THE THINKING TRADER
by ilene - December 18th, 2011 10:26 pm
Courtesy of David, The Crosshairs Trader
POGO STICK STOCK MARKET THINKING
“I’m sure I am forgetting a few other rules I like to trade by, but this is a good list for starters!” (@2stt2318)
“Michael Mauboussin, Chief Investment Strategist of Legg Mason Capital Management, explains why it is getting harder to beat the market and why doing less can actually make you more.” (MICHAEL MAUBOUSSIN via WEALTHTRACK)
“In practical terms, being a successful investor requires overcoming the instinctual urge to respond emotionally to financial events—the environment of the moment.” (GREGG S. FISHER via FORBES)
“To know what goes on in the mind of a rogue trader – and that of every reckless gambler – it helps to be a bird-watcher.” (JOHN GAPPER via FT MAGAZINE)
“Three destructive habits that will kill your trading day, week, month, or career.” (ELI RADKE via TRADER HABITS)
“Traders drawn to the allure of quick riches are virtually certain to ignore proven methods and risk parameters, destroying their accounts as a result. The only path to trading riches is via consistent profits over the long run.” (FRANK KOLLAR via MONEY SHOW)
“Players actually tend to shoot a lower percentage after makes than after misses.” (JOHN MATSON via SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN)
“Excitement is often a major driver of the actions of newer traders. They want the action and get frustrated when there’s nothing going on.” (JOHN FORMAN via THE ESSENTIALS OF TRADING)
“Skillful risk-taking, disciplined money management and the ability to correctly size-up a situation — these are the characteristics of great asset managers.” (JOHN NAVIN via FORBES)
“Here are some rules from one of the most famous trading letter writers in the world to consider adding to your own.” (STEPHEN BURNS via NEW TRADER U)
“It seems as though it should be so easy to know yourself, but it’s very, very challenging.” (GRETCHEN RUBIN via PSYCHOLOGY TODAY)
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North Korean Leader Kim Jong Il Has Died
by ilene - December 18th, 2011 10:04 pm
Courtesy of ZeroHedge. View original post here.
Submitted by Tyler Durden.
Just out on Yonhap:
- North Korea says its leader Kim Jong-il has died.
- N. Korean leader died of fatigue at 8:30 a.m. Dec. 17 during train ride: KCNA
From Daily Yomiuri:
- Cause of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s death is said to be a stroke.
And Reuters confirms:
- NORTH KOREA STATE TELEVISION SAYS KIM JONG IL HAS DIED
Great. More geopolitical uncertainty. Because as the Arab Spring has shown us there is nothing quite as stable as a transitory military government to fill a power vacuum (also see Thermidorian reaction during the French Revolution).
As expected the South Korean response is immediate.
- S. Korean gov’t shifts to emergency footing on news of N.K. leader’s death
Some more from Reuters:
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died on Saturday on a train trip, a tearful state television announcer, dressed in black, reported on Monday.
The announcer said that the 69-year old had died of physical and mental over-work on his way to give "field guidance".
He had suffered a stroke in 2008, but appeared to have recovered.
The reclusive state had begun the process of transferring power to his son Kim Jong-un, believed to be in his late 20s.
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North Korean Leader Kim Jong Il Has Died Aged 70, South Korea On Emergency Footing
by Zero Hedge - December 18th, 2011 10:04 pm
Courtesy of ZeroHedge. View original post here.
Submitted by Tyler Durden.
Just out on Yonhap:
- North Korea says its leader Kim Jong-il has died.
- N. Korean leader died of fatigue at 8:30 a.m. Dec. 17 during train ride: KCNA
From Daily Yomiuri:
- Cause of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s death is said to be a stroke.
And Reuters confirms:
- NORTH KOREA STATE TELEVISION SAYS KIM JONG IL HAS DIED
Great. More geopolitical uncertainty. Because as the Arab Spring has shown us there is nothing quite as stable as a transitory military government to fill a power vacuum (also see Thermidorian reaction during the French Revolution).
As expected the South Korean response is immediate.
- S. Korean gov’t shifts to emergency footing on news of N.K. leader’s death
South Korean on emergency alert following the news:
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) on Monday placed all military
units on emergency alert following the news of North Korean leader Kim
Jong-il’s death.
The JCS said it called an emergency meeting
of officials handling crisis management and operations just after noon
Monday, after the North Korean media reported Kim’s death.
Some more from Reuters:
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died on Saturday on a train trip, a tearful state television announcer, dressed in black, reported on Monday.
The announcer said that the 69-year old had died of physical and mental over-work on his way to give “field guidance”.
He had suffered a stroke in 2008, but appeared to have recovered.
The reclusive state had begun the process of transferring power to his son Kim Jong-un, believed to be in his late 20s.
And Yonhap:
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who ruled the communist nation with an iron fist while pursuing nuclear weapons programs, has died, state media said Monday. He was 69.
Kim, who took over North Korea after his father and national founder Kim Il-sung died in 1994, “passed away from a great mental and physical strain” during a train ride at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, the Korean Central News Agency said in an urgent dispatch.
Bloomberg chimes…
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EVIL TROLL: NEWT GINGRICH WANTS TO SPEED UP AMERICA’S RACE TO THE BOTTOM
by ilene - December 18th, 2011 10:01 pm
Courtesy of Richard Metzger of Dangerous Minds
Taking current GOP front-runner, Newt Gingrich—and his plan to put inner city children to work as janitors—to task, Crooks and Liars managing editor Tina Dupuy writes of her own experiences working as a child janitor for the princely wage of $4.25 an hour (she made $75 a week before tax!). As Dupuy writes, it’s not that America’s poor children need jobs to discipline them and to make them better workers, it’s that the jobs need to be better for America’s adults!
Full disclosure: I, too, worked as a janitor at a municipal park in West Virginia at the age of 14 and made this exact same wage. I don’t really think it harmed me in any way. In fact, I wanted to do it so I was able to buy punk rock records, marijuana and LSD, but that’s not the point here: It’s that apparently Newt Gingrich thinks that America’s adult workforce should be competing with their own children for jobs that pay a third world wage.
Why isn’t it being framed like that in the media? It seems so obvious, doesn’t it?
You’d have to be a fucking Republican to believe such nonsense…
Now 49 million Americans live in poverty – with 2.6 million falling into the category last year. That’s 16 percent of Americans. There are more Americans living in poverty than there are Canadians on the planet.
Gingrich is trying to equate poverty with a moral shortcoming. It’s a warped offshoot of the prosperity gospel – riches are a sign of god’s love – poverty is a sign of his indifference.
But also in this richer-and-therefore-holier-than-thou diatribe of Gingrich’s is an attempt to bust unions. He suggested firing union janitors to hire children to clean their own schools. Yes, a janitor with a job that pays him enough to live on is, in Gingrich’s eyes, a problem. In the call for hiring children and ending child labor laws is the call to end working for a living.
All the anchors of a middle-class living (pensions, benefits, decent salaries) are being dubbed “luxuries” by Republicans, to be sacrificed so magical “job creators” can be cajoled into saving us all.
Because, really, the greatest threat to America is that janitors are paid too much. Please. Wealthy janitors are, to borrow Gingrich’s phrase,
…
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Psssst France: Here Is Why You May Want To Cool It With The Britain Bashing – The UK’s 950% Debt To GDP
by Zero Hedge - December 18th, 2011 9:43 pm
Courtesy of ZeroHedge. View original post here.
Submitted by Tyler Durden.
While certainly humorous, entertaining and very, very childish, the recent war of words between France and Britain has the potential to become the worst thing to ever happen to Europe. Actually, make that the world and modern civilization. Why? Because while we sympathize with England, and are stunned by the immature petulant response from France and its head banker Christian Noyer to the threat of an imminent S&P downgrade of its overblown AAA rating, the truth is that France is actually 100% correct in telling the world to shift its attention from France and to Britain. So why is this bad. Because as the chart below shows, if there is anything the global financial system needs, is for the rating agencies, bond vigilantes, and lastly, general public itself, to realize that the UK’s consolidated debt (non-financial, financial, government and household) to GDP is… just under 1000%. That’s right: the UK debt, when one adds to its more tenable sovereign debt tranche all the other debt carried on UK books (and thus making the transfer of private debt to the public balance sheet impossible), is nearly ten times greater than the country’s GDP. To call that “game over” is an insult to game overs everywhere. So here’s the bottom line: France should quietly and happily accept a downgrade, because the worst that could happen would be a few big French banks collapsing, and that’s it. If, on the other hand, the UK becomes the center of attention (recall this is the same UK that allows unlimited rehypothecation of worthless assets, and the same UK that unleashed the juggernaut known as AIG-FP’s Joe Cassano – after all there is a reason why the UK has 600% its GDP in financial liabilities – financial innovation always goes there where it is least regulated), then this island, which far more so than the US is the true center of the global banking ponzi scheme, will suddenly find itself at the mercy of the market. At that point the only question is whether the vigilantes will dare to take down the UK, as said take down will result in an implosion in the very fabric of modern finance, much more so than what even a full collapse of France could ever achieve, or if due to the certain…
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Fed May Inject Over $1 Trillion To Bail Out Europe
by Zero Hedge - December 18th, 2011 9:21 pm
Courtesy of ZeroHedge. View original post here.
Submitted by Tyler Durden.
As first reported here, two weeks ago European banks saw the amount of USD-loans from the Fed, via the ECB’s revised swap line, surge to over $50 billion – a total first hit in the aftermath of the Bear Stearns failure prompting us to ask “When is Lehman coming?” However, according to little noted prepared remarks by Anthony Sanders in his Friday testimony to the Congress Oversight Committee, “What the Euro Crisis Means for Taxpayers and the U.S. Economy, Pt. 1″, we may have been optimistic, because the end result will be not when is Lehman coming, but when are the next two Lehmans coming, as according to Sanders, the relaunch of the Fed’s swaps program may “get to the $1 trillion level, or perhaps even higher.” As a reference, FX swap line usage peaked at $583 billion in the Lehman aftermath (see chart). Needless to say, this estimate is rather ironic because as Bloomberg’s Bradely Keoun reports, “Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke yesterday told a closed-door gathering of Republican senators that the Fed won’t provide more aid to European banks beyond the swap lines and the discount window -- another Fed program that provides emergency funds to U.S. banks, including U.S. branches of foreign banks.” Well, between a trillion plus in FX swap lines, and a surge in discount window usage which only Zero Hedge has noted so far, there really is nothing else that the Fed can possibly do, as these actions along amount to a QE equivalent liquidity injection, only denominated in US Dollars. Aside of course to shower Europe with dollars from the ChairsatanCopter. Then again, before this is all over, we are certain that paradollardop will be part of the vernacular.
Historical ECB swap line usage with the Fed, and projected assuming $1+ trillion in use. Just to put it all into perspective.
For all those lamenting the ECB’s lack of willingness to print, fear not: the almighty Chairsatan has vowed to valiantly take his place when needed. As in 2 weeks ago. From Bloomberg:
European financial companies led by Royal Bank of Scotland Plc were borrowing about $538 billion directly from the Fed when the central bank’s emergency loans to all banks peaked
…
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Buyer’s Remorse; Record Volume of Returns Before Christmas; $217 Billion Returns Expected, Up 14%
by ilene - December 18th, 2011 9:06 pm
Courtesy of Mish
Christmas shopping is up, but so are returns, before Santa even delivers them. This is not a case of wrong size or bad color, but rather "I found a better deal or I spent too much".
MSN Money says Take that back! Returns are big for the holidays
People who rushed to snag discounts on TVs, toys and other gifts are quickly returning them for much-needed cash. The shopping season started out strong for stores, but it looks like the spending binge has given way to a holiday hangover.
Return rates spiked when the Great Recession struck and have stayed high. For every dollar stores take in this holiday season, they’ll have to give back 9.9 cents in returns, up from 9.8 last year. In better economic times, it’s about 7 cents.
Returns are typically more associated with January than December. After all, that hot pink sweater with yellow stars on the sleeves may not be exactly what your sister had in mind. But these days, more is going back before it ever gets to Santa’s sack.
"When the bills come in and the money isn’t there, you have to return," says Jennifer Kersten, 33, of Miami. She spent $300 the day after Thanksgiving on books, movies and clothes for her nephews. Last week she returned half of it.
Some reasons for the many unhappy returns:
Shoppers are binging on big discounts. Stores are desperate to get people in the door. But the same shoppers who find a "60 percent off" tag too good to resist may realize at home that they busted the budget.
Stores have made it easier to take things back. Nordstrom is letting online shoppers return items at no extra charge this year. It used to charge $6. Other stores are offering more time to return or rolling out "no questions asked" policies — no tag or receipt required. But that can backfire.
"Spurring more returns wasn’t part of the plan," says Al Sambar, a retail strategist for consulting firm Kurt Salmon.
Stores are undercutting each other in a tough economy. Wanda Vazquez spent $39.99 at a New York Target on iPad speakers for her 12-year-old daughter, then returned them when she found something similar for $16.99 at Marshalls.
Consumer electronics in particular are being returned at a rapid clip. Stores and manufacturers are expected to spend $17 billion reboxing, repairing,
…
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9 Things to Say Goodbye To, Including Privacy and Free Speech
by ilene - December 18th, 2011 7:49 pm
Ch-ch-ch-changes… Watch out, privacy is already gone; next up, freedom of speech via the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). ~ Ilene
Courtesy of Mish
Changes are coming. Many things we know and love will soon be gone, just as happened to the 8-track player, the buggy whip, and MS DOS. Unfortunately, we are also losing some things we cannot afford to.
In an article written about a year ago, Rense says Changes Are Coming – Things We’ll Be Saying Goodbye To. I added one key item to the list.
Things We’ll Be Saying Goodbye To
1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.
2. The Check. Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with checks by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the check. This plays right into the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely go out of business.
3. The Newspaper. The younger generation simply doesn’t read the newspaper. They certainly don’t subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.
4. The Book. You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered that I could get albums for half the price without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with books. You can
…
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Goldman’s Take On TARGET2 And How The Bundesbank Will Suffer Massive Losses If The Eurozone Fails
by Zero Hedge - December 18th, 2011 7:22 pm
Courtesy of ZeroHedge. View original post here.
Submitted by Tyler Durden.
Two weeks ago in “Has The Imploding European Shadow Banking System Forced The Bundesbank To Prepare For Plan B?” we suggested that according to recent fund flow data, “the Bundesbank wants slowly and quietly out.” Out of what? Why the European intertwined monetary mechanism of course, where surplus nations’ central bank continue to fund deficit countries’ accounts via an ECB intermediary. We speculated that according to the recent ECB proposal, the primary beneficiary of direct ECB intermediation in fund flows, as Draghi has been pushing for past month, would be to disentangle solvent entities like the Bundesbank, allowing it to prepare for D-Day without the shackles of trillions of Euros in deficit capital by virtually all of its counterparties. Today it is the turn of Goldman’s Dirk Schumacher to pick up where our argument left off, and to suggest that it is indeed a possibility that the Buba would suffer irreparable consequences as a result of Eurozone implosion, and thus, implicitly, it is Jens Wiedmann’s role to accelerate the plan of extracting the Buba from the continent’s rapidly unwinding monetary (and fiscal) system.
From Goldman:
“central banks in the core countries face one specific risk that can be traced back to the TARGET2 imbalances, and this refers to the possibility that a country might decide to leave the Euro area. In such a scenario, the net claims the remaining central banks have acquired vis-à-vis that country reflect a genuine risk that would not exist without these imbalances. This could in the extreme case of a total break-up of the Euro area, and assuming that the peripheral central banks could not repay their liabilities, mean that the losses would materialise on the Bundesbank’s balance sheet.“
Adn the conclusion:
It is only if one or several countries were to decide to leave the Euro area that the imbalances would lead to potentially significant losses beyond the risk already reflected in the current generous liquidity provision through the ECB.
Needless to say, the possibility that a European country can leave at will, as the European Nash Equilibrium finally fails, is something the Bundesbank not only knows all too well, but is actively preparing for: here is what we said on December 6: “we may be experiencing the attempt by the last safe European central bank…
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Even The Ancient Roman Empire Wasn’t As Unequal As America Today
by ilene - December 18th, 2011 7:22 pm
Courtesy of Gus Lubin of Business Insider
Some 1,500 years after the fall of the Roman Empire, the supposedly advanced and progressive United States of America is plagued by even worse income inequality.
Tim De Chant at Per Square Mile reached this conclusion based on a study by historians Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen.
Rome’s top 1% controlled 16 percent of the wealth, compared to modern America where the top 1% controls 40 percent of the wealth.
Looking at the Gini coefficient, where 0 means perfect equality and 1 means perfect inequality, Rome measured between 0.42 and 0.44. Modern America scores worse at 0.45, and some areas are much worse like Fairfield County, Conn. with an alarming 0.54.
De Chant comments on a telling line from the essay by Shiedel and Friesen:
[A]t the end, they make a point that’s difficult to parse, yet provocative. They point out that the majority of extant Roman ruins resulted from the economic activities of the top 10 percent. “Yet the disproportionate visibility of this ‘fortunate decile’ must not let us forget the vast but—to us—inconspicuous majority that failed even to begin to share in the moderate amount of economic growth associated with large-scale formation in the ancient Mediterranean and its hinterlands.”
In other words, what we see as the glory of Rome is really just the rubble of the rich, built on the backs of poor farmers and laborers, traces of whom have all but vanished. It’s as though Rome’s 99 percent never existed. Which makes me wonder, what will future civilizations think of us?
Read more on the study at Per Square Mile.
Don’t miss: 23 mindblowing facts about inequality in America >
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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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