Archive For "February, 2011"

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – The U.S. government has frozen $30 billion in Libyan government assets so they cannot be accessed by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and his family, said David Cohen, Treasury acting undersecretary for terrorism on Monday. In a briefing, Cohen said this was the largest amount of assets ever blocked under any sanctions regime. President Barack Obama froze the Libyan assets on Friday in response to Gadahfi’s violent crackdown on protestors seeking democratic reforms.

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The Federal Reserve Bank of New York bought $6.69 billion in Treasury debt on Monday, part of the Fed’s second round of quantitative easing. Dealers offered the central bank $38.868 billion in Treasurys maturing from 2013 to 2015. Since starting a previous program to also reinvest cash from its maturing mortgage-related holdings back into Treasurys began in August, the Fed had bought about $449 billion through Friday, according to Morgan Stanley. After the buyback, bonds remained mixed. Yields on 10-year notes , which move inversely to prices, fell 1 basis point to 3.41%.

… is finally here! Without further ado, please check out the new User Guide complete with glossaries for each section, updated screenshots and more.

Also, I’ve enabled comments on the User Guide itself so if at any point while reading you have a question just scroll down, type your comment and click submit! Pretty easy stuff.

Click here to read the new user guide.

P.S. Some of you noticed that the term term “Net Profit” was replaced with “Profit Factor” on the search options page. Nothing in the functionality changed, the proper term is just “Profit Factor” and this makes it consistent with Backtester. Thanks @cadtek.

Also, there is currently a bug when looking at very old signal’s Performance Reports. If you see a signal that has NO profit factor listed in the search results (it will say: “Backtest Profit Factor high:” <— notice the lack of a profit factor) then don’t trust that performance report until we roll out the bug fix later today. Again, this applies only to older signals and has no effect on current / recent signals. Thanks @cadtek

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -Pending home sales fell in January, the second straight monthly decline, a real estate trade group reported Monday. The pending home sales index fell 2.8% in January, close to market expectations, the National Association of Realtors said. However, sales in December were much weaker than first thought. Sales in December were revised sharply lower to a fall of 3.2% versus the prior estimate of a 2% increase. The index is 1.5% below January 2010 but 20.6% above the trough hit last June after the homebuyer tax credit expired. Pending homes sales fell in the Northeast, the Midwest, and West but rose in the South. The index is based on sales contracts on existing homes. The NAR also reports on sales of existing homes once the sales close, usually six to eight weeks later.

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Treasury prices pared losses and the dollar stayed down on Monday after a report showed U.S. consumer spending rose 0.2% in January, less than many economists expected. The dollar index , which measures the U.S. unit against a basket of six currencies, fell to 76.839, down from 76.848 before the data and versus 77.24 in late North American trade Friday. The euro rose to $1.3842, up from around $1.3750 on Friday. Yields on 10-year notes , which move inversely to prices, were little changed at 3.42%, after being 0.01% higher before the data. Still to come is data on pending home sales and a Federal Reserve buyback of $5 billion to $7 billion in U.S. debt maturing from 2013 to 2015.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The Federal Reserve will not let inflation “gain a foothold,” said William Dudley, the president of the New York Fed on Monday. In a detailed speech on the economic and monetary policy outlook, Dudley said that the economy is showing more signs of life than it was six months ago. “This is welcome and not a reason to reverse course,” Dudley said. Dudley went into great depth on the inflation outlook, saying the biggest risk over the next year or two would be for inflation expectations to become unanchored. Dudley said he was confident that “no one on the FOMC is willing to countenance a sustained rise in either inflation expectations or inflation.”

LONDON (MarketWatch) — Inflation in the euro zone rose at an annual rate of 2.3% in January, up from 2.2% in December, the European Union statistics agency Eurostat reported Monday. The reading was revised down from a preliminary estimate of a 2.4% annual rise. The rate is above the European Central Bank’s target of near but just below 2%.

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) – Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Janet Yellen on Friday strongly defended the central bank’s innovative bond purchase program, saying the benefits have been “sizable.” In the absence of the Fed’s asset purchases, the unemployment rate would have remained over 10% and core inflation would have fallen below zero this year, Yellen said, citing research at the central bank. She spoke at a monetary policy conference hosted by the University of Chicago Booth Business School. Going forward, market expectations about the timing and pace of the unwinding of the Fed’s asset purchases will impact financial conditions, Yellen said. Conditions would likely “tighten immediately” if the market came to expect a more rapid selloff of the balance sheet while a slower-than expected-exit would likely be stimulative. As a result, the Fed will use great care in its communication, Yellen said. Last April, the FOMC members said they wanted the “renormalizing process” to take five years.

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The recent run-up in oil prices is not a risk to the recovery to date, said Jeffrey Lacker, president of the Richmond Fed on Friday. “I think it is a manageable risk,” Lacker told reporters on the sideline of a monetary policy conference sponsored by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Lacker said he had not made up his mind whether he would advocate scaling back the Fed’s $600 billion bond-buying program at the next Federal Open Market Committee meeting on March 15. Lacker said he did not attribute much of the recent pickup in the economy to the bond purchases. Other Fed officials have defended the bond-buying program because the current growth outlook is relatively muted compared with past recoveries. Lacker said the economy is being held down by the weak housing sector. “I think we should expect a slower recovery and I think we may have to live with that,” Lacker said.

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The Federal Reserve Bank of New York bought $7.24 billion in Treasury debt on Friday, part of the Fed’s second round of quantitative easing, and includes purchases made under a previous program to reinvest cash from its maturing mortgage-related holdings back into Treasurys. Dealers offered the central bank $23.97 billion in Treasurys maturing from 2018 to 2021. Since the program began in August, the Fed had bought about $442 billion through Thursday, according to Morgan Stanley. After the buyback, bonds stayed up, pushing yields down. Yields on 10-year notes fell 1 basis point to 3.44%.