Well, Japan has been doing pretty serious money printing all along... Far more serious than Bernanke, Merv or anyone else. Not enough to offset the other stuff, obviously. As to the JGBs, looking at the futures doesn't really work due to the occasional CTD changes. Also, your figures aren't entirely correct for the futures: the lowest they have ever gone in 2003-04 was 133.71 (the lowest in 06 was 131.15). Looking at yields, the largest peak-to-trough drawdown would have been from the low of 45.5bps in '03 to the high of arnd 200bps in May '06. But then of course JGBs rallied from 200bps in 2000 to the low in '03. At any rate, the point here isn't really that being long JGBs is a good trade here and now. The point Bridgewater is trying to make is that if you got the macro call and the timing right, you could have made hay being long JGBs, just like you probably would make being short. Because I am not that good at macro and at timing, neither direction offers any edge, IMHO. But that's just me.
By what criteria you say that? http://seekingalpha.com/article/226671-japan-case-study-in-private-sector-debt-bubbles Check out the CBs charts. The BOJ balance sheet did almost nothing for 10 years after their bubble went bust. Meanwhile the Fed boosted the balance sheet almost immediately. The difference between the BOJ and the Fed on money printing is very large, the Fed is far more active
Well, I don't know of another CB that is buying quite such a plethora of private assets (REITs, ABS, equities, you name it). To me that's pretty extreme.
I'm not sure who you think you're talking to. Despite my obvious abilities, I'm not a major PM, (that's the dude here posting under the dhpar alias) At most, I might have like 2 or 3 open positions - and very basic ones (I'm pretty sure I know second to second how eurodollars or the EUR is doing). I'm not suggesting me or anyone else stick their head in the sand. I think it's pretty clear from this thread I stick obsessively close to the news. If something blows up on a stock I own (and yes I'm an owner, an extremely happy owner of BP) or a position I have, I'm going to know about it immediately. The idea of keeping a daily diary of my account balances has negative utility for me. I stopped doing it some time ago and the effect on my performance was profoundly positive.
IB didn't put all the option for annual reports for 2011 trader activity so I can't make exact calculations yet but my crude calculations are showing a gain of 25% on networth from all my trading in 2011 This was driven my 2 trades -Long fed funds futures -Under hedging of USD exposure against the BRL(As the BRL fell this benefited me) This number is not equivalent to the figures I put out in the front page of the journal because in those figures I netted out the fluctuations of the hedge basket activity(I wanted to filter my actual global macro trading not my problems at finding hedges that I felt were beyond my control) I don't have the exact figures(And its hard to calculate this) but I'd estimate the hedge added about 5-6% to the return. Netting that out the return was something like 17-20% In this figure it is also included a loss of 2% on a Quant index/stock trading strategy and a gain of 1% in a systematic stock strategy and a loss of 1% in a Quant currency trade When IB releases the annual report I can dig out some more exact measures But I'm confident it was in the high teens, driven entirely by the Fed futures, my trading ex-Fed futures was actually quite poor I'm not too happy about some of my decisions this year, specially in terms of shorting EURs instead of buying bunds.
But it took them forever to go there. Imagine what Bernanke will be buying in 10 years if the US doesn't get out of this
Actually might be the time to cover shorts. Euro is already off 300 pips from Tuesday afternoon. These NFP days are often a great time to cover things like this. For the moment, I will remain as is (subject to change from the moment I hit 'submit').