by ilene - May 24th, 2009 11:21 pm
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For those wishing to learn about insider buying trading, I’ve consolidated three posts on this topic, to provide an easy way to find all the information in one place.
By Ilene and Dave
A generally reliable stock-trading strategy is to buy a stock when an insider has just reported a significant purchase to the SEC.
The theory is simple: the insider knows the stock is undervalued and/or knows there is good news on the way which will move the stock price up, and believes this move will be sustainable.
There are a number of services which notify subscribers when an insider buys stock in a company. Some services provide notification within minutes, transmitting the information to subscribers via email alerts. Insider Cow, which is allowing us to tap into their service, allows subscribers to choose which insider actions they wish to be alerted to.
Not all insider buys have the same ability to move a stock – some are recognized as meaningful and will attract traders and investors, while others are virtually ignored. Distinguishing between meaningful buying and insignificant buying is part of successfully trading this strategy. To complicate the matter, the meaningfulness of an insider buy – measured by the market reaction to it – is influenced by an ever-changing market environment.
When I began trading this strategy, about four years ago, I was using a software program developed by a friend which would access the SEC website and alert us when an insider filed a buy. The program would attempt to determine how bullish the purchase appeared to be. It would do this by calculating a score based on the available information. For example, if a CEO of company with market capitalization less than about $1 billion would buy $1 million dollars worth of stock, the program would toss out a relatively high score indicating that buying the stock was likely to result in a profitable trade.
Beginning around two and a half years ago, this method became more difficult to trade due to changes in day-trading patterns and market conditions. The first change we noticed was that we were losing our competitive edge. Faster, larger players (programs?) were buying
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by ilene - May 24th, 2009 6:35 pm
Lost Vegas
During the boom years, no place in America boomed more than Las Vegas. But when the economy collapsed, Vegas fell hard. Laura Ling tours the wreckage of Sin City, from unemployed strippers and half-built, abandoned casino projects, to hospitals turning away cancer patients and ambulances, to one of the few remaining boom industries--evicting people.
The forced "no notice" evictions in the Lost Vegas video are very disturbing. If someone is not paying the mortgage on their property and is evicted I have little sympathy. However, the video shows multiple instances of "no notice evictions" as many as 13 a day, that give renters as little as 20 minutes to leave with nowhere to go and no place to put their belongings, even if they are current on their rent.
This is theft in my opinion, and I am quite sure the practice is not limited to Las Vegas.
Evicting Entire Rental Buildings
In response to Lost Vegas, "Tin Hat" replied in a comment:
A friend of mine experienced a "no notice" eviction in Ft Lauderdale December of 07. Her rent payments had been on time.
Luckily for her, she caught wind of it/heeded the rumor a week before it happened and found a place to move. As she was taking the last few boxes out of her apartment, the State police showed up to start mass evictions. Those tenants that didn’t know, were forced to leave with what they could carry on their backs and nothing else. They were not allowed to go back for anything that was left. So they not only lost the roof over their head, they lost most of everything they owned.
What happened to those people who didn’t have some one to take them in on no notice?
Tenants rights? In these cases, there are no tenants rights. It’s disgusting. They force people into homelessness through no fault of their own. It’s unconscionable. IMO, if a bank is going to
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by ilene - May 24th, 2009 6:04 pm
Another view questioning who is really in charge here. Courtesy of Jesse’s Café Américain.
This is a difficult essay for an American of this generation to read, because we have grown up with the assumption that the security of the United States is intimately tied to massive amounts of spending for military preparedness. The first response to any essay such as this is often an emotional one: "What about the troops?"
It requires an effort to realize that the vast majority of this spending has absolutely nothing to do with what the troops want or need. The recent examples of the lack of adequate armor on vehicles carrying troops, to the abysmal conditions in the military hospital system, are more than just anomalies. The military industrial complex, of which we had been warned in the farewell address of Dwight Eisenhower, does not value the troops, the US citizen army, highly in its equations.
The United States has reached its limit. It can no longer aspire to be ‘the world’s policeman.’ We are not able to do this and maintain a viable and healthy democracy at home. We are not protecting ourselves and our liberties; we are promoting the interests of pseudo-american global corporations around the world. As Mussolini observed, corporatism is fascism.
The global corporate complex, though nominally based in part in the US, exists for its own purposes, serves its own purposes, and consumes everything which we the American people hold most valuable: our lives, our liberties, and our pursuit of peace and happiness with justice for all.
"Some of the damage can never be rectified. There are, however, some steps that the U.S. urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defense budget all projects that bear no relationship to national security and ceasing to use the defense budget as a Keynesian jobs program. If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don’t, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression."
Why the U.S. Has Really Gone Broke
Chalmers Johnson
Le Monde Diplomatique
February, 2008
Global confidence in the US economy has reached
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by ilene - May 24th, 2009 4:56 pm
Click here to sign up for a free subscription to the PSW Report. It’s easy! – Ilene
Here’s another one by Allan. Allan’s getting ready to pull the trigger on his long awaited Sell signal.
Weekly SPX
The bars remain blue going into next week. But the False Bar Stochastic, channels and wave count are all warning that the end of a multi-month corrective Wave 4 is upon us. Still unconfirmed, but running out of room and running on fumes.
Daily SPX
The Daily chart above flipped SHORT last week. The wave count and FBS are warning that another leg up is possible, maybe even probable. A recovery from last week’s decline would certainly suck in a lot bullish sentiment, just the psychology needed for the icing on that Weekly Wave 4 end, a culmination rally sucker-punching the bears.
240 minute SPX
Not all charts help the analysis, as is the case with the above
240 minute chart. But it does define our dilemma;
Which way, which way?
30 minute SPX
So we drill down to a chart that does add tactical perspective. At first glance, this looks eerily close to the
Weekly chart. But it’s a
30 minute SPX. The portrait here is of a definitive end to a
Wave 4 correction and the
first red bar of Wave 5 down. On the shortest tactical time frame we see what could be the beginning of a massive bearish formation that will infect all of the above charts and bring into the play a significant decline, or more accurately,
the significant decline.
Bottom line is that the resumption of the Bear Market in a big, big way is upon us. If it hasn’t started yet, it will soon enough. Significant weakness next week will seal the deal. Absent that, another week, maybe two will be needed for an almost perfect set-up for an almost perfect storm.
Tags: bear market, Elliott Waves, technical analysis
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by ilene - May 24th, 2009 4:32 pm
This is truly stunning information, and although I do not consider myself a "conspiracy" believer, I’m going to post this with no further comment. – Ilene 
Courtesy of Allan
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Tags: Bilderberg Depression
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by Zero Hedge - May 24th, 2009 2:19 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
The recent addition of legacy loans to TALF caused CMBX spreads to turn on the nitrous and rip like all the commercial real estate concerns over the past 6 months have disappeared (especially in the top-most AAA tranche). Between financials, whose stocks have doubled on average, and CMBX (whose spreads have halved), there is, at this point, no doubt as to what lengths the administration is willing to go to funnel every single printed dollar into these otherwise doomed industries.
While there is still no indication that TALF v3.0 will work at all (the ongoing tweaks to TALF are nothing more than the government’s way to moderate the CRE collapse) and facilitate leveraged interest in AAA CMBX, the market has priced in a massive upside at this point, implying the up/downside from this point, absent a complete nationalization of all commercial real estate, is significantly unattractive.
CMBX 1
[click on charts for larger images]
CMBX 2
CMBX 3
CMBX 4
CMBX 5
CMBX AAA By Vintage
Lastly, I present the MCDX spread chart, representing the index for risk of municipal default, which consists of both state and city constituents, which has also tightened since March as well as on the heels of Frank’s initiative to guarantee municipal debt issues. At this rate, there will i) either be no non-sovereign risk attendant to any asset class relatively soon, or ii) the administration’s plan of socializing every form of risk imaginable will blow up in some unprecedented and, as of yet, inconceivable manner.
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by Zero Hedge - May 24th, 2009 2:14 pm
- Ben Bernanke’s commencement speech at the Boston College School of Law (FRB)
- Obushma-Biney in the home of the frightened (FT)
- Geithner picking the best (for Wall Street) of all derivative worlds (Bloomberg)
- S&P: Britain will be the next stage of the global crisis (Telegraph)
- More on Europe: The really ugly truth on European banks (HY Blog)
- Steve Liesman’s favorite portal (Recessionblocker)
- Dollar is dirt, treasuries are toast, AAA is gone (Bloomberg)
- The importance of irrelevant alternatives (Economist)
- Why Peter Schiff’s bookings are down 75-85% (Time)
- Some pretty ideas here, most lacking a few extra zeroes (Dollar Redesign Project)
- Libya sees 50% chance OPEC to cut oil output at Vienna Meeting (Bloomberg)
- The new, new economy (Wired)
With sincerest gratitude for recent donations received from: Brendon, Brian, David, Desmond, James, John, Martin, Mehul, Richard, Rida, Ryan, Thomas, Todd and William. The support means a lot.
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by ilene - May 24th, 2009 1:27 pm
Thank you to PSW member who posted a link to this excellent review article in the chat. Sajal has kindly granted us permission to reprint his work. Thanks, Sajal! - Ilene
Courtesy of Sajal at Fundamental Insights and Ideas
With an almost ~40% equity markets rally behind us, this bull market may still have some upside left. The bears sure got caught flat footed on this one. It’s always interesting to collate responses from different strategists. I find that recurrent themes makes it easier to filter out the noise. (Consider this to be similar to the "most widely held" consensus stock portfolio. Only in this case we’re trying to divine the "most widely held" very-smart money strategy. )
I’ve written two other recent commentaries which can be found here and here. Together, they represent a nice summary of current very-smart money opinion.
Well, the consensus seems to:
- Favor gold. We already knew that several prominent funds like Paulson Funds and Greenlight Capital have recently taken huge positions in gold.
- Bearish strategists still point to the suspect technical nature of this rally, and sound as adamant as ever. Probably a little too wedded to their ideas.
- A currency crisis with dollar devaluation looks imminent
- Even the bears think the highs in this rally may be ahead of us
- 930-950 on the S&P500 represents overhead resistance. If we clear it, this bull has a lot further to go. If we don’t, it’s a bear market rally.
- One common thread running through a few commentaries focuses on a three cycle picture: a correction in May, another big rally into June-July, and then another really deep correction, possibly taking us to new lows (depending on how bearish the strategist is).
- Some well respected economists have chimed in on how the current rally on green shoots euphoria sounds suspect.
So it definitely looks like the rally is long in the tooth. Let’s see what the very-smart money has to say:
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by phil - May 24th, 2009 7:46 am
Time to get a little more conservative…
In Part 1 of this post, we talked about the potential long-term value of taking a chance on companies that used to pay dividends but don’t at the moment. In addition to the 7 selections we had last Tuesday, I would urge members to keep on the lookout for additional prospects we can discuss as the long-term benefits of catching these stocks at the lows can be amazing! This was the same logic that led me to pound the table back in March on C, BAC, WFC, JPM and even the hated GS – stocks that have tripled or better in just 3 months.
We had a very easy time selecting those stocks as we were able to hedge our entries and our long-term logic was that, at those low prices, we could be fairly sure of producing a good option income even if they never restored the dividends but the kicker was the possiblility of owning, for example, C at $1.50 down the road when they go back to paying $1 per year dividends. Imagine having a year’s salary put away on stocks that pay you almost a year’s salary every year in dividends alone!
Don’t worry, you didn’t miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, we just have to work a little harder at the moment. As I noted with our LYG example, there are still beaten-down financials that are worth a look and today we’ll look at 2 more of our 21 Tuesday selections (one now, one later) and go over the trading plans for those positions. Note that the LYG trade ties up just $1,035 in cash to make (hopefully) $1,465 in year 1 with a commitment of $3,535 if you end up owning all 1,000 shares on Jan 15th.
By making sure you are on top of these figures, a person making $30,000 a year who has $5,000 in an investment account count take a modest 6-month gamble like this. If this trade pays off, $5,000 becomes $6,465 and 500 LYG shares are secure (about $2,500 worth) or, at worst, you have 22% more cash for the next trade. The next trade secures another potential dividend payer and if every 6 months you can secure just another $2,500 worth of dividend paying stocks for under $2,000 then in just 10 years, investing just 10% of a $30,000 annual salary, you could, very conservatively, have $50,000 worth of…
Tags: C, Dividends, Hedging, LYG, Options, TNK
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by ilene - May 24th, 2009 5:32 am
Click here to sign up for a free subscription to the PSW Report. It’s easy! – Ilene
Courtesy of Tyler at Zero Hedge
Fast forward to 13:34 minutes in the clip below, in which the president, interviewed by C-Span, has the mother of all Freudian slips and discloses just what the real state of the economy is.
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
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