Weekend Wrap-Up, Still Trying to Get Bullish
by Phil - March 14th, 2010 5:20 am
I’m having writer’s block this weekend.
Usually when I can’t think of what to write it helps me to go over our portfolios so I started this morning reviewing the Buy List but I didn’t get far because it was silly. Of 43 plays on the buy list, 39 are doing well - too well in fact to the point where it’s hard for me, in good conscience, not to say let’s kill the whole thing and get back to cash as we’re up about 20% in 2 months and that’s just ridiculous - most people would call that a good year and go on vacation.
The Buy List was 100% bullish and we did catch a good bottom on our early February entries. I was gung ho bullish then because I felt comfortable that the 10,000 line on the Dow would prevail and that we were good for a run back to the top (10,700), following, more or less, the pattern we had in 2004 (see original post for charts). Well that’s pretty much what’s happened since then but that’s not making me happy because I see no reason we won’t complete that pattern and begin falling off a cliff shortly.
As you all know, I’m not a big fan of TA, or patterns for that matter but the reason I started looking for patterns was to try to get a handle on how long market could really keep going up before falling victim to exhaustion. To me it seemed we weren’t at that point on Feb 6th but now that we’ve put in that big push back up - if we can’t punch up to new highs on all our indexes then I do think it’s time for the markets to take a break.
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Clearly I’ve been too bearish for the past couple of weeks and we are now 224 points over 10,400 on the Dow which is where I turned bearish as the January data made me lose faith in our ability to get back to 10,700. I should have stuck to the TA because we’re a lot closer to 10,700 than we are to 10,400. With the Russell and Nasdaq exploding to their own new highs. You can see though, from the above chart, why I do want to wait to see the NYSE, Dow and S&P confirm this move up - it’s not far now!
We’re finally getting the hang of the Wonderland Market though it’s actually quite simple…
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Friday Chart Toppers - Breaking Up Is Hard To Do!
by Phil - March 12th, 2010 8:01 am
They say that breaking up is hard to do.
Well, not for this market it seems as we make new highs on ever decreasing volumes. While I have been very skeptical of this rally, at some point you have to give in and go with the flow. As I said at the end of yesterday’s post, "We still have a bearish short-term stance but we will continue to watch our technicals and play the hand that’s dealt" and that’s what we did as our 9:42 Alert to members contained 2 bullish was to cover our short plays with the TNA Apr $52/53 bull call spread at .45, which finished the day at .60 (up 33%) and the DIA Apr $106 calls at $1.08, which finished the day at $1.40 (up 29%) so not bad for scrambling for covers!
That’s how we can hold our bearish positions as the tide moves against us. As our final upside resistance levels begin to break, it may be time to break up, and not just cover, our short positions. BUT, not until next week, when we’ll know, we’ll know that it’s true and not just some pumped up reaction to this week’s $150Bn Jobs Bill, which is really a $150Bn debt bill with 1/2 the money going to benefits extensions and $25Bn just to offset rising Medicaid costs that our states can no longer afford. That leaves $50Bn for actual jobs or enough to put 1M people back to work at $50,000 for one year if it is used with 100% efficiency.
We have 25M unemployed, discouraged and underemployed workers and that’s a lot bigger of a hole than a $150Bn band-aid is likely to fill. Still, we missed the last 250 points of the run-up and we’re committed to miss 50 more (10,700) but, come next week we’ll have to follow Mr. Cramer’s advice, as he said yesterday: "Don’t be so skeptical that you write off very big, very real trends,” Cramer said, “that I still think, even from these levels, could make you a lot of money." Let’s take a look at "these" levels then:
We’re still following the uptrending channel I drew on Tuesday’s S&P chart with the MACD line up 50% in 3 days of trading - a difficult trick to keep up. Aside from the Jobs Bill, we’re getting a nice boost this morning from a "leak" that the supremely doveish Janet Yellen will be Obama’s pick for Vice Chairman of the Fed so yay for the markets but boy are we loving…
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218 New Billionaires Averaged $500M in Gains Last Year - How Are You Doing?
by Phil - March 11th, 2010 8:08 am
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That’s right, the new Forbes list is out where we celebrate the top .000014%!
Thanks to an unprecedented concentration of wealth, the World’s supply of Billionaires jumped 27% in 2009 and the 1,011 people in the club accumulated an AVERAGE of $500M more Dollars EACH! Isn’t that great? That’s $505Bn or 65% of America’s TARP spending handed over to 1,011 people who are, according to Forbes (The Capitalist’s Tool), clearly better than us.
They sure are doing better than us as America’s 450 Billionaires added $225Bn to their bank accounts (and that’s AFTER taxes) and the saddest thing is that amount is INCLUDED in the $1.6Tn bounce of US Total Net Worth we had after losing 18% of it in 2008. A lot of positive economic statistics are skewed by our top 1% but even the top 1% is blown away by the top 450 (0.00014%) who are sitting on $3.6Tn of our nation’s total household wealth 8% or 27M times more than the average citizen. Wow, I guess they are better than you - better in fact than 26,999,999 of you!
As I mentioned in "The Dooh Nibor Economy (that’s "Robin Hood" backwards)," America has become a real wealth-building machine the funnels every last cent off the bottom of the pyramid and sends it straight to the top. Those of us standing near enough to the top (the top 10%) are lucky enough to pick up enough table scraps to make us 1,000 times better than you - our bottom 90% "friends" and that is just great for walking around town but you must pity us because even we are embarrased to show up in our shoddy Armani suits when we are invited to hob-nob with the top 1% in their custom-tailored suits who don’t look at lables but at the thread-count of your sleeve.
Even those "masters of our universe" cower in the presense of that top .00014%, who are, by definition, 26,999 times better than they are! So don’t go thinking the people in the top 10% have it so easy - we have a whole different set of problems to deal with. You only need to make $150,000 a year to join the top 10% club - we have to make over $2M to crack the top 1% and $2M doesn’t even pay 1/10th of the MONTHLY interest on the assets on our top 450.
So congratulations to the Forbes winners, especially from the 462,000 of us that…
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Which Way Wednesday - World of Worries Weighs on Wall Street
by Phil - March 10th, 2010 7:33 am
7 W’s in the title - that has to be some kind of alliterative record!
What could we possibly be worried about with the market making new highs? Well, I’m a little concerned that Shanghai housing prices fell 10% in a week. That’s the kind of behavior that may make you think they may have a bit of a bubble that’s popping. Of course they held up well compared to Shenzhen, where prices dropped 14% in the first week of March. That was matched by a 14% decline in iron ore shipments from Australia as China’s demand fell from 11M tons in January to 8.7M tons in February. So, if you were wondering how much China’s $600Bn stimulus spending was affecting their economy - 14% is the effect of them simply slowing it down a little.
Japanese Machinery Orders fell 3.7% in January and Producer Prices fell a deflationary 1.5% in the World’s second-largest economy (for now). “The gap between supply and demand in the domestic economy has yet to shrink,” said Morita at Barclays Capital. “It’ll be very difficult for companies to pass on those costs. That’s not good for their profits.” The Baltic Dry Index is topping out just over our 3,200 target, signaling a possible end to the great commodity run of 2010. Devan Kaloo, head of Aberdeen’s Global Emerging Markets is predicting that emerging markets (we are long EDZ, now $47) may fall as much as 15% this year. “The markets will see a correction this year,” Kaloo, whose Aberdeen Emerging Markets Institutional Fund has beaten 93 percent of competitors in 2010, said in an interview in New York. “People get over-optimistic and expect too much out of earnings and global growth.”
Sure, I know I’ve been saying this for a while but it sounds so much more official when a guy in charge of $22Bn says it! China’s 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus package, coupled with record bank lending in 2009, helped the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index rally 80 percent last year. The gauge has dropped 6.4 percent in 2010. “From a stock-picking perspective, we can find better opportunities” than China, Kaloo said. “The government pumped money into the financial system, but soon they’ll run out of money,” which will hurt the earnings of Chinese companies.
Amazingly, much of the tech growth we’re seeing in Asia is resulting from a mad rush to produce 3-D TVs in time for the holidays - something I believe may be one of the biggest marketing catastrophes of our time. At the moment,…
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Toppy Tuesday - Happy Anniversary Bull Market!
by Phil - March 9th, 2010 8:26 am
It’s hard to believe that just one year ago today investors thought the world was ending!
Well, not all investors - we were BUYBUYBUYing at the time, as I recapped back in September whan we did our "Market Crash - Year One Review." Click on Cramer’s picture for the Daily Show’s March 4th, 2009 review of the magical moments that led us down to the bottom and here’s another great video from the evening broadcast on March 9th and, of course, there is my own legendary appearance on LiveStock from March 6th, but that’s summarized in the crash link, so save yourself 3 hours, although the first 10 minutes are worth it for people who want to learn about our buy/write strategy as I explained the logic of it as I recommended FAS at $2.41 using those hedges.
And what a wild year it has been as we’ve made an epic recovery. The only question is - have we come too far too fast? Should we be up 75% from our March 9th lows? We are still down 25% from our highs but let’s keep in mind that we made those highs thinking AIG was MAKING money, that FNM and FRE were great stocks for your retirement portfolio, that Kirk Kirkorean was going to rescue GM, that BZH wasn’t some kind of scam, that BSC, LEH et al were "the smartest guys in the room." I urge you to click on Cramer and listen to the idiocy of the analysts who would tell you everything is all right even as it was all falling apart around them - why does everyone suddenly trust them again?
How could we not love this market? Markets do this sort of thing all the time don’t they? It’s all part of the "efficient pricing model" that always lets you know what a stock is truly worth like when GE was "worth" $30 in 2008 and "worth" $6 in 2009 and is now "worth" $16. This is not some biotech folks - this is GE, they’ve been around for 100 years and they have $170Bn in global sales. Did they really drop 80% in value in 2009? No. That’s why it was easy to pick a bottom - the valuations got ridiculous and, as fundamentalists, we siezed on the opportunity to BUYBUYBUY despite the negative sentiment.
Now, we are in a very different situation. Now we have the MSM telling us to BUYBUYBUY…
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Monday Market Movement
by Phil - March 8th, 2010 8:27 am
Asia exploded out of the gate today!
The Hang Seng is up 2% at 21,196, gaining 408 points on the day along with a 2% gain on the Nikkei (216 points), taking them over the 10,500 mark to 10,585 as they play catch-up to the Dow, which topped out at 10,566 last week. The BSE keeps going higher, adding 0.6% for the day, back over 17,000 at 17,108 and the Shanghia added 0.7%, finishing the day at 3,053.
The Hang Seng’s incredible morning gap up and 100-point follow-through, though impressive, is only a "good start" to getting that index back on the road to recovery as they had topped out at 23,000 in November and flirted with 22,500 in early January so we’ll need some sustained conviction before we get all bullish on China but, for today, we can just say "WOW" - it’s amazing how much a market can move when it’s closed!
![[iceland]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-HT711_icelan_F_20100306222632.jpg)
We’re closed as well but our pre-markets are looking strong although Europe is kind of flat-lining. They are all upset because the 300,000 people who live in Iceland took a vote and decided they didn’t have $5.3Bn to bail out failed Icebank, which kind of leaves the EU investors, who deposited money into an internet savings account that promised 8% returns, in a bit of a lurch becuase (surprisingly, I’m sure) it turns out the bank took a lot of risks to get those returns and (even more surprisingly) THEY BLEW IT! Even more surprisingly to European investors, 93% of the voters said: "No thank you, we will not agree to pay $17,666 per person (about $58,000 per family) to make foreign investors whole."
What I find most funny about this is that the UK and the Netherlands had the nerve to ask Icelanders to repay this money. $5.3Bn is 1/2 of Iceland’s GDP - that would be like countries who lost money in the Lehman collapse asking US taxpayers to kick in $6.5Tn to make them whole. What do you think our vote would be? Sure we are numb to our own debt level but are we that numb? Possibly so as we seem to be happily buying oil at $80 a barrel again - sending $321Bn American dollars out of the country in exchange for a product we burn up and need again the next day. I wrote about this disaster over the weekend so no need to re-hash it…
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Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 2010
by Phil - March 8th, 2010 7:54 am
I’m in a cynical mood this morning.
I just watched a presentation by Republican National Committee Finance Director, Rob Bickart, which includes the question for RNC fundraisers: "What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House or the Senate?" and the answer is "Save the country from trending toward Socialism." This is kind of like Pepsi launcing a new advertising campaign called "Coke is rat poison!" Is this really what our country has come to?
So happy Monday to you! I guess, on the whole, this is going to be good for the markets because the Republicans are on a roll and they are going to take back the Government and this brief experiment with Democracy will come to an end. Oh and by Democracy, I mean the Democrats being in charge - I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was saying the Republicans don’t believe in Democracy. Of course they do, it says right…
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Wrong Way Weekly Wrap-Up
by Phil - March 6th, 2010 8:34 am
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This whole week did not feel right to me.
We were too bearish as I had expected a bogus commodity rally in last weekend’s wrap-up but I didn’t expect it to persist for a week, even as the dollar held it’s ground above 80, a 10% pullback off the top, when oil was $40, copper was $1.50 and gold was $850. Now oil is $80 (up 100%), copper is $3.35 (up 123%) and gold is $1,135 (up 33%). Let’s say gold is a true indicator of dollar weakness - that means that only 33% of oil and copper’s move up can be attributed to the 10% drop in the dollar (not that even that makes sense but we’ll give it to them). Can the rest be attributed to demand?
Certainly not with copper. Global copper consumption was down 1.9% in 2009 and Q1 2010 is lower than any quarter since Q1 2009 and even Barclays’ very aggressive targets for China growth only bring global demand up 2.5% this year - whch would just about bring us back to 2007 levels of consumption. That, of course, also assumes a rebound in housing construction - something we are not seeing at the moment. Also, China spent $700Bn last year stimulating their economy and one of the ways they did this was to stockpile copper. As you can see from the chart - that too appears to be winding down and even Goldman Sachs has abandoned the bullish side of copper at this point.
Oil is just as silly. According to the EIA, global oil consumption is not expected to return to 2007 levels until late 2011 - and that is with some very rosey estimates of a global econonomic recovery - exactly the type of thing that can be derailed by high oil prices! Mighty China’s consumption is projected to go from 8.66Mbd this year to 9.13Mbd in 2011, a 500,000 barrel increase. Last week, the US had a build in inventories of 4Mb - we just send those over to China and everyone is happy! I’ve already had my say on oil demand this this weekend, so let’s just move on…
Let’s just say I’m a little skeptical about any market moves that are lead by commodity pushers at this very early stage in a recovery. Prices are not going up based on demand but on expectations of demand in the future and that’s a very dangerous game to play…
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America’s Commodity Crisis - 2010 Edition
by Phil - March 5th, 2010 7:07 pm
Ouch!
We did not expect to break higher this week. After a stellar week last week where we had 49 winners in 56 trades, I’m dreading this week’s review as I really feel like my picks were too bearish overall. Of course, the bulk of our trading is in bullish long-term positions that are doing very well but that doesn’t mean I don’t like to win the short game as well. As I said at the close of last week’s review: "I’ll be in a foul mood if we have a commodity rally that moves the Dow up on Monday but it will be my own fault - as I often say to members - CASH is so much more flexible!" And you know what - we did have a commodity rally and I AM in a foul mood!
Commodities are a TAX. They are the worst kind of tax because they flatly (not progressively) charge every man woman and child in this country more money for the same food, fuel, shelter and clothing that they had to have last week in order to live. It doesn’t matter if those people are trying to save or trying to tighten their belts or trying to get out of debt - high commodity prices are a shake-down that rips money out of the pockets of the middle class and funnels it to the very, very small class of commodity producers, commodity speculators and the people who finance them and collect the fees.
Over 99% of the people in this country do not own mines or oil wells (and I’m not counting small farmers because they are literally raped by speculators and bankers, often leaving them worse-off than the consumers) or huge plantations and they do not buy futures contracts on margin with cash they borrow at prime plus 0.5% nor do they own tankers filled with 2M barrels of crude that they arbitrage along the crack spread, looking for an opportune moment to deliver their goods (hopefully during a crisis) at a maximum profit.
So 99% of the people in this country don’t even own a commodity ETF - they have no way to profit from high commodity prices and they need to eat, and they need to buy clothing and have shelter and they need fuel to heat or cool their homes and go from place to place. There is a word for people like that, at…
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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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