Terrible Tuesday.

It was a wild session in the U.S. on Tuesday.

10Y yields touched the dreaded 3% mark for the first time in four years:

In case you weren’t aware, that’s a harbinger of the apocalypse. Cue the only good scene in the Exorcist 2:

https://twitter.com/heisenbergrpt/status/967821505252950016

Ultimately, yields came off their highs as the bottom fell out for equities. 2s10s steeper by 2.1bp, 5s30s by 3.5bp. Bloomberg notes that “while 3% acted as barrier, heavy 10-year put open interest at 119 strike (equivalent to ~3.02% yield) may be a support.” According to Citi, buyers will come to the table eventually.

What started with a “stunning beat and raise” from CAT (to quote Buckingham’s Neil Frohnapple) turned into a “stunning” reversal of fortunes midday when these morons made the mistake of using the phrase “high water mark” on the call (I mean, I’m feeling particularly prickly today, but who the fuck says that on a call?):

~800 point haircut off the overnight highs for Dow futs:

Worst day for stocks since April 6 and the fourth day of losses in a row for the Nasdaq:

So that’s obviously a disaster and speaking of disasters, big-cap tech:

Nasdaq ‘VIX’ on the rise:

Facebook fell for a third consecutive session as the regulatory/privacy/public trust risk there continues to manifest itself in all manner of horrible-sounding headlines, like this one, out on Tuesday:

As you can see, that’s from Motherboard, and it’s a real “mother”fucker if you’re a shareholder:

That comes a day after Jeff Gundlach showed up at Sohn dressed in a damn clown suit and and pitched a Facebook short – so I guess he’s pleased with this.

Speaking of “motherfuckers” and clowns, Trump was in rare form today – long story short, he turned his various public appearances with Emmanuel Macron into an all-out Presidential blooper reel, complete with (another) wild handshake…

 

 

…a dandruff accusation…

 

…a reference to Kim Jong-Un as an “honorable” person…

 

… and this ramble on Iran that concludes with Trump admitting that “nobody knows what I’m going to do on May 12”:

Trump says "nobody knows what I'm going to do" on May 12 when a decision on the Iran deal needs to be made https://t.co/3UW6xMHKc6

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) April 24, 2018

To be clear, “nobody knows” what he’s going to do on any given day and there’s a chance he’ll start a nuclear war every time he opens his Twitter app, so I guess in that regard, May 12 is no different than any other day.

Oil fell to a session low just after Macron pitched a new Iran deal. Here’s a possibly useful two-day, annotated chart:

The dollar gave some back today after a torrid rally over the past several sessions:

This is bad news:

But hey, look, if all of this ends up going to hell in a handbasket, you can apparently turn to cryptocurrencies because even as the plunge from the December peak in Bitcoin is being increasingly pitched as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for risk assets, crypto assets are up some 70% MTD:

I’m being sarcastic – all of those “assets” are going to zero.