Markets Editor
Mara Ellison runs the markets desk, setting daily coverage across equities, Treasuries and the flows that connect them. She spent nine years on a fixed income sales desk before moving into journalism, and still reads the auction calendar before she reads the headlines. Her weekly positioning note tracks where risk has quietly moved rather than where the index closed.
Eleven of the fourteen deals priced since Labor Day cleared with concessions above 25 basis points, and one was pulled. Dealers are moving inventory into a market that has stopped absorbing everything offered.
For a shareholder sitting on a single stock with almost no basis, there are four honest routes out. Each one trades tax, exposure, liquidity and cost in a different proportion.
Bullion has risen 9.7 per cent in three weeks while long Treasuries fell, breaking a relationship that held for most of the past decade. The correlation between gold and the ten-year yield has turned positive, and that is the whole story.
Long-dated Treasuries sold off through a week in which the front end rallied, pushing the two-year to ten-year spread to 118 basis points. The move is about compensation for duration risk, not optimism about growth.
Borrowers who had pencilled in October deals moved them into the first week of September rather than market a long tranche into whatever the reinvestment announcement does to the curve. Concessions on high grade paper stayed thin. Everything below it paid up.
Two portfolios can earn exactly the same annualised return across thirty years and end in completely different places. What separates them is which of those years were the bad ones.
Auction results arrive as five numbers on a screen and get read as a verdict on demand. Most of the time they are a verdict on how well the pre-auction market guessed, which is a different and more useful thing to know.
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