It has happened time and again in recent months as Europe’s debt crisis has played out. Stocks stage a strong comeback on expectations that a solution has been found. Then they quickly resume their decline as hopes dissipate, leaving investors puzzled and frazzled. What is going on? via In European Crisis, Little Hope for a Quick Fix – NYTimes.com.
China readies its own space station module for launch By Mat Smith posted Sep 27th 2011 8:24AM Presumably feeling a little left out after being turned down from the global love-in that is the International Space Station, China’s decided to go it alone. The ever-expanding nation will be ready to launch the first module of it’s very own space station, the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace), by the end of this month. The initial launch will be unmanned, delivering an 8.5-ton module ready for docking practise and other interactions with three more spacecraft that are planned to join it later this year. … Read more
Questions To Ask Yourself Before Making Impulsive Trades Posted In Blog | Add Your 2 Cents If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Either way, thanks for checking us out! There is no secret sauce to control your trading psychology on ever single trade – but you can get better at it over time. More often than not it’s the impulsive trades that become destructive to our portfolio. You know the trades we make on a whim and hope with no more than 15 seconds of analysis. … Read more
EFSF Plan in Europe is no Free RideSeptember 26, 2011By Russ WinterThe debt ratios of the key players illustrates well first chart that virtually everyone is courting fiscal crisis. The easy way out of turning to bigger, more solvent governments for bailouts has run its course. The chamber is empty. Government debt to GDP is running high everywhere. When a country such as the U.S. runs near 100% gross government debt to GDP combined with huge future deficits, it’s already dead on arrival.Looking at the next dead-on-arrival candidates leads us to Germany and France. Although superficially it appears as if … Read more
I think its time to flush out the conversation about whether we are going into a bear market, double dip recession, or whatever awful unknown awaits us. According to Investopedia, “A bear market is a general decline in the stock market over a period of time. It is a transition from high investor optimism to widespread investor fear and pessimism. According to The Vanguard Group, “While there’s no agreed-upon definition of a bear market, one generally accepted measure is a price decline of 20% or more over at least a two-month period. On that measure the S&P 500 topped out at 1356 on … Read more
September 26, 2011, 10:21 AM ETWarren Buffett Scorns Stock Buybacks (Except Now)Article Comments (11) Deal Journal HOME PAGE »EmailPrintTwitter Digg + More close StumbleUponMySpacedel.icio.usRedditLinkedInFarkViadeoOrkut Text By Shira OvideReutersThere are a bundle of remarkable things about Berkshire Hathaway’s announcement today that it plans to buy back an unspecified amount of its own stock.One, the conglomerate has never under Warren Buffett’s watch repurchased its own shares. That’s 40-plus years of never.Two, this announcement is an implicit admission that Buffett can’t grow returns as he has in the past. Buffett has been warning for years that he won’t be able to keep pace … Read more
First of all let me defend this trade by saying that I’m like everyone else a huge Apple fan. I even run 4 30″ Monitors on an Apple Desktop (although I do use Boot Camp and Windows 7) And I think Apple is a very cheap stock and a fundamental buy. So this idea is really just a short-term trade and could provide some hedge in a bear market. 1. Apple flashing bearish RSI divergence on both daily and weekly charts. Recent run to $420 has over extended the stock technically. I attached the daily chart but the weekly chart shows bearish divergence. … Read more
In North Dakota, Flames of Wasted Natural Gas Light the Prairie By CLIFFORD KRAUSS 10:08 PM ET About 30 percent of the natural gas produced in North Dakota is burned as waste. Executives say they cannot afford to capture all the gas for now. via Business and Financial News – The New York Times. It’s really a crime that this country burns off natural gas because we have no national energy policy to promote its use instead of importing foreign crude oil. The jobs it could create building infrastructure, refitting vehicles, and extracting are estimated to be in the … Read more
The weakening Euro is actually very good for the European economies as it will make their exports cheaper, and tourism more affordable. You won’t see Germany protesting too much. A collapsing Euro would not be good of course but an orderly descent is long overdue. It’s not good for U.S. multinationals that have had currency gains at their back. They’ll now have a headwind. Since oil is denominated in U.S. dollars, a strengthening dollar should take some pressure off of oil prices and that will be a welcome relief to consumers if they can get the prices passed down to the … Read more
The great debt scare SEP 23, 2011 11:17 EDT By Robert J. Shiller The opinions expressed are his own. It might not seem that Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis and growing concern about the United States’ debt position should shake basic economic confidence. But it apparently has. And loss of confidence, by discouraging consumption and investment, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, causing the economic weakness that is feared. Significant drops in consumer-confidence indices in Europe and North America already reflect this perverse dynamic. We now have a daily index for the US, the Gallup Economic Confidence Index, so we can pinpoint … Read more
We like domestic energy plays in the U.S, which means natural gas, coal, and oil in the Baaken and Gulf of Mexico. They are all getting crushed on the China slow down syndrome but in reality currently ship little to China. Exports represented 7.5 percent of production in 2010. Natural gas exports were negligible. We bought come coal miners, Arch Coal, more Alpha Natural, Hess and Chevron. ANR reached a low of $16.80 in March of 2009. We closed at $19.91 today down from $65 at the beginning of the year. Arch Coal reached a 2009 low of $15.20. It’s there again … Read more
As far as the end game goes, it’s clearly the Euro. When they get rid of that darn thing or finally get the will to issue Eurobonds, recapitalize all the major banks with fresh effusions of Eurobond debt or make-believe money, it will end. Who knows when and if that will happen. One thing is for sure, Europe can do just fine without the Euro. Probably a lot better. Get rid of it, is my preference. The problem as I and many others have written is simple. The EU should have come up with a common government before a common … Read more
Jim Rodgers, a peripatetic,bow-tie wearing, prolific financial commentator and author, wrote a book published in December 2007 entitled a Bull in China, Investing Profitably in the World’s Greatest Market. Rodgers was a vocal proponent of the theory that the sun has set on the West and China was the future. No one is in fact more associated with this theory than him. So how well has the investment turned out for his readers. While Rodgers recommended dozens of stocks, many of which are impossible to price, it’s fair to say that when you advocate purchasing more than forty different companies, … Read more
This is one of our positions we are pretty excited about. In spite of the horrible volatility and unrelenting negative headlines, life will go on and money can be made in the market. The technical set up for GLW is not great. I expect it to go down tomorrow but put this on your radar. Especially take notice of the 2013 Jan 12.5 calls. They can be purchased for under $3 which looks really cheap to me for in the money Leaps on a blue chip company. GLW debt was just upgraded by Moody’s to A3. They have $4.1 billion in net cash. … Read more
When I trained brokers for PaineWebber, we used to have mutual fund wholesalers come in almost every week and buy us lunch and tell us about their best performing mutual funds. After a couple of yeas of sandbagging my clients with the best performing funds, I began immediately interrupting their presentation and asked them about their worst performing funds. ” Every year you tell us about your best performing funds, and we sell them to our clients and then they turn into your worst performing funds after we buy them,” I interrupted once I was assure lunch was served. “How … Read more
But this is the next best thing without having to be body searched and fly with the public in a cramped aluminum can. CNBC’s Tyler Mathisen talks to six power players to get their best ideas for investing right now, featuring Kyle Bass, Hayman Advisors LP founder and principal; Leon G. Cooperman, Omega Advisors chairman and CEO; Philip Falcone, Harbinger Capital Investments founder; J. Tomilson Hill, Blackstone Marketable Alternative Asset Management CEO; Daniel S. Loeb, Third Point LLC founder and CEO; Anne B. Popkin, Symphony Asset Management president.
Coverage From the Delivering Alpha Conference! September 15, 2011By Jacob Wolinsky Yesterday the “Delivering Alpha Conference” took place in New York. The top value hege fund managers were at the conference; including Jim Chanos, Bill Ackman (stay tuned as I will post more on Bill Ackman later today), Marty Whitman, and many of the speakers in the panel below. This panel consisted of six investors with their favorite ideas. They have seven minutes to present and then took questions from the audience. The panel consisted of Kyle Bass, Hayman Advisors LP founder and principal; Leon G. Cooperman, Omega Advisors chairman and CEO; … Read more
US “Misery” At Fresh 28 Year High Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/15/2011 10:41 -0400 Reuters Unemployment It was just three months ago that we posted that the US Misery Index (inflation plus unemployment) hit a 28 year high. Today we boldy recycle that headline, and pretty much the entire post, as the US Misery Index just hit a fresh post 1983 high. Really nothing to add here: #WinningTheFuture. Chart: Reuters via US “Misery” At Fresh 28 Year High | ZeroHedge.
Although nothing goes up or down in a straight line we do feel that the Euro dollar’s long superiority over the U.S. Dollar has come to an end. By Jan Strupczewski and Glenn Somerville BRUSSELS/WASHINGTON | Mon Sep 12, 2011 7:49pm EDT (Reuters) – Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner makes a one-day trip to Poland this week for an unprecedented meeting with euro zone finance ministers as growing fears of a potential Greek debt default rip into Europe’s banking sector. The trip comes as a surprise since Geithner returned only on Saturday from a meeting of Group of Seven finance … Read more
You are either long or short the market, long or short gold, oil, everything is correlated. Stock picking is practically dead. If I had to call it, I’d say we’ve entered a bear market end of April May period. We probably crystallized this with the S&P debt downgrade of U.S. debt. I believe you can make money in any kind of market but it’s clearly much harder in a bear market. It would be easy enough if you could just stay short but bear market rallies are notorious for weakening resolve. Some common themes that should work in this … Read more
Since Barack Obama took office, $38 billion in new major regulations have been introduced, imposing an unprecedented burden on businesses, according to last month’s report by the Heritage Foundation. An overly regulated environment is creating uncertainty — and uncertainty is perhaps the greatest obstacle for investing and hiring. The administration hastily introduced the 2,300 page Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in the depths of the recession without fully understanding and studying the potential consequences of such unprecedented legislation. To put the Dodd Frank bill in perspective, it is ten times the length of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act … Read more
Sept. 12 (Bloomberg) — Italian bond yields surged at an auction today and Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou failed to reassure investors that his country can avert default as the euro region’s debt crisis worsened. Italy sold 12-month bills today to yield 4.153 percent, up from 2.959 percent a month ago as demand fell. The yield on Greece’s two-year note surpassed 60 percent for the first time after the government said it would raise property taxes to meet the 2011 deficit goal in its European Union-led rescue. Papandreou is struggling to convince investors that Europe’s most-indebted country can avoid a … Read more
Market Swings Are Becoming New Standard By LOUISE STORY and GRAHAM BOWLEY Published: September 11, 2011 The stock market just can’t seem to make up its mind. Enlarge This Image Paul Taggart/Bloomberg News A trader at the New York Stock Exchange last week, where significant swings were seen almost every day. Multimedia Graphic Era of Higher Stock Volatility Related Investors Brace as Europe Crisis Flares Up Again (September 12, 2011) Renewed Worries About Europe Shake Asian Markets (September 13, 2011) Add to Portfolio Barclays PLC Go to your Portfolio » Day after day, stocks swing sharply by hundreds of points. … Read more
Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) — U.S. stocks fell, after the biggest gain in two weeks for benchmark gauges, as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke failed to offer any specific new plans to bolster growth in the world’s largest economy. Financial and industrial shares had the biggest losses in the S&P 500 within 10 groups. Bank of America Corp. and Boeing Co. fell at least 2.9 percent, pacing declines in companies most-tied to the economy. Dollar General Corp. slumped 5.4 percent after saying that holders will sell 25 million shares. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index lost 0.8 percent to 1,189.39 … Read more
Tim Geithner says Global action needed boost growth US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner Thursday called on the Global finance chiefs to boost growth but said a repeat of the massive co-ordinated fiscal stimulus efforts of Y 2009 is no longer possible. In an opinion piece written for the a UK news paper, Mr. Geithner said the United States must strengthen employment, Europe must act more forcefully to contain its debt crisis, and China and other emerging markets should strengthen domestic demand and allow their currencies to rise more rapidly. “The imperative remains to strengthen economic growth. Fiscal policy everywhere has … Read more
US exports rise signalling firmer growth The US economy is sluggish, but it is still moving along. That was the message from 2 economic reports that pointed to a weak labor market, but also a better performance on trade that should boost Q-3 GDP. The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits rose unexpectedly last week, further evidence of an anemic employment picture just hours before President Barack Obama unveils a plan on job creation in a major address to Congress. Still, a considerably narrower trade deficit for July offers hope for economic growth in Q-3 following a … Read more
US Banks offered deal on faulty mortgage foreclosure practices BAC, JPM, C, WFC US banks that allegedly engaged in improper mortgage foreclosure practices have been offered a deal by State prosecutors that limits their legal liability in exchange for a multibillion-dollar payment, it was reported Monday citing several people with direct knowledge of the discussions. The proposed deal effectively releases the companies; Bank of America Corp. (NYSE:BAC), J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM), Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE:WFC), Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) and Ally Financial from legal liability for allegedly wrongful securitization practices, the newspaper cited the people as saying. The … Read more
Funds add Bullish agriculture bets on shortages Funds increased Bullish bets on agricultural commodities by the most in more than a year on signs of tightening supplies amid adverse weather conditions. In the week ended August 30, speculators raised their net-Long positions in 11 commodities by 18% to 915,341 futures and options contracts, government data show, the biggest gain since August 3, 2010. Holdings in Wheat more than tripled, Bullish Corn bets reached an 11-week high, and Coybean positions rose to the highest since November 2010. Corn prices have risen 70% in the past year and Soybean has gained 43%. … Read more
Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) — Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi called a Cabinet meeting today to authorize a confidence vote in Parliament on an amended 45.5 billion-euro ($64.5 billion) austerity plan that prompted a general strike. The meeting at 6 p.m. in Rome will pave the way for a vote on the measures, which will include raising the value-added tax rate by one percentage point to 21 percent, a 3 percent levy on incomes of more than 500,000 euros a year as well as an increase in the retirement age of women in the private sector starting in 2014, Berlusconi’s office … Read more
Sept. 5 (Bloomberg) — U.S. stock futures fell, indicating the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index may slide for a third day when exchanges open tomorrow, as European markets showed growing concern the sovereign debt crisis is worsening. Bank of America Corp. declined 5.9 percent and Citigroup Inc. dropped 4.9 percent in German trading as banks led the Stoxx Europe 600 Index to a 4.1 percent retreat. Alcoa Inc., the largest U.S. aluminum producer, slumped 3 percent in Germany. S&P 500 futures expiring in September lost 2 percent to 1,145.60 at 11:50 a.m. in New York. U.S. markets are closed for … Read more