Posts Tagged
‘bears’
by ilene - August 31st, 2010 3:46 pm
Courtesy of Mish
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Here is an interesting snip from August 31 Market Commentary by Art Cashin for UBS. Sorry, no link.
Monday’s market evaporated nearly all the gains from Friday’s rally. Despite lighter volume, it was a 90% down day. That means the bears got a lopsided advantage in negative breadth and negative volume. In Friday’s rally, the bulls had had a similar 90% advantage. Robert McHugh of Main Line Investors says 26 of the last 88 trading days have been 90% days – one way or another. Any wonder the public is wary.
Are these 90% Days a Good Thing?
While the big boys push the market around, small investors have thrown in the towel and are not coming back.
Market volume now consists of black boxes pushing all stocks one way or the other on 30% of the days. Is this a good thing? For who? Investors or Goldman Sachs?
Holding the Line
Today, the 1040 level on the S&P held for about the 8th time on "fabulous" news consumer confidence rose to 53. Bear in mind number in the 70′s are typical of recession lows.
How long the 1040 level can hold is a mystery, but each bounce seems to be weaker and weaker.
Last Friday, I noted Market Cheers 1.6% Growth; Treasuries Hammered; while asking "what’s next?"
We have a partial answer already. Treasuries have regained the entire selloff that started (and ended) on the "great news" that 2nd quarter GDP was +1.6% instead of the expected +1.4%. Never mind that growth was revised down twice from above +2.5% to +1.6%.
Looking ahead, I expect GDP to be negative in the 3rd quarter.
Art Cashin’s 17.6 Year Cycles
A little over a year ago Art Cashin commented Dow Trapped in 17-Year Cycle
Art Cashin, director of floor operations at UBS Financial Services, offered CNBC his stock-market insights. Cashin decried the idea of a second stimulus, in light of the "infamous" first attempt.
"There was no ‘stimulus’ in the stimulus package. It was mostly social engineering," Cashin said. Thus, talk of a new plan is shaking markets with fears of even more debt — with "nothing to show for it."
Cashin revisited his theory of "the 17.6-year cycle."
"It’s like the Biblical story of the fat
…
Tags: 17 year cycles, 90% days, ART CASHIN, bears, Consumer Confidence, David Rosenberg, Goldman Sachs, japan, lost decades, Mish, retail investors, S&P, small investors, Stock Market, trading
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by ilene - August 16th, 2010 2:35 pm
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds
The sentiment and media news flow is so uniformly Bearish that I think the herd is running hard--and that makes me hesitant to join it.
I am seriously demanding you read the HUGE GIANT BIG FAT DISCLAIMER below before reading further because I am conducting a highly speculative thought experiment, NOT offering investment advice. This is the freely offered ramblings of an amateur observer, and nothing else.
The only problem with being Bearish on the stock market now is that everyone else is Bearish, too. Frankly, that’s extremely Bullish. In my many years of observing the stock market, it seems the ideal time to go short is when complacency is running high and bad news is being discounted--say, just like the state of the market in late April, 2010, just before the wheels fell off and the market began its slide to July lows. (Never mind the "flash crash.")
The reverse is also true. The time to get Bullish is when everybody hates stocks, loves bonds and junk bonds, when the financial media is groaning under the weight of Bearish commentary and charts and the few remaining Bulls are dismissed as cheerleaders or mocked as perma-Bulls, and when various charts, historical data and omens all predict that a crash is just around the corner.
That’s what bottoms look like, not tops. Yet the herd is running fast and hard, expecting a crash or a sharp decline in September and October, because that’s what "should happen" for a number of good reasons: the economy sucks, and historically the market tanks in those months.
Except when it doesn’t. How many times does the stock market do what it "should" when almost everyone expects it to?
Let me put it another way: If you really think the market will crash or tank bigtime in mid-August or September, then when do you sell? Do you wait around for the crash? Heck no. You sell long before the anointed window of crashability opens.
In other words, everybody who wanted to sell has already sold. If everybody that wanted to sell has already sold, then who’s left to sell off hard enough to crash the market?
We all expect the market to crash or decline, so we sell, but some mysterious group of clueless money managers who have read…
Tags: bears, bullish case for stocks, Bulls, media, sentiment, Stock Market, stocks
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by ilene - July 26th, 2010 7:26 pm
Courtesy of Mish
The summer stock market blast higher has wiped out the conviction of short sellers. Bears are back in hibernation and Stock Short Sales at 2-Year Low, Data Explorers Says.
Investors are exiting bearish bets on global equities, pushing bullish wagers on stocks to a two- year high versus short sales, according to Data Explorers.
The firm’s long-short ratio has risen to 9.5, having surged from 5.75 in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s collapse intensified the financial crisis, the London- and New York-based securities-research company said. The reading is the highest of the data that goes as far back as July 2008.
“Short sellers are now taking money off the table,” said Will Duff Gordon, a senior researcher at Data Explorers in London. “Perhaps the bears are going back into hibernation?”
Barton Biggs, the hedge fund manager who sold half his equity holdings at the start of July, said today that signs the U.S. economy will avoid a recession spurred him to build the stakes back up.
Whipsaw City
Many traders are getting whipsawed here. Chasing shorts lower and longs higher has certainly been the wrong approach most of this year.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
Tags: bears, rally, shorting stocks, Stock Market
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by ilene - June 16th, 2010 5:06 pm
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker
I don’t care if you trade forex, stocks, commodities or bonds – if you’re out here running money in any capacity then you’re braving the Risk On, Risk Off training regimen that the Market Miyagi is putting us through. It changes daily or bi-daily, but damn if I don’t feel like a pinball on my last ricochet before I head home each night.
Early in the morning, Risk On is signaled by positive economic data points out of China. The next thing you know, the euro’s being short-squeezed putting pressure on the dollar while US Steel ($X), Freeport Mac ($FCX) and the rest of the industrial-cyclicals are dancing around the maypole with streamers and confetti.
The very next day it becomes Risk Off as the TV studios in Englewood Cliffs welcome the Performing Bears fresh from the Moscow Circus. Futures are the blood-red opposite of the prior day’s close as the Dollar, the Vix, Gold and Treasuries puff up their chests.
- Monday the bulls blast a hole in the sky
- Tuesday the bears say ‘The End is Nigh’
- Wednesday risk assets are all the rage
- Thursday fear is back on the front page
- Etc.
I’ve caught a few of these turns in both directions but there are simply too many to risk catching them all. Like most patterns, once the crowd catches on and learns to play, it gets even more difficult. We may not be there yet, but soon.
"Risk On, Risk Off. Buy Danielson, Sell Danielson."
And the Market Miyagi stands off in the distance with his arms folded across his chest, grunting his approval at our attempts to run the gauntlet.
Tags: bears, Bulls, risk, Stock Market, volatility
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by ilene - April 15th, 2010 7:54 pm
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
Sentiment data is surging this week. The Investor’s Intelligence poll is showing a new high in bullishness and a new low in bearishness. 18.9% of advisers tracked in the polling are bearish on stocks. Bullishness has now surged to 51.1%. Bullish sentiment is surging versus last week’s reading of 48.9%.
The latest Merrill Lynch Fund Manager Survey is showing similar optimism. 71% of the respondents believe that earnings will jump 10% or more over the next 12 months. This is up dramatically from 53% in March. The survey also showed that 52% of managers are now overweight equities versus just 33% in February. Michael Hartnett, Chief Equity Strategist at B of A Merrill Lynch says the Goldilocks scenario is priced into stocks:
“April’s survey shows a growing number of investors envisaging a Goldilocks scenario of above trend growth and benign inflation. The findings are consistent with the view that the US consumer, far from remaining in intensive care, is on the path back to good health.”
Today’s AAII poll showed the same trend in wild bullishness. Bullish sentiment surged to 48.5%. This is the highest bullish sentiment since the beginning of the year. Charles Rotblut at AAII notes that the current skew between bulls and bears is consistent with periods prior to a pull-back, but not representing “irrational exuberance”:
“The spread between bullish and bearish sentiment is at +19. This is a level that has correlated with the past few market pullbacks, though is not a level that suggests irrational exuberance.”
Source: AAII, Investorsintelligence.com
Tags: bears, bullishness, Bulls, investor optimism, sentiment data, Stock Market
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by ilene - January 4th, 2010 4:54 pm
Market Bears – what sub-species are you? "Outwardly concerned with the instability of economies and markets yet cannot resist the urge to speculate in gold stocks"--if that rings true, you’re a David RosenBear. Now you know. – Ilene
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker
(read the below in an exaggerated Australian accent, like that guy who took bubble baths with great white sharks and electric eels but for some strange reason died in a freak animal incident.)
Krikey! This landscape is litrelly filled with Market Bears! But wait just a tick – there appear to be many different types of bears running about…all with different attributes and markings to help us tell them apart.
Let’s have a peak through the binoculars and see what we’ve got:
The Born-Again Bear (Ursus Scottradeum) - this creature was horribly wounded during two prior market crashes while remaining long and margined to the hilt. Has since sold entire portfolio at the bottom, subscribed to RGE Monitor and delights in telling the members of his old investment club what morons they are. Can be found roaring "bwahaha" at other investors on the Yahoo Finance message boards.
The Perma-Bear (Ursus Abelsonious) – the very definition of "creature of habit", Perma-Bears are right 2% of the time but tedious and pedantic 100% of the time. By never conceding the fact that anything could even possibly be a positive, they render themselves irrelevant, even during actual bear markets. Many, however, are brilliant and lovable, despite their unwillingness to change or concede.
The Conspiratorial Bear (Ursus Tinfoilicon) – A highly adaptive sub-species of the Perma-Bear. These animals are known for their over-perspicacity and have foreseen 11 of the last 3 market corrections due to a light social calendar and a fondness for Data-mining & Dragons. They are, however, always the most interesting bears to behold in the forest and serve the important role of keeping the other woodland creatures on their toes and alert.
The David RosenBear (Ursus Aurum Minotur) – a species that is outwardly concerned with the instability of economies and markets yet cannot resist the urge to speculate in gold stocks. He will justify his "playing" of precious metals with myriad warnings of inflation, deflation, mega-flation, Gaga-flation etc, but in reality, he is banking on the greater…
Tags: bear markets, bears
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by ilene - September 20th, 2009 12:54 am
Courtesy of Christopher Fountain of For What It’s Worth
Ya gotta love a horse race. Here’s an article from the New York Times that interviews five different analysts and gets six different opinions on where the market’s headed. I think this guy, for instance, is nuts – reminds me of a lot of real estate agents I know. But hey, he could be right, and so could they. I’m not betting on it.
Despite this grim backdrop, Laszlo Birinyi, president of Birinyi Associates, a stock market research firm in Westport, Conn., believes that we are in the early stages of a classic bull market that has plenty of room to run.
“At any juncture during a bull market over the last 50 years you could point to economic problems,” he said. “The obvious problems aren’t the ones that I worry about.” In his view, the economic weakness has been documented so well that the market has already taken it into account. “The negatives are right in front of your nose,” he said. “The market is looking past it.”
Tags: bears, Bulls, Stock Market
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by Chart School - September 17th, 2009 2:21 am
Here are a few quick posts by Tim Knight at Slope of Hope. - Ilene
Or……..how I learned to stopped worrying and love the bull.
I bought a very large position in SSO earlier today for a couple of reasons:
- I don’t get my jollies out of losing money;
- The OPEX week clearly has import;
- I was impressed and convinced by Fujisan’s post last night, calling for – if memory serves – a push to 1086 by Friday.
I am having fewer and fewer compunctions about buying select stocks. That is evident from my watch lists.
One cause for concern for the bulls remains…………..volume! Just take a look at the volume graph; it’s simply pathetic.
It is generally true that prices climb higher at a far slower rate than they drop. This rally, however, has been a remarkable exception. The push higher has been explosive, and it has pushed higher with just about the same timetable and force as the drop itself.
The question, of course, is: when (if ever) will it end?
There are as many opinions as there are traders, but a few general camps would be, using the example of the Russell 2000 above:
- It has another 10% to go, and it will happen quickly. That would be painful for the bears, but I would hasten to point out that, at that level, the Russell would have completely retraced to the neckline of a head and shoulders pattern spanning three years whose beauty would make bears (if there are any left by then) weep tears of joy.
- It’s done climbing and will start falling. This has been uttered so many times by so many parties (including, I admit, a few times by me) that it’s not even worth considering anymore. The entire, "OK, now………….errr………OK, NOW!………..oh, wait…………….errr, NOW!" gets really, really old.
- We’re in a major new bull market and it’s simply going to keep pushing its way through to progressively higher prices.
For the bears out there who would like some encouraging news, the semiconductor index – which is a helpful bellweather – is looking like it is approaching a huge area of resistance. This is why I bought SSG yesterday.
…
Tags: bears, Bulls, market rally, SOX
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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 site