It’s a Saturday, but it certainly doesn’t feel like it, because there’s a heck of a lot going on.
Here’s what you need to be paying attention to this May Day.
The Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) annual shareholders meeting is happening right now. Already the company has reported monster Q1 profits, and both Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have taken turns defending Goldman Sachs (GS), which is one of their portfolio companies. [See also: From One Pigman To Another....]
Obama is flying to the Gulf Coast on Sunday morning to inspect the damage and response to the Deepwater Horizon oil crisis. The sense right now is that we’re looking at an environmental tragedy on the scale of Exxon Valdez, maybe worse, since there’s no short-term prospect of plugging the massive leak in the ground that’s spewing oil. Current estimates suggest BP (BP) is on the hook for at least $3 billion.
Greece/IMF/EU talks continue. According to Greek government officials, some kind of announcement may be made today. The market is hoping to hear something that’s orders of magnitude stronger than any bailout announcement we’ve gotten so far, or otherwise the feeling will be that it can and will fall through again.
Of course, there are fresh violent, anti-austerity protests going on today in Athens. The fact that it’s May Day, a day for celebrating anti-capitalism only adds to the tension.
New reports suggest the criminal probe into Goldman Sachs is not just a perfunctory follow-on to the SEC charges, but rather a truly separate thing that’s wider than Abacus, and that started before the SEC’s investigation. HUGE.
With just five days before the election, UK’s The Guardian has endorsed the Liberal Democrats, the country’s biggest third party. Its leader, Nick Clegg, has surged thanks to a string of strong debate performances, Gordon Brown’s disastrous campaigning, and a lingering sense of unease with the conservatives.
WASHINGTON—Democrats took a step toward their goal of overhauling financial regulation, reaching a tentative deal to set restrictions on trading in exotic financial instruments known as derivatives.
Among the considerations still in the balance: A big provision being sought by Warren Buffett in recent weeks. A key Senate committee had changed its proposed overhaul of derivatives regulation after lobbying by Mr. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., potentially helping the famed investor avoid a financial hit, congressional aides say.
I thought these were weapons of financial mass destruction Warren?
What’s the problem? You don’t want to be forced to recognize the economic and accounting reality of your transactions? I don’t see why that should be a problem.
Posting margin on underwater positions is a reality for everyone who trades on margin – and you do a lot of it. There’s no reason why anyone – you included – should not have to put forward margin – in cash – just like everyone else.
Yeah, I know, Berkshire is "Strong". So what? That’s not material to the point at hand, which is that when you are short a "PUT", which is effectively what you are, and the position is underwater, you should be required to post margin!
Reliance on "future economic strength" to avoid this requirement is a big part of why the system nearly blew up. You were a part of it writing those contracts, and you now want to be exempted from safety and soundness requirements on something you identified – in public – as a dangerous practice.…
The big story of the day in the world of financial stocks is that they’re all getting hammered, and the idea is that it might have something to do with the fact that strong derivatives reform seems to be coming down the pike.
Now there was a report earlier in the day that perhaps Berkshire Hathaway might somehow get a fat exemption, but now according to WSJ that’s not the case. The Democrats have killed that provision.
So you’d think that Berkshire might be getting pelted, but it’s not.
It’s actually up about 0.4%.
That’s not a huge move, except in comparison to other financials, in which case it’s significant?
So what’s going on?
The markets are probably figuring that the hit to Berkshire will be one-timey in nature — basically that it will cause the company to post collateral, but that derivatives aren’t central to how it makes money.
With the financial firms getting whacked, strong regulations may go at the heart of what they do, and actually hurt future profitability, thus the falling shares and blowout in CDS.
Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) CEO Warren Buffett has generally maintained a sterling reputation (as far as financiers go), but longtime observers know that he’s as good as any at taking advantage of public policy to suit his needs.
In the November 2009 issue of Elliott Wave International’s monthly Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, co-editors Steven Hochberg and Peter Kendall published a careful study of Goldman Sachs history — and made a sobering forecast for its future. Here is our special report, Part III.
Special Section: A Flickering Financial Star, Part III
With the market’s downtrend recently in abeyance, these transgressions failed to capture the imagination of the public or the scrutiny of law enforcement. But the extreme recriminatory power of the next leg down in social mood suggests that Goldman’s dealings will become a lighting rod for public discontent.
In January 2008, Elliott Wave Financial Forecast noted that Goldman’s success relative to the rest of Wall Street pointed “to the eventual appearance of a much larger public relations problem in the future. In the negative-mood times that accompany bear markets, conflict of interest charges will come pouring out.” The recent revelations about Paulson’s and Friedman’s actions are exactly that to which we were referring. Additional claims against Goldman — including front-running its clients and profiting from inside information — are already too numerous to mention. As the bear market intensifies, the firm will attract scrutiny as easily as it brushed it off in the mid-2000s.
Based strictly on the form of its advance, a July 2007 issue of The Short Term Update called for a peak in Goldman shares at $234. Goldman managed one more new high to $250 in October 2007; it then fell 81 percent to a low of $47 in November 2008. The stock market’s wave 2 rise brought Goldman back to $193 on October 14. Its affinity for marching in lock-step with the DJIA strongly suggests that Goldman will decline to below its November 2008 low.
Another key socionomic trait is for the most successful recipients of bull-market goodwill to be singled out for special treatment in the ensuing decline. Even fellow financiers are taking aim. In a not-so-veiled reference to Goldman, one Wall Street titan said that big profits made by investment banks are “hidden gifts” from the state, and resentment of such firms is “justified.” Let the bloodletting begin.
Let the Buyers (of Stock) Beware
Goldman’s heavy involvement in the hedge fund…
A Goldman Sachs Group Inc. director tipped off a hedge-fund billionaire about a $5 billion investment in Goldman by Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. before a public announcement of the deal at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, a person close to the situation says.
The revelation marks a significant turn in the government’s case against Raj Rajaratnam, the hedge-fund titan at the center of the largest insider-trading case in a generation. Mr. Buffett’s investment in Goldman in September 2008 was a watershed moment in the financial crisis. One of the world’s savviest investors, Mr. Buffett helped allay fears about the instability of the financial system by backing America’s leading investment bank.
The new disclosure stems from a government examination into whether the Goldman director, Rajat Gupta, gave inside information to Mr. Rajaratnam. In a court filing March 22, the government alleged that Mr. Rajaratnam or "co-conspirators" traded on non-public information about Goldman. In a filing last week, the government provided more details about the information it alleges Mr. Rajaratnam received, including advance notice about the Buffett transaction with Goldman.
“Only fraud and falsehood dread examination. Truth invites it.”
- Dr. Samuel Johnson
The SEC is formally charging Goldman Sachs with fraud in the derivatives markets, specifically with regard to Collateralized Debt Obligations related to subprime mortgages.
Investors in Goldman’s Abacus CDO lost one billion dollars.
In addition to the company, an individual VP in Goldman’s international group is being charged, Fabrice Tourre.
Paulson and Company, a major hedge fund, paid Goldman to structure a CDO based on mortgages that Paulson selected, so that they could bet against it.
"The product was new and complex, but the deception and conflicts are old and simple. Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party,” said Robert Khuzami, director of the division of enforcement.
This could be construed as a deft way of throwing red meat to the angry mob, nailing a specific individual at Goldman while limiting the criminal charges against the company although there will be significant civil cases, and dealing with the billionaire hedge fund owner Paulson who made a fortune betting against the subprime market.
This could be more damaging if this includes other Goldman bets against its customers on products it represented and created, and it shows an overall intent to create fraudulent products for the purpose of shorting them. For now the SEC will not say if this fraud is a singular event or more systemic.
Goldman will almost certainly attempt to spin this as the actions of a ‘rogue trader‘ who was an aggressive exception.
Last week the White House asked Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein to ‘cool it’ on their intense lobbying efforts against derivatives and financial reform.
Perhaps this will help them in their decision.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The Wall Street Banks are knee deep in fraud.
Bloomberg Television’s Betty Liu does a great job deconstructing the hypocrisy behind Warren Buffett’s Goldman investment – she quotes Alice Schroder author of Snowball, who says, "I’ve always wondered why Buffett would trade his skepticism for an investment in Goldman Sachs. It looks it was a mistake, it was a mistake for Buffett to invest this money in Goldman and to compromise his philosophy on Wall Street." What philosophy? That of the benevolent old uncle who is happy to rip the entire silver market apart and demand physical when he knows full well (as does the CFTC) that it is an impossible request? Or that of the guy who pretends to have principles when he is fully aware the government will always bail him and his investments out at the expense of the middle class? We eagerly await to see Berkshire’s press release on its Goldman investment after this development.
Warren Buffett is the most glorified and respected investor of all time. And rightfully so. After all, he became the world’s wealthiest man by essentially picking stocks. But Warren Buffett is also remarkably misunderstood by the general public. I personally believe the myth of Warren Buffett is one of the greatest tricks ever played on the small investor.
To the average investor Buffett is a folksy frugal regular old chum who just has a knack for picking stocks. You know, he just picks those “value stocks” and let’s them run, right? Well, nothing could be farther from the truth and here we sit with an entire generation of investors fooled by the idea that value investing/buy and hold is the single greatest way to accumulate wealth. With the poor results of the last ten years investors have finally started to challenge this thinking.
To a large extent, the myth of Buffett has fed an investment boom as a generation of American’s aspire to make their riches in the equity markets. And who better to sell this idea than Wall Street itself? After all, a quick investment in Bill Miller’s Value Trust or the great Peter Lynch’s Fidelity Magellan (now essentially defunct) will get you a near replica of the Warren Buffett approach to investing, right? Not so fast.
Let me begin by saying that I have nothing but the utmost respect for Mr. Buffett. When I was a young investor I printed every single one of his annual letters (including his Buffett Partnership letters which can be found here) and read them page by page. It was and remains the single greatest education I have ever received. I highly recommend it for anyone who hasn’t done so. But in digging deeper I realized that Warren Buffett isn’t just this value stock picker that he is widely portrayed as. What he has built is far more complex than that.
In reality, he formed one of the original hedge funds (The Buffett Partnership Ltd) and used his gains to one day purchase Berkshire Hathaway. His evolution into the value investor we now think of today has been long in the making. Make no mistake, Buffett is a hedge fund manager. Yes, he comes from the ilk of the oft vilified and awful hedge fund…
Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway and Bill Ackman of hedge fund Pershing Square recently sat down with CNBC in two separate interviews. While the two men shared a talking point in the recent Kraft deal (they are both large shareholders), we thought it was interesting to hear their recent takes on the economy and markets.
In his interview, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman says that you are buying Kraft (KFT) at less than 14 times earnings and get a 4% dividend yield. He liked the fact that Kraft used a limited amount of shares (and used more cash) in the deal and in the end paid a fair price to get the deal done. As we covered earlier, Kraft is now Pershing Square’s largest holding.
Ackman argues that Kraft’s purchase of confectioner Cadbury now makes Kraft a more ‘defensive’ play. Obviously it will take a bit of time to integrate the two businesses, but the Pershing Square hedge fund manager points out that Kraft has done it numerous times before with other transactions.
Embedded below is Ackman’s video interview where he outlines his thoughts on the Kraft and Cadbury deal. RSS & Email readers will want to come to the site to view this post as there are a lot of videos included:
And here is part two of Ackman’s video interview where he talks about some of his other portfolio activity and his take on the economy:
Moving next to Warren Buffett, we see that he shares a different opinion on the matter of the Kraft and Cadbury deal. Below he gives his thoughts on Wells Fargo (WFC), the economy, Ben Bernanke, and much more.
We’ll admit we haven’t read this yet, and that we probably won’t get to it until this weekend. But those of you who have some time to kill on a Friday may enjoy Martin Armstrong’s latest letter, which looks like a classic.
What follows is 62 pages of Martin Armstrong spilling what he knows about the club, about politicians, about Goldman Sachs, Warren Buffett, murder, international intrigue, and his own involvement in all of it. We’ve seen a lot of it before, but this is certainly the most comprehensive and reads like a mini-epic in the making.
Those who have not followed Armstrong’s case will learn a great deal about it from reading this. Here you will get a good narrative of his perspective and how the events of his case are related to world happenings and market manipulations by members of the “club.” There is so much here to point out that I’m not even going to try and instead just recommend that you designate a couple of hours this weekend, sit down and read it.
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:...
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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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It’s actually up about 0.4%.
Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) CEO Warren Buffett has generally maintained a sterling reputation (as far as financiers go), but longtime observers know that he’s as good as any at taking advantage of public policy to suit his needs.
Government Suspects Goldman Director Told Galleon of Berkshire’s 2008 Investment
Last week the White House asked Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein to ‘cool it’ on their intense lobbying efforts against derivatives and financial reform.
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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
(