JPM Warns Second Bloodbath May Be Imminent: Violent Selling Could Return On Thursday

JPM’s Head Quant is warning us that round two is brewing and that a second market crash could be imminent. All eyes on Thursday as trading could get ugly.

Zero Hedge - Last Friday, when the market was down only 2%, we presented readers with a note which promptly became the most read piece across Wall Street trading desks, which was written by JPM’s head quant Marko Kolanovic, who correctly calculated the option gamma hedging imbalance into the close, and just as correctly predicted the closing dump on Friday which according to many catalyzed Monday’s “limit down” open.

Recall:

 

 

Given that the market is already down ~2%, we expect the market selloff to accelerate after 3:30PM into the close with peak hedging pressure ~3:45PM. The magnitude of the negative price impact could be ~30-60bps in the absence of any other fundamental buying or selling pressure into the close.

 

We bring it up because Kolanovic is out with another note, one which may be even more unpleasant for bulls who, looking at nothing but price action, were convinced that after the biggest two day market jump in history, the worst is behind us.

In the just released note, the head JPM quant warns that a large pool of assets controlled by price-insensitive managers including derivatives hedgers, Trend Following strategies (CTAs), Risk Parity portfolios and Volatility Managed strategies, which is programmatically trading equities regardless of underlying fundamentals, is about to start selling equities, “and will negatively affect market in coming days and weeks.” For good measure, he casually tosses the word “crash” in the note as well.

By way of reference, JPM notes that a good example of how price-insensitive sellers can cause market a disruption/crash is the price action on the US Monday open. It says that technical selling related to various hedging programs, in an environment of low (pre-market) liquidity indeed caused a ‘flash crash’ on Monday’s open. S&P 500 futures hit a 5% limit down preopen, and then a 7% limit low at 9:31 and 9:33. The inability of hedgers to short futures spilled over into large cap stocks that were still trading and could be used as a proxy hedge. Had it not been for the futures limit down event, the selloff would likely have been worse as indicated by the price of the index implied by individual stocks. The figure below shows the S&P 500 futures, SPY ETF and S&P 500 replicated from
the largest stocks that were trading near the market open.

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