Federally Frightened Friday
by Phil - February 19th, 2010 7:56 am
The Fed raised the discount rate - Big Deal!
As I said in my Weekly Wrap-Up, recessions are for wimps and kudos to the Fed for finally pulling out the stick after all the soft talking they’ve been doing. Meanwhile, I do not see what all the fuss is about - I did the math for Members last night and banks borrow about $89Bn at the discount window on a good day and 0.25% of $87Bn is a grand total of $22M - this is NOT going cause the fall of Western Civilization people! What it does do is stop making the Fed the lender of first resort, which was never supposed to be their function in the first place.
The MSM should be more concerned with the end of the TALF, which is where the Fed buys up toxic assets from the banks at face value (we’ll all be paying for that later) and they just announced that the Fed’s holding of Mortgage-Backed Securities went over the $1Tn mark yesterday, bringing the Fed’s Balance Sheet to $2.25Tn of very questionable assets that they’ve bought for us from the banksters.
Speaking of banksters - Kudos to Matt Taibbi for his excellent Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle. As I said to Members, if it wasn’t for Matt and Dylan Ratigan, I would have to be writing about this stuff instead of following the markets. Thank goodness there are a few top-notch people investigating this nonsense with the ability to communicate their findings in a way that makes it interesting:
The nation’s six largest banks — all committed to this balls-out, I drink your milkshake! strategy of flagrantly gorging themselves as America goes hungry — set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007.
The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits — Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation — is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street’s eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from bailout city to $13.4 billion in the black because, as Blankfein suggests,…
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Global Chart Reveiw Shows Key Inflection Point
by Phil - January 25th, 2010 3:00 am
Chart Review by Michael Clark
“By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”
– John Maynard Keynes
SO, IS THIS FINALLY THE ‘REAL’ CORRECTION?
What a week it was. The Bears gave the Bulls some payback. Obama got a wake-up call. And the banks got a well-deserved scare (and we hope they will get a well-deserved hair cut).
The markets reacted, as one might expect, with selling. Actually, the selling began before the Massachusetts election and before Obama sent a shot across the Goldman Sach’s bow. Last week Intel announced surprisingly strong earnings; and the stock started up and then sank. For the past half-year investor behavior had been the reverse: a buying spree for any stock that did not lose as much as it might have — beating ‘Street expectations’ that had been dumbed down over and over again during a quarter so that the company could report ’surprising’ strength. Suddenly, now, even good earnings are being greeted with selling. Then came Massachusetts — wasn’t that a Bee Gees’ song?
All the lights went out in Massachusetts
Anyway, readers want to know where the markets stand today, after the sell-off this week. My view of it — my ‘view’, not my gut-feeling — is that we are, so far, merely correcting from an over-extended rally. This rally has been bizarre, to say the least. This has been a ‘fear rally’ — usually the ‘fear’ side of the equation is when selling comes in, ‘greed’ driving the expansion. But fear of systemic failure has driven this rally; and Ben Bernannke has been the captain sailing the ‘Boat of Fear’, Ben’s logic — that more debt will solve the insolvency crisis — has a shadow side, the logic that a collapse in stock prices will result in systemic failure, international chaos, revolution, repression…made him believe that preservation of the status quo was requiired, at any price. A ‘make-believe’ recovery could be jump-started, perhaps, if the Fed could just stimulate (and simulate) another asset-bubble. After all - that is how his mentor and predecessor, Alan Greenspan, had become the darling of the coctail party crowd, leading member of Time Magazine’s ‘Committee to Save the World’; and that was how he, himself, had become Time’s ‘Peson of the Year’.
Logic was thrown out the window. Causality no longer mattered. More debt might cure the problem of too much debt? …
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Friday - Is the Dollar Going UUP?
by Phil - November 6th, 2009 8:12 am
Is it time to buy the buck?
As noted by Andrew Wilkinson on Wednesday, there was a huge volume surge in UUP call options, the ETF that tracks the US Dollars index value, ahead of the FOMC statement. 155,000 November call options were bought at the $23 strike level and another 155,000 were purchased at the December $23 strikes. The November calls came in at around .15 and are now .25 (up 66% in one day on UUP) and the December calls were executed around .25 and are now .40 (UUP up 60%) - this is not bad for a day’s work but was it just a day’s work or are we betting on a trend?
As you can see from David Fry’s chart, it’s not just the 300,000+ options (controlling 30M shares) that have been trading bullishly around the dollar - there has been a stunning surge of volume buying that has built up since mid-October as the dollar index skates along our own target low of 75.
So strong was the demand for shares of UUP that we noted in Member Chat that the PowerShares DB US Dollar Index Bullish Fund (UUP) was halted pending clearance of their request to register another 100M shares "in order to meet investment demand."
“There’s been a lot more interest in this ETF because investors are using it as a hedge on the dollar,” said David Stec, an ETF options trader at Group One Trading on the Chicago Board Options Exchange floor. “Yesterday, with the amount of options volume they saw, they probably have to add some shares. The ETF is based on the dollar versus a basket of currencies, so if there aren’t enough shares it might trade at a premium.”
The Dollar trading at a premium? Surely you can’t be serious! Well, I am serious and don’t call me Shirley… While this may be contrary to what you’ve been hearing in the MSM, where dollar bashing has become a popular blood sport, it’s the main reason we’ve been having trouble buying into this commodity-led rally, which has been primarily based on the 15% pounding the Dollar has taken since March. As I often point out to members, if you adjust the S&P to reflect a real currency, like the Euro or the Yen, then you’ll find that our "spectacular" 60% rally in the S&P since March is really just a 27% rally and looks like this to a foreign investor (S&P value converted…
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A Quick Look at the Weekly Commodity CRB
by Chart School - August 21st, 2009 7:30 pm
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A Quick Look at the Weekly Commodity CRB Aug 21
Courtesy of Corey at Afraid to Trade
With markets at potentially major turning points - one way or the other - let’s take a quick look at the CRB (Commodity) Index for a possible clue.
One almost has to look at the weekly chart to appreciate the price damage broad commodities took in 2008 - it was stellar.
Now, price is forming a counter-rally against last year’s plunge, but price has retraced upwards into a critical resistance area that needs to be addressed.
The $260/$270 Index area reflects the falling 50 week EMA along with the weekly upper Bollinger Band line - both of which are expected to hold as resisance (until breached convincingly).
If this week closes about the same index level as we’re seeing on this chart, then we’ll have formed a doji candle at this overhead potential resistance area, which furthers the odds that resistance will hold.
Then again, if this level is broken to the upside, we would have an “Open Air” scenario where all levels of ‘obvious’ weekly resistance would be broken which would likely result in a momentum move up to the $320 level.
As a note, key Fibonacci price levels to watch are as follows (not labeled):
38.2%: $305
50.0%: $335
Let’s see how buyers/sellers react at this technical (price) level for additional clues to what’s in store for the future.
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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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