A.M. Update

Good morning.

Overnight the USD/JPY caught a solid bid and has lifted the markets as we expected yesterday when closing the AAPL and QQQ puts, only to look for an area a bit higher on a bounce to re-establish them at longer strike dates.

The USD saw some incredible strength overnight with the $USD hitting a 13 year high.

The EUR/USD on the other hand hit a low of just under $1.06 on its way to parity as the ECB doesn't have enough net issuance to do their QE and they don't know how to treat negative yielding bonds which stirred talk of more rate cuts to make up the difference essentially.

China also had horrible data on top of the news that they are consolidating their large state owned enterprises and telling the smaller ones to expect less state support and get ready to go public and list.

Industrial Production out of China for Jan. / February was the worst since the Global  Financial crisis on a y.o.y. basis. In addition property sales for the same period dropped at the fastest rate in 3 years.

Finally in the "You can't make this stuff up column", Greece's Tsipras is one day submitting proposals to the Troika for citizen tax collectors armed with cameras and recorders so no one in the country will know if it's a tax collector or tourist and pay their taxes which was shot out of the water and then Greece essentially says they'll do whatever the Troika wants to resolve this, the next day (today) he is threatening to seize German assets over the "Third Reich's War Crimes and Hitlers Hoards", saying that Germany never paid Greece war reparations and asking if that was "Moral?" since there's so much talk across the EU about morality of paying one's debts.

I'm stunned by the last one, talking about setting the bar low for political office, it's embarrassing even for me.

In any case, it looks like our bounce has arrived, so lets make the best of it!