what’s sold in Japan should be made there.
Nissan’s decision to import foreign-made vehicles in 2010 paved the way for some of Japan’s biggest companies, including cosmetics company Shiseido Co. (4911) and electronics maker Toshiba Corp. (6502) Shipments home from Japanese producers’ overseas plants have more than doubled in a decade to a record, including a 31 percent jump in the past two years, compared with a 61 percent gain in total importsover the 10 years, government data show.
“Nissan’s decision was epochal,” said Masato Sase, an auto-industry analyst and partner at Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting Co. in Tokyo. “Before then there was a tacit assumption that cars sold in Japan would be made in Japan.”
The shift reflects one of the biggest departures from an industrial strategy begun by the Meiji leaders who ousted the last shogun in 1868 and set up western-style factories. A “made by Japan” model, where manufacturers base operations with less regard to nationalism, may boost corporate competitiveness at the cost of jobs in the world’s third-biggest economy, deepening deflation pressures.
“People see the sale of cars made abroad as a sign of the times, as globalization,” said Shiro Kakinuma, a salesman at Taiyo Nissan Auto Sales Co.’s Shibaura Chuo showroom in Tokyo, which offers the Thai-made Nissan March subcompact. “When the new March came out there were some articles questioning the quality of a car made in a developing country. Not anymore.”
system developers know, the process of building automated trading systems is complex and filled with biases. A machine is not necessarily a physical mechanical machine. It can be a virtual machine, electrical machine, or in our case, software-based logical trading machine. System trading is the process of building and implementation of algorithm-based systems that execute trades automatically. While many associate this with machine intelligence, only the execution is fully automated.
Don't allow the low volatility in August to make you complacent.
Most of the world is on vacation, even in the hard working United States. Kids are off from school, some hedge funds even shut down in August. Those who aren't on vacation, use this as a quiet time for planning so they are ready for a big September.
BofA strategists Arjun Mehra and Cheryl Rowan have a warning more precisely aimed at the stockmarket. In a note to clients entitled Code Red, Mehra and Rowan claim there is "limited upside from here" and the "risk of a sell-off is high."
Peter from Ireland wrote in asking me to do a piece on liquidity on
the forex market. Although the market trades 5 trillion dollars per day
in volume, even forex traders face limitations in how much volume they
can push through in a short period of time.
A Zero Hedge article on the Reuters 3000 platform outage
cited some interesting statistics for the currency markets and where
the trading actually occurs. Although I was familiar with Reuters and
EBS previously, the Dow Jones article was the first place where I've
seen volume statistics published. Apparently Reuters, the biggest
platform, trades approximately $130 billion dollars in volume per day.
That's an astronomical amount of money. Intuition makes it feel like hitting
the ceiling on executing large transactions might be a problem for only
the biggest institutions. Let's take a look at where we might expect to
run into problems.
When I went through broker training at FXCM,
the team leader cited the EUR and USD as being involved with 60% of all
forex trading volume. That number does not imply how much volume occurs
in the specific EURUSD pair. Also, that that was seven years ago. I dug
around looking for more up to date numbers. Forex trading volume is
notoriously hard to track due to it being an over the counter market.
The best proxy that I know of is the FX futures market.
The CME publishes FX futures contracts volume
(page 16), which I used to estimate the proportion of the EURUSD pair
in relation to all traded volume. FX futures contracts, like their spot
counterparts, are all denominated in different currencies. Except for
the e-mini and e-micro contracts, which resemble the mini lots of retail
forex trading, the contract size is roughly $150,000. I'm counting
contracts rather than actual notional value to speed up the
calculations. You can double check my calculations by downloading this spreadsheet. The EURUSD pair represents 33% of all forex trading volume based on my rough estimates.
The
EURUSD value traded per day on Reuters is 33% of $130 billion, which is
43.33 billion. The average trading consists of 1,440 minutes per day.
43.33 billion trades per day / 1,440 minutes per day yields an average
traded amount of $30,092,592 traded per minute. Again, this is a huge
number.
Everyone in forex trades on margin. Institutions
traditionally keep their margin very low. Assume that 3:1 is the norm
for the big players. That means that the actual funding in the account
only needs to be $10 million dollars (30/3). That's a lot of money, but
that is chump change by institutional standards. That's more on par with
a wet behind the ears CTA that launched within the past few years. This
scenario is for the most liquid currency pair on the largest currency
trading platform in the world.
Dropping down to the retail scenario, the numbers involved get much, much smaller. The Financial Times cites FXCM's average trading volume
as $55 billion per day. This is tens of multiples higher than an
average broker's volume. I picked it because it's the highest that I
know of and I wanted to demonstrate a big scenario. 33% of $55 billion
is $18.15 billion traded on the EURUSD. $18.15 billion / 1,440 minutes
per day is $12.6 million traded per minute.
Retail traders
leverage far higher than institutions. Again, let's be kind and make the
assumption that the average retail trader employes 15:1 leverage on the
account (hint: it's much higher). $12.6 million / 15 implies that it
only takes an account balance of $840,277 to trade all of the expected
trading volume in an average minute. One trader is unlikely to have a
balance that large, but a segment of a broker's customers most certainly
do.
The fragmentation of the market combined with leverage makes
it strikingly easy for a group of traders to suck up all of the
liquidity available on a given platform. Even though trillions are
available across the broader market, the broker or platform where a
trader participates is substantially more limited. The scenarios modeled
use the EURUSD, the most liquid pair in the world. Liquidity gets
exponentially worse when examining exotics or cross currencies. The
volumes are far lower, but the available leverage and account balances
remain the same.
When too many traders buy the same EA, all orders
fire off at the same time. Blockbuster EAs easily reach the combined
account equity floor where demand overwhelms supply. Finer details like
all of the supply is being one sided make the situation all the worse.
Based on an overwhelming bearish negative bias on the euro (FXE) from multiple sources (individuals, banks,
analysts, and fund managers) we believe selling the euro on any run-up is a
viable strategy.
The euro climbed to a fresh seven-week high against the dollar on Thursday on news Spain is negotiating with the euro zone over conditions for international aid to bring down its borrowing costs though the country has not made a final decision to request a bailout.
Earlier, the single currency set a fresh seven-week high against the U.S. dollar after Federal Reserve minutes hinted at more monetary easing in the U.S., while French and German business activity surveys were not as bad as feared.
In today's volatile business environment, organisations must be ready to reconfigure their strategic priorities at speed, and with certainty.
Crucially, instead of basing major business decisions on intuition, they need to mine the data and information at their disposal to drive rapid decision making.
This is why analytics - the use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models - has moved centre-stage.
According to market research firm IDC, the market for business analytics software grew 14 percent in 2011 and will hit US$50.7bn by 2016.
Of course, analytics itself is nothing new.
Organisations such as Google, Tesco and Caesars Entertainment are well recognised for their ability to predict market trends, customer behaviours and workforce staffing requirements and turn these into top-line growth and/or bottom line savings.
But for the many other businesses now seeking to take advantage of analytics, there continues to be a lack of clarity around certain fundamental questions.
What is analytics? How can it propel and improve an organisation's competitive positioning or effectiveness?
What does it mean to truly become an analytical organisation? And how does an organisation set out on this critical journey?
Although the development of analytical capabilities and capacity is obviously important, a focus on data, methods and technology alone will not magically deliver the insights needed for competitive edge.
