whatok

This is also a misleading comment. The main purpose of the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility is to purchase secondary market bonds and this is stated in the IMA and term sheet. The only reason why they're buying ETFs right now is because it's easier operationally and the issuer registration process for primary and secondary bond purchases has been difficult so far. They are not buying ETFs because they are "more liquid and convenient" vs underlying.

The Fed also is absolutely trying to directly support issuers through these facilities and ETF purchases are an important part of this. Primary issuance is dictated by where secondary markets are trading and if some of the most liquid corp instruments (ETFs) are trading extremely wide or at a huge discount to NAV (like they were before these facilities were announced) then primary issuance will either be much more expensive or completely closed.

The Fed has two corporate facilities in-place right now: the Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility and the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility. ETF purchases fall under the SMCCF. Secondary corporate bond purchases are also under the SMCCF but they have not made any purchases yet. There is an issuer registration process that is thought to carry some stigma (Google "discount window stigma" if not familiar with something similar) especially with backlash towards larger companies taking advantage of PPP. There are no issuers currently registered.

As far as primary issuance goes, the same issuer registration process is in play. There are pretty punitive funding fees vs where syndicated bond issuance is right now so there's little incentive for issuers to participate in it as well.

Primary corporate markets are very wide open and have been ever since they announced these facilities. Investment grade issuance is at over $1trn on the year and have been very concentrated in the last few months. The Fed has bought around $6bn in ETFs so far which is really nothing in the grand scheme of things. The main effect these facilities have had so far is restore market confidence.

Excel is a very effective tool for many things but suggesting that it would be useful to spend time learning Excel to prepare for HFT is really bad advice.

Consuming more of this product does not necessarily lead to an increase in revenue.

For HFT? Absolutely not. For trading? The original poster needs to clarify what they mean by "trading" as this is probably still the case for most tech-driven prop trading firms.

How much of your day was taken up by meetings before and is the same amount of time used for the equivalent meetings now? Do you have additional "status" meetings that were hastily put together just because?

At the end of the day, that comes down to the type of industry/work and whether you have effective management. Organizations that are able to make 100% remote work function properly are at a serious competitive advantage in many ways.

I live in New York, have a reasonable commute (20-30 mins each way), and vastly prefer working from home. The commute is only one factor in my preference and I can't really decide whether saving time outweighs what used to be a dedicated time slot for reading non-work stuff.

This is also somewhat of a self-correcting problem too. If these conversations really matter so much and either information isn't transmitted efficiently throughout the organization or it becomes a remote vs office clique thing, management either finds a solution or you probably go back to everyone in the office.

What I do know is that a lot of businesses are functioning perfectly fine 100% remote right now and there's a lot of fat that can be cut converting to full-time remote. Those benefits are likely going to outweigh "But what if Timmy gets left out of a conversation?!?!" If 100% or majority remote work becomes a competitive advantage, businesses will find a way to fix the communication gap.

Surveys are fine and all but in some industries/companies, workers are not going to have much say in this. When it comes down to cost savings from increased productivity and reduced/eliminated office space, the decision is very easy for some. Not to say it's the right decision but it's a decision some are going to make with some limited data at hand.

It really depends on how old your kids are. If your kids are of school age then the distraction at home is minimal. I'm sure someone is going to come in reply with "omg but they're real rascals in the morning!!!!" I would weigh that vs morning commute time and then throw in saving the post-work commute for free.

Even if they aren't of school age, paying for daycare vs potentially much lower cost of living is an easy trade for a lot of people. That's not even getting into the difference between public school choices or much reduced private school tuition available in the rest of the country.

You had asset prices and rates at much different levels during this downturn vs your three downturns. You haven't had asset prices correct to what economic reality is (not saying they should necessarily but that's what's needed for a healthy business cycle) and rates can't really go in either direction without things getting really bad. I agree with your general comments 100% but this can be a much different business cycle as far as length and phase.

Even a larger company like Ableton is not supporting the previous version of Live in Catalina and won't release any updates for it:

https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=235803

The grandparent suggests that conservative users are to blame on this and that's partially true but it's not out of irrationality. If you are charging by the hour, you cannot afford any downtime. Studios run extremely lean teams and don't necessarily have a tech person on hand to fix things. If they find a configuration that works, they're going to stick to it.

In normal functioning markets, maybe? When stuff like the events of the past few months happen, markets just stop trading altogether. If there's thin trading in an already illiquid market, there's no mechanism that forces things to reprice. What you see as NAV did not reflect executable levels. That's why you saw bond ETFs trading at such a discount because those were the only things people were able to sell. In a lot of cases most people decided they'd rather short 25mm of an ETF at -x% discount and have it retrace to NAV par than sell 10mm bonds down -1.5x% and then the next 15mm at an even steeper discount. Crude example, not how bonds are quoted, and you probably would have to sell those bonds in way more trades than that but hope it serves as an example.

There's a few reasons. The Fed's mandate to "promote maximum employment" has taken the form of ensuring properly functioning capital markets. ETFs not getting too dislocated from NAV is an important part of that because otherwise they become a useless hedging instrument. Lack of effective hedges increases volatility in markets and forces investors to reduce positions. Further reducing positions during a sell-off causes an even steeper sell-off, etc blah blah.

Additionally and more importantly, primary market transactions are priced off secondary market levels. During the sell-off and before the Fed intervened, corporate bond issuance completely vanished. A large portion of US companies are debt-financed and would be unable to finance operations or be forced to pay way higher rates without functioning debt markets. Ensuring both the primary and secondary market functions properly fulfills (in their theory) their mandate of promoting maximum employment because without either, a lot more companies would have gone under or laid off way more people.

Your thought pattern makes sense but a lot of dislocations in these markets are once again due to liquidity. I think the easiest way to summarize this is because of the liquidity transformation ETFs provide, the tail wags the dog until it doesn't. This gets a bit rambling but I am too lazy to edit right now.

Liquid hedges are extremely valuable when trading corporate bonds. With almost every sell-off/rally, you will see more liquid instruments be first movers and usually overshoot in either direction. If I wanted to buy/sell 100mm MV of bonds right now, I would have to pay through the nose and there's no dealer on earth (due to post-GFC regulations) that is warehousing 100mm MV of a single bond issue so then I'm probably buying 10-20 different bonds and that doesn't really fit what I'm trying to do. Instead, I can buy/sell 100mm of a bond ETF, pay close to equity-like bid/ask spreads, and do so without picking up the phone or having someone decline to trade with me. I'm a little braindead right now and I know this is a bad example but this makes intuitive sense: if I really need cash immediately for something, I'll go to the pawn shop first before going to the bank. The pawn shop will give me immediate liquidity while the bank might not be open, want me to open an account, fill out some documents, blah blah.

The same thing happens with SPY, if I want to hedge my up/downside and need to do it quickly and efficiently, buying/selling single name equities in a lot of cases is not the best way to proceed. Dislocations vs NAV rarely happen with SPY or anything with large liquid underlying assets because the create/redeem process for these is very efficient; I can do it through an API. There have been advances in the corporate bond market but for the most part bonds are traded via chat or phone.

So, let's say bonds sell off for whatever reason, everyone immediately reaches for an ETF rather than selling any bonds. The underlying market takes some time to react and there's a further cascade of price discovery that usually happens in order of liquidity. When you have several thousand bonds underlying an ETF and no efficient way to trade them, price discovery takes a while. ETF overshoots, bonds try to catch up, oh but wait now this bond looks cheap/rich vs that other bond, then maybe everyone starts taking their hedges off, and then the process restarts in a miniature fashion.

This tug of war can take days to shake out but in the meantime, the create and redeem process still exists so if I feel the ETF is way too rich (simple unreaslitic example but "wow, ETF dividend yield is 5% but the underlying bonds yield 10%") I can buy some shares and redeem them for the underlying bonds and also do the reverse.

The create/redeem process was broken during the recent sell-off because there was no consensus on where NAV actually was. Sure, the ETF provider publishes a NAV level but you had several ETFs trading at several percentage point discounts. In normal cases, I can buy the ETF and redeem it for the underlying theoretically pocketing the difference. I'm not going to do that if the underlying price should be much lower or I'm just uncertain as to where it really should be.

Long story short, ETFs track NAV closer in more efficient markets. In less efficient markets, ETFs or any liquidity transformation vehicle usually lead the underlying because it's easier/cheaper to transact in them. From there it's price discovery on the underlying which happens at varying speeds and the process goes back and forth.

There's a few faulty assumptions that might apply to more liquid and efficient markets but do not apply to corporate bonds. Corporate bond liquidity is minuscule and many create/redeems are done with incomplete baskets vs actual underlying. One of the reasons why the Fed decided to include ETFs in this facility is because the ETFs were trading at a steep discount to NAV at some points earlier this year. For example, SPY's largest discount to NAV this year was around 80bps. For LQD (the largest and most liquid IG ETF), the largest discount was close to 5.1%. Discounts to NAV of that size are not academically arbed away with illiquid underlying assets because there's no liquidity or price discovery happening in those assets either.

Apple does not have a clear and complete vision for their software. They consistently break things with OS and hardware updates. Many of the developers for audio applications are extremely small teams and cannot turn around updates at the drop of a dime when Apple decides to give them little notice that they're once again breaking shit. There is no "golden path" for pro audio on a Mac and that's evident in their desktop offerings over the past decade.

Blackrock is waiving ETF fees for this facility (don't know off the top of my head if other providers are as well) and overall fees for managing these facilities are not great. The Fed does not have the operational expertise to manage these facilities in-house. You could make an argument if all they were buying was ETFs but a majority of the facility is for corporate bonds and things can go real wrong if you don't know what you're doing there.

There might not be CPI inflation but there's definite asset inflation which trickles down to real estate which trickles down to rent which trickles down to money in everyday consumers' pockets.

The Fed buying bond ETFs is a small portion of the overall SMCCF. They are buying bond ETFs right now because the issuer certification process for buying individual bonds has been dragged out and right now it seems that not many issuers want to register because of backlash from PPP.

I agree with your two initial points in the context of the Fed ONLY buying ETFs but that's only a small portion of the overall facility. With secondary bond purchases, the Fed is absolutely going to be favoring individual issuers not willingly but through the design of the program and the form of individual issuers' capital structures. If the Fed wanted to rush a program out to only buy ETFs, they did not need to take almost two months to do so. The underlying corporate bonds were the main target of this program, they ran into some operational problems launching that portion of the facility, and decided to go ahead with the ETF portion.

Agreed on the Matt Levine. He's fine for certain things but it seems like he's the ultimate source for tech people who want to talk about finance and he's not always right/is only one side of the story.

Few things:

- No one knows how much or what exactly they're buying but they're limited by the size of the overall facility and are primarily going to stick to investment grade with a carve out for fallen angel and HY ETFs. Blackrock needs to provide the Fed with a list of ETFs they may buy and disclosure on that is uncertain.

- They are not required to publish their holdings but will provide an aggregate number alongside the rest of the H.4.1 numbers published on Thursday.

- The main and other part of this secondary market facility is secondary market corporate bonds. There is a certification process that issuers need to complete in order for the Fed to buy their bonds. Given the backlash on PPP, issuers are reluctant to register and especially reluctant given that secondary markets are more or less functioning.

- Most of the impact of this and other facilities announced has been seen in the announcement; not through actual purchases. This is true for the Fed and has been true for the BoJ and ECB.

- With the announce impact/implicit backstop, a (current) cap on ETF purchases, and a reluctance for issuers to certify, if markets function properly, you may not see very many purchases by the Fed under this facility at all.

Yeah, I'm thinking of the person who either fell for the Mac propaganda or already had one. There still is a sizable advantage to knowing that things will probably work out the box on a Mac laptop vs random PC laptop but the price gap is unreal. Live Intro is definitely enough for most people to get a feel for things.

I know how Live works, I've owned it for way too long now. I'm talking in relation to features Logic has lifted from Live, if you are just starting out and don't really know what's going on, it's a very hard ask to spend double on base Ableton (3x? for Suite) vs Logic especially when Logic comes with more stuff.

Under normal circumstances, no one wants to be the first mover on something major like this because it's extremely disruptive to the way most people work without a clear example of the benefits. You're mentioning all of the upsides but there's a lot of execution risk in shifting a large organization to a remote setup. There's also a lot of management layers that are largely redundant with remote working and they've likely fought tooth and nail to prevent it.

Companies have touted open desk workspaces as some grand collaborative masterpiece for years now. It's a very big difference to advocate working from home because you also have to acknowledge that was a total farce.

It's definitely a good way to branch out on their current user base and probably makes a lot more sense for people starting out to buy Logic than base Ableton. Ableton Suite just doesn't seem like a great value vs Logic unless you absolutely need something in Ableton.

It really is incredible how badly Apple screwed up video.

I wouldn't really compare the two. They target much different markets.

As another reply took issue with, strictly was probably a bit overstated. Software support was a secondary issue vs hardware support. You simply did not have Windows drivers for many of the top audio interfaces or you had major stability issues that vendors would blame on Windows. Macs were really plug and play hardware-wise and putting together properly specced PCs to run hardware on a stable basis really made the cost of advantage of a PC questionable.

Avid is not exactly known for their strategic vision. And talk about wringing customers for every possible penny too.