Swing trading virtual portfolio – week of February 8th, 2010
by Optrader - February 7th, 2010 11:43 pm
This post is for live trades and daily comments.
To learn more about the swing trading virtual portfolio (strategy, membership etc.), please click here
- Optrader
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The Meaning of “Monty Python and the Meaning of Life”
by ilene - February 7th, 2010 11:37 pm
Amusing analogy, and while the finer details may be hard to appreciate, like the difference between dying from contaminated salmon mousse and an e-coli-laced burger, I believe Robert Waldmann’s argument is correct — food poisoning kills. And slicing, dicing and spreading contaminated beef through the hamburger supply, kills most efficiently. What we have here is not one bad can of salmon. - Ilene
The Meaning of "Monty Python and the Meaning of Life"
Courtesy of Robert Waldmann at Angry Bear
Barry Ritholtz argues that the problem with mortgages was underwriting standards and not securitization. He appeals to the very great authority of Monty Python. Click the link.
Ritholtz seems not to be familiar with this new idea in economic theory called "Nash equilibrium". Over -rated yes. Totally irrelevant not so much. One can not assume that underwriting standards are exogenous. If there had been no MBS, no firm would have underwritten those mortgages. It was exactly because it was possible to blend them, and then sell them to people who didn’t spin the mortgage tapes before buying, that the mortgages existed in the first place.
Let me work with his analogy. First, while I have great respect for the Monty Python team, few people have been killed by canned Salmon. Even blended into mousse, it kills fairly quickly and can be tracked back to the canner. The way bacteria work is that if you mix some contaminated stuff with other stuff you have trouble for sure. It doesn’t work that things seem fine until people notice.
At a way lower cultural level than Ritholtz I appeal to road runner cartoons. Wile E. Coyote runs along in mid air until he notices. Then he falls. As noted by everyone, this is the way financial markets really work. The non Monty Python quality humor is based on the fact that gravity doesn’t really work that way. Neither do bacteria. Analogies between rotten mortgages and rotten Salmon fail for this reason.
Notably, the ingredients in the Salmon mousse are few enough that the dead diners immediately know what went wrong when death points at the mousse. That’s not the way MBS work let alone CDOs of MBSs or CDOS of tranches of CDOS.
A better analogy would be making hamburger. Bits from hundreds of steers end up in the…
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Bottled Water Syndrome
by ilene - February 7th, 2010 11:30 pm
The Drinking Water Profiteers
Bottled Water Syndrome
Courtesy of JOSEPH NEVINS writing at CounterPunch
In mid-January, I received a mass email asking me to donate $10 for bottled water and other supplies for participants in an important immigrant rights march in Phoenix. Given the ever-repressive and cruel political climate in Arizona for immigrants (especially unauthorized ones), I was unequivocally in support of the mobilization. Nonetheless I was taken aback by a request to contribute even nominally to an effort to buy bottles of water for what turned out to be, according to some estimates, more than 20,000 people.
Certainly there are other ways—ecologically sustainable and less expensive ones—to provide water for such a multitude. How, why, and to what effects bottled water became the preferred way to do so for myriad people and places far beyond a single event in Phoenix is the focus of Elizabeth Royte’s powerful and compelling book, Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs and the Battle Over America’s Drinking Water.
I’ve never been a fan of bottled water, considering it ecologically damaging—in the United States alone 30-40 million single-serve bottles per day end up as litter or in landfills—and economically foolhardy, another capitalistic trick to con us into purchasing something from profiteers that we don’t shouldn’t have to. But as Royte powerfully illustrates, the increasing commodification of drinking water is far more complex, and dangerous, than at least I appreciated.
Until recently, the sale of single-serve bottles of water was rare. While the United States had regional bottled water companies as early as the nineteenth century, such entities mainly supplied homes and offices with large containers of the life-sustaining liquid (for water coolers, for instance). This situation began to change in the 1980s with the entry of Perrier into the U.S. market and its successful television advertising which stressed that a little luxury—a bottle of the French water—was available to everyone.
Other companies, like Evian and Vittel, followed, employing the likes of Madonna and fashion models, to help equate bottled water with personal health, fitness, and glamour. That, combined with the invention of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic—which made water easily portable—helped the U.S. bottled-water industry boom: between 1990 and 1997 its annual sales increased from $115 million to $4 billion. (By 2006, the figure was $10.8 billion; globally bottled water’s income was $60 billion.)
This…
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SEC Is Probing Goldman's Excess Variation Margin Demands On AIG
by Zero Hedge - February 7th, 2010 10:41 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Sooner or later it was bound to happen: the SEC is now looking into whether Goldman’s over the top variation margin demands on AIG caused an “improper distress” in the mortgage insurance market (not to mention a couple of competitors’ bankruptcies here and there). Not that much will come out of it, you see, since the SEC is woefully underfunded to purchase even one copy of any Janet Tavakoli book… Although the fact that they are finally investigating it should be indicative that if you raise enough stink, even the brain dead Wall Street sycophants at the Syndicate Encouraging Corruption will stop watching pornography for a living and for a few short minutes pretend to push a few papers here and there and actually do their pathetic, anaerobic jobs (and bill taxpayers more than appropriately).
From Reuters:
On a conference call between Goldman and AIG executives early that year, the Wall Street bank wanted the insurer to pay more than the $2 billion it already paid to cover losses Goldman said it might suffer on complex securities, the paper said, citing AIG documents and an audio recording of the call.
AIG executives wanted some of the $2 billion back, saying Goldman had inflated the potential losses, the paper said, adding the call ended with nothing settled.
Then the world’s biggest insurer, AIG insured Goldman’s securities. It was bailed out with a $182.3 billion government aid package when the mortgage market-inspired financial crisis struck later in 2008.
Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission is examining whether the demands by banks were improper, the paper reported, citing people briefed on the matter.
“This is the New York Times’ third attempt to develop a conspiracy theory about Goldman Sachs and AIG,” Goldman spokesman Lucas van Praag said in an email. “The theories are disgracefully contradictory and the ‘facts’ don’t stand up to serious scrutiny.”
Way to go Mary. Oh and by the way, did you pay Sergey Aleynikov a few million to shut up yet? Inquiring minds want to know if stealing “market manipulative” secrets from Goldman Sachs is now considered an act of breavery and courage.
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SEC Is Probing Goldman’s Excess Variation Margin Demands On AIG
by Zero Hedge - February 7th, 2010 10:41 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Sooner or later it was bound to happen: the SEC is now looking into whether Goldman’s over the top variation margin demands on AIG caused an “improper distress” in the mortgage insurance market (not to mention a couple of competitors’ bankruptcies here and there). Not that much will come out of it, you see, since the SEC is woefully underfunded to purchase even one copy of any Janet Tavakoli book… Although the fact that they are finally investigating it should be indicative that if you raise enough stink, even the brain dead Wall Street sycophants at the Syndicate Encouraging Corruption will stop watching pornography for a living and for a few short minutes pretend to push a few papers here and there and actually do their pathetic, anaerobic jobs (and bill taxpayers more than appropriately).
From Reuters:
On a conference call between Goldman and AIG executives early that year, the Wall Street bank wanted the insurer to pay more than the $2 billion it already paid to cover losses Goldman said it might suffer on complex securities, the paper said, citing AIG documents and an audio recording of the call.
AIG executives wanted some of the $2 billion back, saying Goldman had inflated the potential losses, the paper said, adding the call ended with nothing settled.
Then the world’s biggest insurer, AIG insured Goldman’s securities. It was bailed out with a $182.3 billion government aid package when the mortgage market-inspired financial crisis struck later in 2008.
Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission is examining whether the demands by banks were improper, the paper reported, citing people briefed on the matter.
“This is the New York Times’ third attempt to develop a conspiracy theory about Goldman Sachs and AIG,” Goldman spokesman Lucas van Praag said in an email. “The theories are disgracefully contradictory and the ‘facts’ don’t stand up to serious scrutiny.”
Way to go Mary. Oh and by the way, did you pay Sergey Aleynikov a few million to shut up yet? Inquiring minds want to know if stealing “market manipulative” secrets from Goldman Sachs is now considered an act of breavery and courage.
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AIG-GATE: THE WORLD’S GREATEST INSURANCE HEIST
by ilene - February 7th, 2010 10:27 pm
"If the money used to bail out AIG and the banks had been used to bail out the states instead, the states would not be facing insolvency today."
AIG-GATE: THE WORLD’S GREATEST INSURANCE HEIST
Courtesy of Ellen Brown at Web of Debt
Rumor has it that Timothy Geithner is on his way out as Treasury Secretary, due to his involvement in the AIG scandal that is now unraveling in hearings before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Bob Chapman writes in The International Forecaster:
Each day brings more revelations of efforts of the NY Fed and Goldman Sachs to hide the details of the criminal conspiracy of the AIG bailout. . . . This is a real crisis on the scale of Watergate. Corruption at its finest.
But unlike the perpetrators of the Watergate scandal, who wound up looking at jail time, Geithner evidently has a golden parachute waiting at Goldman Sachs, not coincidentally the largest recipient of the AIG bailout. At least that is the rumor sparked by an article by Caroline Baum on Bloomberg News, titled “Goldman Parachute Awaits Geithner to Ease Fall.” Hank Paulson, Geithner’s predecessor, was CEO of Goldman Sachs before coming to the Treasury. Geithner, who has come up through the ranks of government, could be walking through the revolving door in the other direction.
Geithner has been under the House microscope for the decision of the New York Fed, made while he headed it, to buy out about $30 billion in credit default swaps (over-the-counter derivative insurance contracts) that AIG sold on toxic debt securities. The chief recipients of this payout were Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank. Goldman got $13 billion, roughly equivalent to its bonus pool for the first 9 months of 2009. Critics are calling the New York Fed’s decision a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been put through bankruptcy proceedings in the ordinary way. In a Bloomberg article provocatively titled “Secret Banking Cabal Emerges from AIG Shadows,” David Reilly writes:
[T]he New York Fed is a quasi-governmental institution that isn’t subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom
…
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China Inflation Scramble Is Now Official As World's Second Largest Economy Prepares For Cold War With U.S.
by Zero Hedge - February 7th, 2010 10:10 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Here comes the China liquidity post-sugar high crash. In comments published tomorrow (no, not an Art Cashin brain teaser), a senior government economist said that surging money supply is leading to inflation. Yet, since in China apparently you can be half pregnant (preferably with one and a half boys), the recommendation from the government is to increase reserve requirements instead of interest rates. The implication is that it is only a matter of time before both end up getting hiked.
Market News reports that National Bureau of [True and Unmanipulated] Statistics chief economist Yao Jingyuan said “Money supply is too big and that’s leading to excess liquidity.” Yet Yao Jing said he would “prefer reserve hikes to rate hikes because rate hikes could cause hot money to flow back.”
Consumer price inflation ticked up to 1.9% y/y in December, only the second month since the outbreak of the financial crisis that consumer prices have been in positive territory.
The People’s Bank of China raised the reserve requirement on January 18, the first time since June 2008 that it has done so, in response to the massive volume of credit extended by banks in the opening weeks of the year.
Another reserve hike is certainly imminent, very likely soon to be followed by an interest rate increase as well. Yet look for the dollar peg to continue until the bitter end: ironically, the Yuan lost value on Monday, as China set the parity from 6.8272 to 6.8273.
And as if this was not disturbing enough, in other news, the TimesOnline reports that “more than half of Chinese people questioned in a poll believe China and America are heading for a new “cold war.”
The finding came after battles over Taiwan, Tibet, trade, climate change, internet freedom and human rights which have poisoned relations in the three months since President Barack Obama made a fruitless visit to Beijing. According to diplomatic sources, a rancorous postmortem examination is under way inside the US government, led by officials who think the president was badly advised and was made to appear weak. In China’s eyes, the American response — which includes a pledge by Obama to get tougher on trade — is a reaction against its rising power.
…
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China Inflation Scramble Is Now Official As World’s Second Largest Economy Prepares For Cold War With U.S.
by Zero Hedge - February 7th, 2010 10:10 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Here comes the China liquidity post-sugar high crash. In comments published tomorrow (no, not an Art Cashin brain teaser), a senior government economist said that surging money supply is leading to inflation. Yet, since in China apparently you can be half pregnant (preferably with one and a half boys), the recommendation from the government is to increase reserve requirements instead of interest rates. The implication is that it is only a matter of time before both end up getting hiked.
Market News reports that National Bureau of [True and Unmanipulated] Statistics chief economist Yao Jingyuan said “Money supply is too big and that’s leading to excess liquidity.” Yet Yao Jing said he would “prefer reserve hikes to rate hikes because rate hikes could cause hot money to flow back.”
Consumer price inflation ticked up to 1.9% y/y in December, only the second month since the outbreak of the financial crisis that consumer prices have been in positive territory.
The People’s Bank of China raised the reserve requirement on January 18, the first time since June 2008 that it has done so, in response to the massive volume of credit extended by banks in the opening weeks of the year.
Another reserve hike is certainly imminent, very likely soon to be followed by an interest rate increase as well. Yet look for the dollar peg to continue until the bitter end: ironically, the Yuan lost value on Monday, as China set the parity from 6.8272 to 6.8273.
And as if this was not disturbing enough, in other news, the TimesOnline reports that “more than half of Chinese people questioned in a poll believe China and America are heading for a new “cold war.”
The finding came after battles over Taiwan, Tibet, trade, climate change, internet freedom and human rights which have poisoned relations in the three months since President Barack Obama made a fruitless visit to Beijing. According to diplomatic sources, a rancorous postmortem examination is under way inside the US government, led by officials who think the president was badly advised and was made to appear weak. In China’s eyes, the American response — which includes a pledge by Obama to get tougher on trade — is a reaction against its rising power.
…
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Why Amedisys (AMED) will hit $85
by ilene - February 7th, 2010 10:03 pm
Here’s PSW member Tuscadog’s detailed analysis of the company Amedisys (AMED). Tuscadog feels this is one of the few solid opportunities in the stock market, and he suggests a massive short squeeze may be coming due to AMED’s 53% short interest. – Ilene
Amedisys, Inc. provides home health and hospice services to the chronic, co-morbid, and aging American population. Its home health services include skilled nursing and home health aide services; physical, occupational, and speech therapy; and medically oriented social work to eligible individuals who require ongoing care. The company also offers clinically focused programs for chronic conditions and various diseases,… (Yahoo financial, more here.>>)
Why Amedisys (AMED) will hit $85
Courtesy of Tuscadog, member at PSW
Feb 23rd may be ‘Judgment Day’ for the AMED short interest.
This is a long posting based on a lot of research and high level interviews I’ve conducted. I’m a private (long term) investor in Amed and I don’t appreciate the way Amed has been ‘jerked around’ by the hedge funds with false rumors and shorting, hence my willingness to share my analysis with small investors. These are my opinions based on my own extensive research, so invest at your own risk. For background on Amed pay particular attention to the 7 articles by Daryl Davis in the ‘Financial Blogs’ section of the Yahoo Finance page for Amed.
UPDATED GUIDANCE WILL BE A NIGHTMARE FOR SHORTS:
Amed will likely release 2009 EPS on Feb 23rd of around $4.90 to $5 and, more importantly, it will give guidance for 2010 based on the status quo on Medicare billing rates for 2010 (i.e. as already issued for 2010 by The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, CMS). Based on the company’s growth rates and CMS’s announced approved rate increase for 2010 (which translates into a 1.8% net increase for 2010 after two flat pricing years) Amed will likely provide 2010 guidance in the $5.60 to $5.70 range. I believe actual results outcome will likely be higher, in the $5.70 to $5.90 range.
The 15 analysts who cover AMED are likely waiting for Amed’s guidance update and to see if there are any Health-Bill developments. The Suntrust upgrade Monday to a $70 target is using a pessimistic assumption of a revision to a retroactive 2.5% Medicare billing rate reduction for 2010. Currently, analysts eps forecasts for 2010 include varying degrees of…
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Match Made In Incompetence Heaven: John Thain Is CIT's New CEO And Chairman
by Zero Hedge - February 7th, 2010 9:19 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
CIT’s gorgeous, bouncer-worthy, and recently bankrupt, 5th Avenue lobby is about to receive some golden commodes and even more taxpayer reverse golden showers if and when the government is forced to bail out John Thain for the nth time. In the meantime Thain will receive $500k and 5.5 million shares in stock (something close to $170 million – how many tungsten-plated outhouses will it buy to transfer all commercial lending assets to Goldman Sachs for -15 cents on the dollar?) as he prepares to destroy yet another recently bankrupt company. Read all about the latest massacre of change you can drown your sorrows in from Bloomberg. We refuse to touch this filth.
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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...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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