Stock market
Hi, Tom Vanderwell here with another of my Mortgage Market Week in Review guest posts. Thanks to Paul for giving me the privilege of putting it here.....Well, it's Friday again, everyone is back in school, my 18 year old...
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Once again, Tom Vanderwell here with some thoughts about moral hazard....Barry Ritholz at The Big Picture had these two comics that brought to the forefront again the issue of moral hazard. Check out the comics and then we'll talk "on...
Factoring in last week's stock market rebound, I have put together a table of global stock markets' performances over various measurement periods. The numbers speak for themselves and can best be summarized in a single sentence: Despite the variation in the economic impact of the credit crunch, stock markets have by and large been dancing to the same tune.
The SEC's announcement to curb naked short selling, together with a dramatic drop in oil prices and a series of better-than-feared earnings announcements from US banks, triggered a recovery in investors' risk appetite, resulting in a strong stock market rebound. Although the near-term outlook has improved and the long-awaited technical rally has probably commenced, it is premature to cast caution to the wind. Read all about this in this guest post by Prieur du Plessis, highlighting some thought-provoking news items and quotes from market commentators during the past week.
Tom Vanderwell here, and I'm taking the liberty of reposting my Mortgage Market Week in Review that normally appears at my blog at www.straighttalkaboutmortgages.com. I'll have more thoughts about the mortgage world next week and thanks to Paul for...
by Guest Author: Tim Sykes--------------------------------------------------In true contrarian style, it's great when analysts downgrade stocks due to problems stemming from the credit crunch (smart) but only after they've fallen 80% (not so smart). Like Wachovia downgrading AIG yesterday?!?!?! [via Yahoo!...
Quantifiable Edges has an interesting little statistic on 52 week lows.
Basically, 1/3 of all the stocks on the NYSE hit a 52 week low yesterday. The last time this has happened was in 1990.
This has only happened a few times since 1971 (5) and in all 5 instances the market was higher 4 days later and 20 days later. Not enough data to make any reasonable conclusion. Whats interesting is that if you go one further year back, 1970, there's three more occurrences and they were all negative 4 days later. Again, not interesting (too few examples) but its
A) another example of the extreme level this market has taken a beating, even when compared with 2000-2002 (which is somewhat striking if you think about what was going on then: Internet bust, enron/wcom, 911, recession, etc).
B) another example where people are comparing this year to the 70s. I disagree with this. I don't think we are in stagflation. I'm more worried about eventual serious deflation a la what "Helicopter Ben" was worried about in 2002. But I'm hoping at least over the next 4 days (and over the next decade), that 2008 isn't the new 1970 but the new 1990.
-James Altucher
There was a wonderfully bizarre moment in a conference call earlier this week. An analyst thought that he had been cut off during the Ameritrade/TD Waterhouse merger call, and Ameritrade CEO Joe Moglia said that was not the case --...
In case folks haven't noticed, there is a meaty Sarbanes-Oxley debate going on in the comments to my post earlier this week where I cited Greg Mankiw saying that SarbOx needs work. Worth reading....
Well, there is apparently more than one unintended consequence of Sarbanes-Oxley. Along with making it more difficult to hire board members, and more expensive to be public, and more difficult to do an IPO, it has done something else:The law...
Engadget is pushing the rumor that Yahoo is buying Skype. While I have heard this before (and with other Skype suitors named too, of course), the Skype acquisition chatter seems to be growing again:It’s sort of early in the game...
Company quarterly conference calls are usually boring affairs. It is the rare call indeed where you get something like the infamous moment when Enron's Jeffrey Skilling called a questioner an "asshole". Rarer still is when a billionaire major shareholder calls...
According to My Yahoo early this morning, it was (briefly) a bad day for the S&P 500. Thankfully, however, the collapse of the S&P 500 to zero wasn't troubling the Dow or Nasdaq. Hey, who says markets are correlated?Apologies, by...
More portfolio managers are playing Mencken and writing not-so-love notes back to their portfolio companies. Here is a fun one from Carlo Cannell of San Francisco-based Cannell Capital to the folks at Opinion Research Corporation (NYSE: ORC) (scroll to the...
Here are two more classics of hedge fund manager Dan Loeb's (admittedly narrow) specialty, the hectoring letter to the CEO and/or board of directors:Letter to Star Gas Partners Letter to Salton Inc...
This week's New Yorker has a breezy piece about the populist approach of Daniel Loeb, a hedge fund manager at Third Point LLC. Mr. Loeb is fond of writing Mencken-esque screeds to CEOs and others who are depressing his fund's...
Don't you love how Google confounded the amateur stock pundits today? The drumbeat was relentless about the amount of GOOG stock coming out of lockup -- 177-million shares, nearly double what has come out since last summer's IPO, and roughly...
I get asked all the time, both by individuals and by media sorts, for names of publicly-traded equities with any material exposure to RSS. Until now I have generally demurred, or, when pressed, pointed (with requisite warnings) to thinly-traded Rocketinfo (RKTI.OB)....
According to my National Post column of a few weeks back, this is the time to short Google. The search company delivered earnings that beat analyst consensus by 10 cents, which is a lot, but not a-lot-a-lot, if you know...
There is apparently some juicy stuff in the new book "Blood on the Streets" by Newsweek writer Charles Gasparino. According to a Newsweek press release, the book "details the rise and fall of three high-profile Wall Street analysts -- Merrill...
Not enough people are saying it, so I will: the 60 Minutes segment on Google Sunday night was an embarassingly sloppy wet kiss from CBS to Sergey, Larry, et al. Apart from the comments by John Battelle -- edited down...
Mark Cuban has apparently been surprised at the amount and intensity of attention directed at his idea of having a gambling-centric abritrage fund:Mr. Cuban says he didn't expect so much media coverage: "I didn't send out a press release. I...
A year or so ago I clipped and emailed a part of the Q&A section from Microsoft's quarterly earnings conference call. The reason? A bizarre and rambling 319-word question from Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker. (My clip got sent around...
PIMCO's Bill Gross is fond of the following chart showing how unusual the current level of debt remains in the U.S. economy:...
Not to pick on James Glassman (the JP Morgan-based Glassman), but an OpEd in today's WSJ is an example of what's turgidly wrong with most Fed-following. Here is a sample: "Obviously, equity investors are nervous about the prospect of higher...
Why do so many investment bankers continue to labor away at a job that has already made them highly wealthy, but that is best characterized as moments of interest surrounded by weeks of towering boredom? Because they've got to get...
There is a wonderfully entertaining Mark Cuban rant out concerning CNBC, fund managers, and why people shouldn't own stocks. The full piece is here, but a clip follows to give you a sense of the wild-eyed thing: Why do people...
According to the current Advertising Age, things were busy, if nervous, at this week's National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE -- pronounced to (sort of) rhyme with "nasty") conference in Las Vegas. TV execs can't figure out where the...
My National Post column today was on bumpf and posturing at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.Update: Ah, if only I had seen this story before I had written the above column. Apparently the WEF anticipated my criticisms...
Microsoft's quarterly financial results tonight seemingly have many investors in a tizzy. It has nothing to do with the higher-than-expected equity compensation costs, however. Those are shuffling of costs from one period to another, and it isn't all that important...
Quirky piece in the Independent about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent marriage to romance novelist Melanie Craft. It is requisitely snide in that U.K. way, so you get bon mots like the following: "At 34, Ms Craft is 25 years...
Today's proposed reforms are overdue, but they're also a decent start at cleaning up the New York Stock Exchange's governance act. Among the recommendations, that NYSE officers can no longer serve as board members for listed companies. While that might...
Help-wanted ads hit a 41-year low on Thursday. The market should be down, right? Well, it isn't. Matter of fact, the Dow and the Nasdaq were up smartly this week. Is the financial market oblivious to the worst employment market in...
