The latest data from Robert Shiller’s 10 year PE ratio shows the market currently at a 20.64 multiple. In his morning note, David Rosenberg noted that this is 26% higher than the long-run average:
“If there was an impediment, in addition to a murky economic outlook, it is valuation. There were revisions to the Shiller valuation data and the latest reading on the normalized real P/E multiple is at 20.64x, up from the 20.0x in February and 20.5x in January. The long-run trend is at 16.36x, suggesting that the S&P is currently overvalued by 26%.”
This chart provides little of utility in and of itself, but combined with a longer-term look at stock prices it raises some interesting thoughts. As a student of and believer of mean reversion, I just can’t help but wonder if the recent recovery in stocks is nothing more than a brief respite in the long-term “chop” that has become a defining characteristic of equity prices over the last 10 years.
Right now the market is talking to us. We hope you are listening because we are. One look at the indexes show a lot of talking going on right now in the form of our indicators flashing "In the Zone" or at the least be aware. This is how the market talks to us.
First up the 20 day one-minute time frequency chart that covers the whole run off the recent lows.
These nano short term one minute charts all show the same thing:
A. Retest of the highs commonly referred to as resistance (red lines)
B. At trend channel resistance (pink lines)
Moving on to a larger time frame and frequency we see numerous things that make us super cautious on the longside.
In each of the above charts we see the same thing brewing in all of them.
A. RSI in overbought territory (red circles at the top of each chart)
B. Full Stochastics in over bought territory (red circles at the bottom of each chart)
C. All at trend channel resistance levels (Pink channels in OTC Comp. and Dow)
D. All are at key Fibonacci retracement levels
E. Lackluster volume on the way up in each index (not shown, but it’s there or not there shall we say)
F. In an ABC down with A is done, we are in B up (right into options expiration mind you) with a potential C down yet to rear its head.
G. Potential retests of recent highs that if they pull away from here it’s a double top at the least resistance right here.
In Summary Big Picture:
It’s options expiration. This means we could sit here for the rest of the week and chew around more. But we see too many indicators telling us that we are in a high risk zone on the longside. Those that have been here for awhile know what this all means all too well. If that’s the case then what is that saying about our Inverse ETF’s out there? Just the opposite of course.
To learn more, sign up for our free newsletter and receive our free report — "How To Outperform 90% Of Wall Street With Just $500 A Week."
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…
It was reported today that Motorola (MOT) is shopping around its division that makes set top boxes and other equipment for cable and phone companies. The rumored asking price is around $4.5 billion.
That sounds great, but unfortunately for Motorola and its shareholders, the company paid $11 billion for it 10 years ago. Read how management gushed over it back then:
"This partnership will enable us to expand our portfolio for network access, delivering next-generation solutions along with ‘home hubs’ that will handle high-speed Internet access and video entertainment, as well as carrier-quality voice services," Motorola chief executive Christopher B. Galvin said. "People want access tailored their way and the ability to get online quickly and simply."
Some might say that Motorola didn’t really pay $11 billion since it issued its own stock to complete the purchase. This is nonsense of course.
Deals like this might be a contributing reason to explain why Motorola stock has been a disappointment to many investors.
Logic argues for a rest but Mr. Market’s not giving much ground. Some of this may have to do with options expiration tomorrow as those who can hunt down strike prices forcing exercise and hitting stops. Sure, it’s a mean game.
IBM posts good earnings while GOOG beats. So, you think over the last two hours of trading some folks got the memo? Just saying… In the meantime even horrible earnings from companies like Harley-Davidson (HOG) were bid higher following the dreamy “the worst is over” buy from WFC.
Volume is still unimpressive as many individual investors are watching but not playing despite all the cheerleading from the media…
There’s quite a mania going on in Emerging Markets and some commodity sectors. This is driving prices to extreme levels (parabolic) making mincemeat of rational judgment. It’s mostly driven by peer performance pressure, excess liquidity, and low yields; but, still only modest volume. Most investors are still feeling the bitter pain of losses and seem reluctant to take Wall Street’s bait.
In 1996, Karen Ho got a job on Wall Street. The student of anthropology, who would later go on to get her Ph.D., was fascinated by how even in the midst of an economic boom, corporate downsizings were rampant — and how each time a company announced a major layoff, its stock rallied. What she found from her perch at Bankers Trust — and later in interviews with people at firms such as Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Salomon Brothers, Kidder Peabody and Lazard — was that it wasn’t just an ideological commitment to boosting shareholder value that drove decisions to merge, break up and restructure companies, but also the work culture of Wall Street itself. Ho, now a professor at the University of Minnesota, talked with Barbara Kiviat about her findings, presented in Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, and how she thinks the recent financial collapse has — or hasn’t — changed things.
What do you mean when you say the American worker has become liquid?
I mean that there’s constant job insecurity, constant downsizing, constant restructuring, a constant need to retrain to have an adaptable skill set and be flexible. In a sense, job security and stability have been liquidated.
And that comes from Wall Street?
What I found in my research was that in many ways investment bankers and how they approach work became a model for how work should be conducted. Wall Street shapes not just the stock market but also the very nature of employment and what kinds of workers are valued. These firms sit at the nexus — they are the financial advisers and sources of expertise to major U.S. corporations and institutional investors — and from this highly empowered middle-man role, what they say has a lot of influence. The model that came to be dominant in the 1980s was one of constant change. The idea is that there’s a lot of dead wood out there and people should be constantly moving, in lockstep with the market. If a company isn’t constantly restructuring and changing, then it’s stagnant and inefficient, a big lumbering brick.
And you think that attitude follows from the way Wall Street works?
What a lot…
Finding investing education advice for stock options trading can be a frustrating endeavor at times. New traders often share with me that it feels like the options trading community is a very tight-lipped community with a high price of admission. I’ve been through that process so I’d like to offer you some advice.
Learning to invest your own money is a journey, not a destination. It takes time, patience, and education. It’s a proactive journey for those who no longer desire to be a victim of the so called experts.
Over the years I’ve made enough mistakes and have had enough successes to know that the ability to master your money is not something that just happens. It takes a bit of work on your part.
Increasing your investment IQ is a key part, especially when you’re dealing with stock options. You have to find a qualified and trustworthy source for investing education. There’s quite a bit of hype out there so you have to filter out all the "noise".
You may have already searched online for information on stock options, or read a few books. Most people are drawn to options trading by the potential to create large sums of money in a short period of time. Here is my forewarning; having a great deal of head knowledge about stock options doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a great trader. It’s going to take some real world practice.
Most of what I’ve learned about investing did not come from a classroom or a book; it came from real world experiences. I found people who were willing to give me unbiased investing education and I applied the knowledge through practice and a bit of trial and error.
Investing Education is your Financial Road Map
Investing education has a purpose in our lives like a map has a purpose to a traveler. A map can take you from point "A" to point "B" when you’re traveling. Investing education can take you from school loans, credit card debt, and no budget to debt-free with money to burn. It’s your financial map so to speak.
You could try to figure out options trading on your own, but if you’re smart and value your time you’ll find a map that can get you to your destination quicker. It’s extremely rare for me to meet someone who doesn’t want…
General Motors appears to be on a fast road to bankruptcy. Chief executive officer Fritz Henderson has already described a bankruptcy filing as "probable" as the U.S. Treasury’s June 1 deadline for reorganizing the company draws near. Also, the fact that GM announced it was moving up its date for paying suppliers from June 2 to May 28 further suggests bankruptcy is likely, says Brad Coulter of O’Keefe & Associates of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., which specializes in helping distressed manufacturing companies. "To me, it’s a pretty clear indicator that they plan to file right around the June 1 deadline." At the same time, half a dozen senior GM executives have dumped shares, even though the stock has been trading for less than $2.
Meanwhile, the work necessary for averting a GM bankruptcy remains undone. Though the automaker is reportedly making progress on negotiations with the United Auto Workers (UAW), open issues remain, and the GM even got into a public spat with the UAW over importing cars from China and Mexico. The union is now demanding more assurances as to what cars GM plans to build in the U.S. in the future. (See portraits of autoworkers.)
On a more positive note, the two sides have reportedly reached agreement on how to finance the Voluntary Employees’ Beneficiary Association (VEBA), which was set up to fund retiree health-care benefits for GM’s blue-collar workforce. GM is said to be agreeing to deposit half the $20 billion it owes the VEBA and to fund the other half with GM stock. The agreement appears to be very similar to the deal Chrysler LLC reached with the UAW. That deal puts the UAW in control of the new Chrysler, with 55% of the stock. The union has also reportedly agreed to cut labor costs, though neither the union nor GM would confirm the figures.
As part of the overall restructuring plan put forward by the company, 16 manufacturing facilities in the U.S. will be closed, including four assembly plants, according to Alan Reuther, director of the UAW’s Washington office.
Here’s the REAL DEAL NO BS Situation with Europe (Warning What Follows is EXTREMELY BAD).
The media is rife with misrepresentations and analysis of the EU. Here’s the real deal.
The ECB is tapped out. Having provided over €1 trillion in funding via LTRO 1 and LTRO 2, taking on over €700 billion in PIIGS debt putting its own solvency at risk, it simply cannot launch another LTRO scheme for th...
"It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident...And yet none of this conduct has been punished in any significant way."
~ Charles Ferguson, Inside Job
"I know that my retirement will make no difference in its [my newspaper's] ca...
The S&P 500 got off to weak start and, after retracing a modest morning rally, spent most of the day in the shallow red with an intraday low of 0.63%. But in the last seven minutes of trading, the index recovered enough to a make a small gain of 0.14%. This is the fourth advance, the first was Monday's 1.60 surge, but the last three have ranged from 0.05% to 0.17% with today's close near the high of the miserly three-day series.
The index is now up 5.02% for 2012, which is 6.93% off the interim closing high.
From an intermediate perspective, the S&P 500 is 95.2% above the March 2009 closing low and 15.6% below the nominal all-time high of October 2007.
Below are two charts of the index, with and without the 50 and 200-day moving averages.
TIF - Tiffany & Co., Inc. – A surprise earnings miss and a reduced full-year profit and sales forecast from luxury jewelry retailer, Tiffany & Co., took some of the luster out of its shares today, with the stock trading down 8.5% at $56.55 as of 11:50 a.m. in New York. Options activity on Tiffany this morning suggests mixed sentiment on the st...
RealNetworks, Inc. (NASDAQ: RNWK) today announced that it has reached an agreement with the Washington State Attorney General over discontinued e-commerce practices. In accordance with the settlement agreement, RealNetworks has committed to:
Discontinuing the use of pre-checked boxes for purchases of RealNetworks subscription products; Spelling out more clearly the material terms of RealNetworks product offerings; Offering online cancellation of subscription offerings; Enhancing RealNetworks customer support guidelines regarding cancellation. Statement from Thomas Nielsen, President & CEO of RealNetworks:
"About two years ago, the Washington State Attorney General's Office contacted us regarding concerns they had with some of our e-commerce practices.
To learn more, sign up for David's free newsletter and receive the free report from All About Trends - "How To Outperform 90% Of Wall Street With Just $500 A Week." Tell David PSW sent you. - Ilene...
First we'll go to the technicals. Back in mid April I had opined a 'bear flag' formation was being created. [Apr 17, 2012: Potential Bear Flag Forming] But the market being the difficult beast it is, head faked everyone and rather than a break down from said flag it first went UP and nearly touched yearly highs. This caused everyone to think the bear flag had failed…. only to lead to a horrid May in the market. Generally a bear flag will resolve relatively quickly but the longer...
Despite the fact that U.S. equities are well-positioned and well-supported to go up, once again it is the headlines out of Europe—especially Greece—that are scaring off investors. Some are saying that it is now likely (and even desirable) that Greece will default on all its sovereign debt, withdraw from the euro, and severely devalue its domestic currency (Drachma?). This will allow them to operate a balanced budget while pumping cash into growth initiatives, rather than suffer the ravages of Germany-mandated austerity.
Some say, so what? Greece makes up only about 2% of the Eurozone’s overall economy. Nevertheless, you might say that t...
Markets died and then rallied to flat again as European leaders “prepared contingencies” for a possible Grexit
Markets died hard and fast earlier today as major indexes registered as much as 1.5% of losses after news that Euro zone officials were unofficially “preparing contingencies” for a Greek exit from the Euro. Unofficial statements were not enough to keep markets down however, as major indexes rallied back to flat levels by the end of the day.
So the world continues to wait on Europe, as the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (NYSEACA:SPY) gained .05%, the SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (NYSEARCA:...
Reminder: OpTrader is available to chat with Members, comments are found below each post.
This post is for all our live virtual trade ideas and daily comments. Please click on "comments" below to follow our live discussion. All of our current trades are listed in the spreadsheet below, with entry price (1/2 in and All in), and exit prices (1/3 out, 2/3 out, and All out).
We also indicate our stop, which is most of the time the "5 day moving average". All trades, unless indicated, are front-month ATM options.
Please feel free to participate in the discussion and ask any questions you might have about this virtual portfolio, by clicking on the "comments" link right below.
To learn more about the swing trading virtual portfolio (strategy, performance, FAQ, etc.), please click here
NEW: Ilene is available to chat with Members regarding topics presented in SWW, comments are found below each post.
Here is this week's test version of the latest newsletter. We apologize for some formatting issues that need to be worked out. Please tell us what you think.
Reminder: Pharmboy is available to chat with Members, comments are found below each post.
In this article, please revisit an article written two years ago titled, "The Calm Before the Storm." This article focused on the patent cliff that was looming in the pharmaceutical industry, that was later picked up by the New York Times and several other bloggers! Subsequent articles were written about big pharma company's revenue streams, and the pros and cons of of their later stage pipelines. Other articles have also attempted to identify smaller biotechs with the potential to reap big reward...
My last weekend update is dated from January 30 so after a long hiatus, here is an update of our virtual portfolio. Since the last update, we have closed the AA Money portfolio due to a lack of enthusiasm (and activity) and I have stopped tracking the FAS strangle as the low VIX makes it hard to get rewarded for the risk! But we have added a small $5KP virtual portfolio which does not use any margin.
FAS Money
We have had to recover from a big move up by FAS and a low VIX which keeps option prices low. But the portfolio has gaine about 10% since the last update.
Last update P&L - $5499.00
IWM Money
Not a lot of activity in this portfolio where the main focus is on the large IWM BCS. But the portfolio has grown over 20% since the last update.
Last update P&L - $1998.00
$5KP Portfolio
This is the virtual portfolio that replaced the AA Money portfolio. It does not use margin and we will keep holdings under $5K.
AAPL $50K P...
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In 1996, Karen Ho got a job on Wall Street. The student of anthropology, who would later go on to get her Ph.D., was fascinated by how even in the midst of an economic boom, corporate downsizings were rampant — and how each time a company announced a major layoff, its stock rallied. What she found from her perch at Bankers Trust — and later in interviews with people at firms such as Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Salomon Brothers, Kidder Peabody and Lazard — was that it wasn’t just an ideological commitment to boosting shareholder value that drove decisions to merge, break up and restructure companies, but also the work culture of Wall Street itself. Ho, now a professor at the University of Minnesota, talked with Barbara Kiviat about her findings, presented in Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, and how she thinks the recent financial collapse has — or hasn’t — changed things.
By Travis W of 
Investing Education is your Financial Road Map
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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
(