Three Ways to Understand Credit Suisse

A new meme has sprouted across the internet: the recent market volatility is making Credit Suisse $CS insolvent. The Swiss bank’s management has swiftly responded to the rumors, saying they’re fine. But are they? To answer that question, we need to know where to look.

Why the Fed Impacts Markets

When it comes to the Fed, their impact on the stock and bond markets is obvious. But why are they so impactful, and why does the market sometimes go up when the Fed raises rates? To answer these questions, we need to understand the three factors that goes into the Fed’s impact on markets.

Interest Rates, Currencies, and Inflation

Assessing risk is at the center of finance, but many people don’t know where to begin. Today Zolio takes a look at interest rates, currencies, and inflation in the example of foreign bonds to show that a lot of the popular conventional wisdom about investment is absolutely backwards—but the right answer involves a lot of analysis and understanding, both of market conditions and of human nature itself.

Three Reasons why Stocks are Falling with High Inflation

Inflation is high and stocks are down—the dynamic has become a hand-in-glove kind of relationship in 2022, so much so that you couldn’t be blamed for assuming a direct correlation that stands the test of time. That, in reality, is not true. Some periods—like the early 1980s—were high inflation and great for stocks. So what’s different now? To answer that question, we need to dig into what’s behind the correlation today.

Why Hedge Funds are Down

Another hedge fund has announced massive, higher than baseline losses in its returns for 2022—which should strike you as weird. Hedge funds are by definition supposed to be hedged—meaning lower performance in bull years and better performance in bear years. So why isn’t this happening—why are hedge funds down 40% when the market is down 20%? Where are their shorts, and why aren’t the shorts helping?