I'll give the consensus answers from the trading arena. Each of your questions has a fairly significant long-term backdrop, a medium-term one, a short term one, and an immediate day-to-day narrative. That's fairly obvious, but there is strong confluence now when it comes to some of the things you are asking. And please ignore the grammar - on a phone and banging it out:
International money is now flowing out of US assets. This is a shift from the past few years where the US has seen historic inflows that kicked into overdrive with the AI wave. The pairing of stronger dollar and rising US assets made us equities especially attractive for international investors. This peaked with the US exceptionalism trade during the beginning of the Trump presidency, and now as a response to tariffs you are seeing dollar down stocks down which is making the sell-off especially painful for international participants.
Before the recent tariff shock, those previous narratives were already coming to an end. European equities have been ripping. That's one place where money has been flowing from big players like hedge funds.
A lot of the money has gone into deleveraging. When you look at prime broker data you can see that hedge fund positioning, large asset manager positioning, vol control, CTA, and most of the big market participants have been heavily lowering exposure for a solid month now. Remember that cash can go to lowering leverage.
The bond question is very much in play. You are correct that bonds have not been catching a bid. The consensus outlook was moving to stagflationary, and bonds had other hair like the US still having a lot of debt to term out (and newly issue... deficits are running Huge despite the news of cuts in inconsequential places as far as overall budget), and some more recent theater releases about consumer inflation expectations were frankly shocking, and that feeds into the fed's response function when it comes to cutting rates and helping out a bond rally cycle. This is part of the reason you're seeing money go, well, a lot of other places! Like European banks, gold, etc over the past few months. Now we're in a full on recession trade, and this debate is in overdrive. Fed cuts were increasingly priced in, bonds caught a bid, but Powell spoke very recently and said there was too much uncertainty to even consider cuts which pulled back those rate cut expectations. Opinions that are in conflict are priced into various aspects of the market right now, and this will play out in the coming weeks.
On to Gold. I think it's fine to simplify it and say that Gold sniffed the danger out. It's been on a face ripping rally for a while now, and what you see now is a great setup for the trading phenomenon of "sell the news." Once everybody is long there's no one left to buy and only sellers can come in from there. When markets get hot like that, you get fast money coming in that is prone to selling on small down moves (because they're only joining the bandwagon to make "easy" money, and they're not interested in losing even a little bit of money. They are also often tourists in that they do not have deep knowledge of the investment product so when something like gold selling off when it should be going up happens, there is a fear response.
That said, the gold selloff today is significant. Have heard two commentaries on this, and both agree it's a sign of margin calls and liquidation/sharp capitulation. In extreme sell-offs you see all correlations go to the one, and there is a "dash for cash" to meet collateral requirements and shore up risk metrics. You can also see signs of this in FX markets. Some other commentary from today confirmed stres in treasury liquidity, which is a "safe haven" but also gets liquidated in dash for cash situations.
And this does partially answer "where the money is going". T Bills. That's what everyone wants when battening down the hatches.
Gold is indeed best viewed as an uncertainty hedge rather than an inflation hedge. That's a good observation. It's really a hedge against systemic fragility though things like people being unsure of Central Bank policy... Tariffs.... Etc. It's not exactly a day-to-day extreme market volatility hedge. Some of the cash is going literally into hedges! Volatility itself is hugely being bid up right now. That stuff is even better than cash because it has negative correlation to risk assets.
Stitch everything together and you get a pretty good backdrop for the current sell-off. It even helps explain things like the 2-day back to back action, where day one was a huge selloff but it was somewhat orderly because everyone was coming in with fairly low exposure, so panic didn't really set in until day two (and he's selling feedback loops often continue until liquidation is forced, which marks a bottom for buyers to take a stab at. Nobody wants to step in during a steep grind down of price).
Relevant charts. Not all of them have the labels in-chart, but it's all significant data. Ex: here's a real data point that isn't in the charts below, but is a typical example of this sort of data. "High volatility is expected to generate 80 billion USD in equity supply from macro strategy funds over the next week if conditions continue": https://ibb.co/album/KNBSw2
International money is now flowing out of US assets. This is a shift from the past few years where the US has seen historic inflows that kicked into overdrive with the AI wave. The pairing of stronger dollar and rising US assets made us equities especially attractive for international investors. This peaked with the US exceptionalism trade during the beginning of the Trump presidency, and now as a response to tariffs you are seeing dollar down stocks down which is making the sell-off especially painful for international participants.
Before the recent tariff shock, those previous narratives were already coming to an end. European equities have been ripping. That's one place where money has been flowing from big players like hedge funds.
A lot of the money has gone into deleveraging. When you look at prime broker data you can see that hedge fund positioning, large asset manager positioning, vol control, CTA, and most of the big market participants have been heavily lowering exposure for a solid month now. Remember that cash can go to lowering leverage.
The bond question is very much in play. You are correct that bonds have not been catching a bid. The consensus outlook was moving to stagflationary, and bonds had other hair like the US still having a lot of debt to term out (and newly issue... deficits are running Huge despite the news of cuts in inconsequential places as far as overall budget), and some more recent theater releases about consumer inflation expectations were frankly shocking, and that feeds into the fed's response function when it comes to cutting rates and helping out a bond rally cycle. This is part of the reason you're seeing money go, well, a lot of other places! Like European banks, gold, etc over the past few months. Now we're in a full on recession trade, and this debate is in overdrive. Fed cuts were increasingly priced in, bonds caught a bid, but Powell spoke very recently and said there was too much uncertainty to even consider cuts which pulled back those rate cut expectations. Opinions that are in conflict are priced into various aspects of the market right now, and this will play out in the coming weeks.
On to Gold. I think it's fine to simplify it and say that Gold sniffed the danger out. It's been on a face ripping rally for a while now, and what you see now is a great setup for the trading phenomenon of "sell the news." Once everybody is long there's no one left to buy and only sellers can come in from there. When markets get hot like that, you get fast money coming in that is prone to selling on small down moves (because they're only joining the bandwagon to make "easy" money, and they're not interested in losing even a little bit of money. They are also often tourists in that they do not have deep knowledge of the investment product so when something like gold selling off when it should be going up happens, there is a fear response.
That said, the gold selloff today is significant. Have heard two commentaries on this, and both agree it's a sign of margin calls and liquidation/sharp capitulation. In extreme sell-offs you see all correlations go to the one, and there is a "dash for cash" to meet collateral requirements and shore up risk metrics. You can also see signs of this in FX markets. Some other commentary from today confirmed stres in treasury liquidity, which is a "safe haven" but also gets liquidated in dash for cash situations.
And this does partially answer "where the money is going". T Bills. That's what everyone wants when battening down the hatches.
Gold is indeed best viewed as an uncertainty hedge rather than an inflation hedge. That's a good observation. It's really a hedge against systemic fragility though things like people being unsure of Central Bank policy... Tariffs.... Etc. It's not exactly a day-to-day extreme market volatility hedge. Some of the cash is going literally into hedges! Volatility itself is hugely being bid up right now. That stuff is even better than cash because it has negative correlation to risk assets.
Stitch everything together and you get a pretty good backdrop for the current sell-off. It even helps explain things like the 2-day back to back action, where day one was a huge selloff but it was somewhat orderly because everyone was coming in with fairly low exposure, so panic didn't really set in until day two (and he's selling feedback loops often continue until liquidation is forced, which marks a bottom for buyers to take a stab at. Nobody wants to step in during a steep grind down of price).
Relevant charts. Not all of them have the labels in-chart, but it's all significant data. Ex: here's a real data point that isn't in the charts below, but is a typical example of this sort of data. "High volatility is expected to generate 80 billion USD in equity supply from macro strategy funds over the next week if conditions continue": https://ibb.co/album/KNBSw2