The Merrill Lynch Option Volatility Estimate (MOVE) Index is a yield curve weighted index of the normalized implied volatility on 1-month Treasury options which are weighted on the 2, 5, 10, and 30 year contracts. This Volatility Index shows the market's expectation of 30-day volatility. It is constructed using the implied volatility of a wide range of S&P 500 index options. This volatility is meant to be forward looking, is calculated from both calls and puts, and is a widely used measure of market risk, often referred to as the "investor fear gauge."

Many of us are familiar with the VIX Index, commonly referred to as the “Fear Index”. The VIX Index is a measure of “fear” as that relates to equity markets and typically rises during periods of falling prices, sometimes sharply during more precipitous declines.
Did you know that there is a similar index that measures fear within the bond market? That index was developed by Merrill Lynch and is referred to as the “MOVE” Index. The index rises as concerns grow that interest rates are on the march higher. The index will rise more sharply when there are fears in the market that rates may be headed significantly higher as was the case during the 2013 Taper Tantrum.

On March 31, an emergency pandemic regulatory relief measure that for the past year has allowed Wall Street banks to hold less loss-absorbing capital against certain assets is due to expire.
Appearing to yield to the industry could put a second term in jeopardy for Powell, who was appointed Fed chief by former Republican President Donald Trump, because anti-Wall Street progressives control the Senate Banking Committee, which vets Fed nominees, and hold sway over White House financial nominees, analysts said.
“Powell (is) in a politically precarious position,” said Isaac Boltansky, director of policy research at Washington-based Compass Point Research & Trading. “This decision will leave someone politically important unhappy with him.”

Based on his words, Grantham is predicting that U.S. stocks will be below where they were in the summer of 2020 at “some future date”. When Grantham penned this prediction (January 5, 2021), the Dow was at 30,200. The lowest the Dow got during the summer 2020 was about 25,100 (17% lower than 30,200).
This means that Grantham was calling for at least a 17% (or larger) correction at some point in the future. If we picked a random trading day since 1915, what’s the probability that the Dow would be down 17% (or more) at some point in its future?
53%.
Grantham’s prediction is no better than a coin flip. How’s that for intellectually demanding?

In this paper I examine the frequency of large, sudden increasesin market value in a broad panel data of world equity markets extending from the beginning of the20th century. I find the probability of a crash conditional on a boom is only slightly higher than theunconditional probability. The chances that a market gave back it gains following a doubling in valueare about 10%. In simple terms, bubbles are booms that went bad. Not all booms are bad.

A member of the World Health Organization investigative team says wildlife farms in southern China are the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic.
China shut down those wildlife farms in February 2020, says Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance and a member of the WHO delegation that traveled to China this year. During that trip, Daszak says, the WHO team found new evidence that these wildlife farms were supplying vendors at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan with animals.
Daszak told NPR that the government response was a strong signal that the Chinese government thought those farms were the most probable pathway for a coronavirus in bats in southern China to reach humans in Wuhan.
Those wildlife farms, including ones in the Yunnan region, are part of a unique project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years now.
"They take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity," says Daszak.
The agency is expected to release the team's investigative findings in the next two weeks. In the meantime, Daszak gave NPR a highlight of what the team figured out.
"China promoted the farming of wildlife as a way to alleviate rural populations out of poverty," Daszak says. The farms helped the government meet ambitious goals of closing the rural-urban divide, as NPR reported last year.
"It was very successful," Daszak says. "In 2016, they had 14 million people employed in wildlife farms, and it was a $70 billion industry."
Then on Feb. 24, 2020, right when the outbreak in Wuhan was winding down, the Chinese government made a complete about-face about the farms.
"What China did then was very important," Daszak says. "They put out a declaration saying that they were going to stop the farming of wildlife for food."
The government shut down the farms. "They sent out instructions to the farmers about how to safely dispose of the animals — to bury, kill or burn them — in a way that didn't spread disease."
Why would the government do this? Because, Daszak thinks, these farms could be the spot of spillover, where the coronavirus jumped from a bat into another animal and then into people. "I do think that SARS-CoV-2 first got into people in South China. It's looking that way."
First off, many farms are located in or around a southern province, Yunnan, where virologists found a bat virus that's genetically 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19. Second, the farms breed animals that are known to carry coronaviruses, such as civet cats and pangolins.
Finally, during the WHO's mission to China, Daszak said the team found new evidence that these farms were supplying vendors at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where an early outbreak of COVID-19 occurred.
The market was shut down overnight on Dec. 31, 2019, after it was linked to cases of what was then described as a mysterious pneumonia-like illness.
"There was massive transmission going on at that market for sure," says Linfa Wang, a virologist who studies bat viruses at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. He's also part of the WHO investigative team. Wang says that after the outbreak at the Huanan market, Chinese scientists went there and looked for the virus.
"In the live animal section, they had many positive samples," Wang says. "They even have two samples from which they could isolate live virus."
And so Daszak and others on the WHO team believe that the wildlife farms provided a perfect conduit between a coronavirus-infected bat in Yunnan (or neighboring Myanmar) and a Wuhan animal market.
"China closes that pathway down for a reason," Daszak says. "The reason was, back in February 2020, they believed this was the most likely pathway [for the coronavirus to spread to Wuhan]. And when the WHO report comes out ... we believe it's the most likely pathway too."
The next step, says Daszak, is to figure out specifically which animal carried the virus and at which of the many wildlife farms.

Backed by the godfather of smart beta, Rob Arnott, the Alpha Architect Freedom 100 Emerging Markets ETF is designed to track countries that allow human and economic freedom.