If you go to a casino and you win every day you won't be allowed to play for long because the casino knows that somehow you are cheating. The only one that wins every day is the casino (and sometimes they can't even do that).
Today Goldman Sachs filings for the first quarter show a PERFECT streak of making money every day during the quarter.
I trade for a living and I can tell you that I never have a streak where I make money every day for a quarter. To do that you either have to be lucky (beyond belief), or you have to be running with inside information, or you have to be manipulating the market.
Goldman Sachs Has First Perfect Quarter With Zero Trading Loss
Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s traders made money every single day of the first quarter, a feat the firm has never accomplished before.
Daily trading net revenue was $25 million or higher in all of the first quarter’s 63 trading days, New York-based Goldman Sachs reported in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today. The firm reaped more than $100 million on 35 of the days, or more than half the time.
Let's remember here that Goldman Sachs is trading (an essentially parasitic activity as I noted in my previous diary - a parasite's view of financial reform). When Goldman makes a minimum of $25 million a day, it is pulling that money out of the market. That is money you and your pension fund are NOT making.
I'm sorry, there is NO WAY that a firm can make a minimum of $25 million a day without cheating. Even Goldman Sachs seems to realize that someone may finally be on their tail.
"We anticipate that additional putative shareholder derivative actions and other litigation may be filed, and regulatory and other investigations and actions commenced against us with respect to offering of CDOs," the bank said in a quarterly filing with the SEC today.
Al I can say about the market these days is to echo what Karl Denninger wrote today:
You cannot invest or trade in markets that behave this way; it is impossible to go to sleep with a position, either bullish or bearish, and not wake up to find it ridiculously underwater. This isn't "stability" being demonstrated as the Euro folks and Bernanke claim, it is schizophrenia, it's destructive and it's impossible to be involved in a market that behaves this way without eventually waking up to all your money being gone.
It is time to give up folks and leave the machines to themselves.
I continue to maintain that NOTHING has been fixed since the financial crisis. All we have seen is the papering over of massive cracks. These cracks will continue to emerge when least expected (Greece anyone) until the basic flaws in the system are fixed.
Of course Goldman does not have its squid tentacles in everything, or does it?
From 2005 to 2008, Ms. Kagan was a paid member of the Research Advisory Council of Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute, according to financial-disclosure reports she filed after being appointed to her current job. The form shows she was paid $10,000 in 2008, when she was dean of Harvard Law School.
Update: Good it is not just me. Zero hedge also finds it "Unfuckingbelievable: Goldman Has Zero Trading Loss Days In Last Quarter"