Why read imarketnews.com?

To become more familiar with what for many investors is an unknown or at least an unfamiliar alternate world — perhaps many worlds. At imarketnews.com you get the insiders' view of the world of the credit markets, the currency markets, the world of the macroeconomic news that undergirds the outlooks of the forecasters and supports the world view of traders in all the markets. If up to this point you've focused mostly on the world of stocks, imarketnews.com is a window on a much larger world.

What do I find on imarketnews.com?

You'll be reading about markets, their transactions that determine interest rates and about all the moving parts that make every day so interesting and, for investors on any scale, so illuminating. And by "markets" we're including so much more than the stock markets like the New York Stock Exchange and the Tokyo Stock Exchange which, after all, are a relatively small part of the global whole. Ownership markets, where shares of companies are traded at current prices, stretch around the globe. Then there are the markets that trade those shares at prices that will be confirmed in the future.

And there are the debt markets where I.O.U.s of near limitless variety are bought and sold. Debt comes in so many flavors, from mortgage debt to corporate debt and a lot in between. There are markets for financial instruments derived from other financial instruments, futures, swaps and options and, of course, swaptions. Throw in credit default swaps and orders for tangible goods from oil to corn and currencies and currency pairs. You begin to see how many moving parts there are and on imarketnews.com you'll see how they interlock and influence each other as well as whatever is in your portfolio. Sure, many of these markets are out of reach of individual investors, yet they both influence the other markets and send signals that can help anticipate the waves that will soon be crashing over your markets.

If the credit and currency markets are so important to understand, why don't I hear more about them on the cable channels and see more about them on the Web and in the newspaper?

These days markets activity is a vast interwoven web of global transactions with some single sets of coordinated trades involving stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities and more — all at once. Cable news channels are mostly trying to build audiences of individual investors who themselves are primarily buying and selling stocks, mutual funds, ETFs in small-dollar lots, not taking the huge positions which are the usual fare among professionals in the larger firms. Yet the entire picture is important even to the small stocks investor, who often has to wonder what's really moving — or about to move — what's important. That's where imarketnews.com comes in, deriving its information from the very same professional screen displays delivered to the professionals.

If I'm not a day trader or someone who has to stay on top of market movements minute to minute, is there anything for me on imarketnews.com?

If you're interested in the world of money for whatever reason you're interested in the world of money as it really exists, not through the lens of a firm trying to sell you or your company something, or through the eyes of someone who wants to persuade you that a certain asset class — gold, bonds, stocks or whatever — is all you need to know about. And you want to see the whole world, not just reflections in the mirror of one particular kind of market. You need to know the context of any transaction you'll make, from buying a security, a house or diversified basket of all kinds of things that can earn a yield, a dividend, a capital appreciation. Professionals with responsibility for significant amounts of money are allergic to the idiosyncratic narrow-gauge retail sales pitches that vy for our attention. They establish principles of investing that they apply to the real world and to do that they need real information. If you're looking for a view of this world through the eyes of professionals you're not going to get any closer to it than your view through imarketnews.com.

But exactly what do I see?

You see a constant stream of many things and only sustained attention brings a growing understanding how it all fits together. Along the way you'll be exposed to market jargon, concepts that may be unfamiliar and a constant stream of data points that are aimed at the market professional. A new economic report from somewhere in the world draws its meaning from the significance of what it measures at a particular time and whether it's a surprise. A calendar of events tells you what's expected, when, and you get a reading of the consensus expectations beforehand. The degree of reaction to that new information itself tells you a lot and so you see the reaction. Analysis and subsequent developments in markets that view the number differently fill in more of the picture. What turned out to be the most important stories of the day are listed, a ranking that adds more to the overall view.

Then you see retrospective references by analysts, traders and economists to the latest numbers and their views of what the new numbers suggest for the next numbers, for the future of interest rates, for the path of various economies, for policies set by central banks and legislatures. Summaries of the views, lists of expectations and coming events and various commentary from various perspectives add even more.

And the more you learn, the easier it becomes to see the comprehensive whole instead of just a barrage of information.

How do I sort it all out?

Every professional in the world of money is interested in the same things and years of feedback from market professionals have guided the menu of materials you'll see on imarketnews.com and its areas of concentration. Every professional will not react the same way to this information, but there is a consensus agreement on what's important to know about. You will become increasingly sensitive to the patterns and departures from pattern you will see. The linkages will become apparent.

Health care cost control or the cost of wars or infrastructure rebuilding are important subjects for anyone trying to gauge how well a government uses its revenues and plans its future, how it balances the demands upon it with the stability of its currency and its ability to borrow. So is the cost of a hamburger and an automobile important, along with the purchasing power and per capita income of the population, the national will to confront challenges, the culture of savings and consumption. It's all there on imarketnews.com.

Where does imarketnews.com get its information?

A lot is gathered by people who have become expert in the process around the world. It's certainly not a mysterious process.

Reporters make telephone calls, hop into taxis to get to briefings and interviews, constantly monitor other news services and use their access to policy-makers, market leaders, analysts and analytic services by way of every formal news accreditation available and every informal relationship called for by their profession. Their names are on their stories on imarketnews.com, often with their telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. In addition, market data feeds and audio and video feeds and the routine sources of government and private data link the newsrooms of Market News International around the world with breaking information, a lot of it obtained in advance of when it is publicly released on the Market News International distribution routes, one of which is imarketnews.com.

The bond market I've read about seems to be somewhat perverse, improving on bad economic news.

Exactly. That's one of the things that's so valuable about information in the credit market that can be found on imarketnews.com.

Credit markets typically respond very differently from stocks to the latest news. There's no mystery about it once you understand the basic mechanics. But there is usefulness in seeing the divergence when it's happening. Because the degree of divergence — and sometimes convergence — provides another view of the current context for all the markets. And when the credit markets and the equities markets are in positive synchronization, you know one of them will be proven wrong in retrospect. Unless you're watching both sides of the markets coin, you're not even aware the stocks-side consensus is being called into question.

So-called macroeconomic news is nothing more than GDP, CPI, the trade deficit and so on, all of which I can pick up anywhere, including government Web sites, right?

You quickly learn that traders and markets are not vast computers constantly chewing up raw numbers and spitting out trading positions almost automatically. Humans are doing the trading strategies if not the trading itself. True, in that split second when the Consumer Price Index for the latest month is made public on the financial newswires, traders and their trading computers are set to react instantly according to how the result differs or agrees with expectations. But a lot of trading goes on between reports and the markets often are guided by a general dominant consensus, or by more than one consensus theme, that provide the context for whatever else is going on. What is the consensus about whether inflation or deflation is the threat and over what time span, about whether growth is assured or doubtful, about whether interest rate sensitive industries are in ascent or decline? You need to know the consensus of the moment, a consensus that can change in a blink of an eye as a new earnings number is released, a new bond auction is held, a finance minister speaks, a central bank acts somewhere. So knowing the latest number is important, but just the beginning. That's the world reflected in imarketnews.com.

Why is imarketnews.com useful?

The Market News International newswire from which imarketnews.com is derived has been used by the top professionals in trading rooms around the world minute to minute for more than two decades. Financial media use it too. imarketnews.com gives individuals a look at this world, providing what may be a new perspective on the markets.

As we've all seen in the latest financial crisis, credit freeze and banking breakdown, there is a big gap in public familiarity with the credit markets outside of the professional circles of traders, portfolio managers and analysts. The credit markets and the currency market involve much more transaction volume by orders of magnitude than the stock markets and if they're not actually driving the stock markets they are influencing them in important ways. If there is a big gap in your understanding how the less familiar markets influence your income, imarketnews.com is the place to start. The kind of news that Market News International has been serving up to its professional clients for many years has never been more pertinent to everyone.

I know information is the key to market decision making, that market participants pay a lot of money to have access to information they need and I suspect there are elements to information that may not be as obvious for someone clicking on a Web page.

Context is everything. Of course speed of information delivery is crucial and some firms spend hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to process price quotes, bids and buys faster than humans can react, in small fractions of seconds. More generally, the professionals pay for information that is particularly relevant to this minute's trading decisions, delivered in the context of everything that's happening and of the consensus outlooks of the moment. Portfolio managers are more sensitive to different kinds of information toward the end of a quarter.

So what you see on imarketnews.com is in context, not just random bits of information. In fact, the information that is most useful to a market participant draws its significance from the context of what was expected, what else is going on, what it says about larger sets of information, what insight it provides that challenges or affirms what's gone before. The information flow has its own texture, so that some small event, perhaps just a few words or a number outside the spotlight, deserves to be highlighted and put in sharp contrast to its surrounding information. That's what market participants need and it is that need that has shaped imarketnews.com and its source services, like the Market News International main wire and Bullets services, through the years.

Are there separate pillars of information, broad categories that can be identified on imarketnews.com?

Yes, there is a broad spectrum of important information, from what's influencing the markets to the markets' reaction to those influences and the expectations for the next synthesis of economic statistics, pertinent events and market sentiment. And yes, within this continuum of markets information, you'll discern the broad patterns of these pillars. There is central bank information, the pronouncements and patterns of activity of those who can mandate changes in important fundamentals. There is the data that constantly stream from government and private data mills. There are more than a hundred key data series in the United States that generate new numbers every month in the United States, divided among the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly releases.

Since interest rates of different maturities have different sets of influences — short-term rates being governed by the central banks, longer term by the constellation of government and non-government influences — a pillar is made up of all the elements of securities supply to the markets. This subsumes everything from government debt to corporations' inclination to borrow. News about the deficit is news about the supply of government securities in the pipeline. That supply is shaped by decisions made by legislatures and can accumulate to shape the destiny of nations. And then there are all the other pieces of news from all sources that can make a difference to market participants under certain circumstances. For those who relate health care reform to control of government spending, or for those who measure spending on Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the future of interest rates, those subjects can be as important a growth and inflation.

So every day is a new day in the markets, a reordering of categories of information, a recalibration of expectations, an adjustment to the news? Any other dimension to look for on imarketnews.com?

Of course we're living in one of the most unusual periods ever seen for the economy, for markets, for households, given that we're trying to put distance between ourselves and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Every aspect of the economic reality on this planet is under pressure to adjust and governments are grappling with often unprecedented decisions that may change important things for decades to come. It's a gripping story played out day by day and more than that, it's the creation of new environment for commerce and consumption and credit. Sometimes the efforts to deal with the crisis can overwhelm all the other news. This is what Market News International is all about, and the focus of all the content you will find on imarketnews.com.

Anxieties raised about the future are reshaping expectations and behavior. The skyrocketing savings rate in the United States is itself leaving many changes in its wake. So news of this "new normal" is top priority for anyone concerned with the future, and certainly for everyone concerned about market activity. Therefore it's a top priority for imarketnews.com.

I just saw a story on imarketnews.com that said: "Listed option flow bias continued to revolve around the wings, Tuesday, implieds steady to big." What in the world does this mean?

There may be a good reason the credit markets are unfamiliar. Like any important area of endeavor, there is a jargon and shorthand evolved over many years. Since nothing on imarketnews.com is "dumbed down" for the Internet, you're seeing what the professional trader understands. So imarketnews.com provides an extensive glossary so unfamiliar terms can be decoded. (See here for our glossary.) Of course, there is much more to read that doesn't need any decoding. Over time, it all becomes less strange and more revealing.