Eli Hoffmann

Unemployment Data: Nothing to Cheer About

Agree that there's little to cheer about, but I don't see how Bloomberg's presenting a swell in the number of job seekers as a "silver lining." It's not happy that people who could afford not to work (retired, housewives, etc.) are now being forced back into the workforce - but it's the truth.

Seeking Alpha Welcomes its 3000th Contributing Author: William Smead

Way to go Boaz and Michal! 3,000 contribs - no wonder you guys burn the midnight oil.

Here's how the Dow/S&P inductees and rejects are faring: DV +4%. TRV +2.7%. CSCO +0.5%. GM -10%. C -4%.

Thank you. Corrected.

Activist hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman pledges to hold his personal stake in Target (TGT) (worth $55M) for another five years if he's elected to the board this Thursday. Ackman's looking to combat criticism he's only in it for short-term gains.

Actually, it's on paper! Click through.

Jeff Macke's bizarre attack on fellow CNBC commentator Dennis Kneale is making the rounds. If anyone has the faintest idea what he's talking about, let us know in the comments.

Some background, FWIW:

1) On Fast Money, earlier, David Faber calls in *from his car* with speculation that the drop in BAC shares was due to them completing a share offering (which turns out to be the case). Could be he's the "guys in the car" about 1/2 hour ago.

www.cnbc.com/id/158402...

2) In his column yesterday, Macke talks about extreme sleep deprivation (and doesn't make all that much sense IMHO):

"After spending most of yesterday scratching my head until it bled (again), then overshooting my goal of getting up early by meeting my goal with the wildly bad ironic twist of not sleeping at all last night, it’s safe to say that I failed my personal stress test before today even started..."

www.minyanville.com/ar...

Censored Again

Hi Mike,

I wasn't involved in the decision, but I'm pretty sure your articles on mutual funds weren't published on SA because we don't cover mutual funds. We usually stick to stocks and ETFs that are tradeable on public exchanges, as well as broad macro-economic themes.

Hope this helps.

Senate passes credit-card crackdown bill which promises to curb sudden rate hikes and hidden fees. Largely anticipated, but credit-card issuers are still looking weak: C +4.1%. BAC -0.5%. JPM -1.9%. AXP -3.2%. DFS -3.5%. COF -4.1%. MA -2.4%. V -2.4%.

Thanks, fixed the error on C.

According to the NY Post, Warren Buffett (BRK.A) recently restructured his infamous derivative contracts by selling a "significantly larger number" of 10-year contracts than the original 18-year transaction. Meaning the risk of loss has increased, but only if markets decline from current levels and stay there.

CNBC says Buffett told them he "didn't pay a dime" to alter the contracts...

www.cnbc.com/id/30805225

Which doesn't necessarily refute the NY Post's story. In fact, this is how the Post explains it:

According to these sources, this restructuring was accomplished on a "dollar neutral" basis, meaning that Berkshire didn't have to pony up cash to do the trade.

Like a gambler doubling down on credit, Berkshire instead purportedly sold a significantly larger number of short-dated contracts than the original transaction -- meaning that the potential risk of loss to Buffet and his shareholders over the next 10 years has actually increased, but only if the markets were to decline from current levels and remain there.

Sources also say that Berkshire was squeezed more on the pricing this time around since the company's credit is not quite as pristine as it was two years ago.

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

Thanks Monty23. Igneous, I can put up my mug shot - but somehow I doubt that would do the trick ;-)


On May 14 10:24 AM Monty23 wrote:

> Welcome back Eli. And thanks for the information.

Why dividends matter: Historically, dividends are responsible for about half of the stock market's total return. Yet by 2000, their slice of the pie plunged to just 10%. Meager dividends could significantly delay any full recovery.

Great discussion on SA comments system here:

seekingalpha.com/insta...

Feel free to weigh in.

This comment in particular:

seekingalpha.com/insta...

addresses this specific Market Current and the ensuing comment thread.

Thursday's economic calendar: 8:30 Producer Price Index 8:30 Jobless Claims 10:30 EIA Natural Gas Report 4:30 PM Money Supply

Great discussion on SA comments system here:

seekingalpha.com/insta...

Feel free to weigh in.

I agree that "markets up/down after ..." is annoying and mainly useless, with notable exceptions when it's clear a certain event had a direct impact on the markets. We try to stay clear of this kind of hindsight-based comments on Market Currents.

How Should We Improve Seeking Alpha's Comment Rating System?

It seems to me from the great feedback here that the first and most critical feature we need is "ignore." To answer your question, David, I think users should have access to how many ignores they've earned, but I would stop short of giving them the information of who's put them on ignore which could be inflammatory.

Aside from the beauty of being able to turn out someone who doesn't interest you, an ignore feature would largely stop the troll-generated comment threads that mikebrah bemoans, because trolls would quickly be ignored by large sections of the community.

As far as the concern that a positive-only ratings system would incentivize people to comment as much as possible, how about if your rating is not based on overall # of positive votes, but rather on the average # of positive votes per comment. That would move insightful commenters up to the top of the leader board, where we want them. (And how about publishing a commenter's rating next to his avatar, like ABC +5.2?) To avoid one-comment-wonders invadingt he most-popular list, we could set a threshold of minimum 50 comments before someone appears there.

I like 31October's idea of weighted comments too. To add to that, we could consider algorithmically weighting a users ratings by his own rating, so that top-rated users' ratings are more influential than weak-rated users. We could also add weighting for contributors.

I agree that rating articles is even more susceptible to gaming than rating comments. I think that to some extent, the comments themselves are a form of rating an article. Perhaps it would be nice to add "most commented" to our lists of most-read and editors' picks. (Most commented does appear on instablog posts, but doesn't seem to appear on regular posts.)

Agree with Cliff that contributors should be getting comment notifications by email. Many message boards also give you the option of "subscribing" to a comment thread, so that you're notified when there are new comments.

Seeking Alpha: Interesting Sentiment Indicator

Interesting study that suggests fading bloggers may be dangerous to one's financial health:

seekingalpha.com/artic...

How Should We Improve Seeking Alpha's Comment Rating System?

Thanks David for bringing this issue to the forefront.

The idea of having comments "fade out" as they're voted down has been raised. I'm concerned that opens an even bigger window for ratings abuse, if you can make someone you disagree with disappear by voting them down enough.

OTOH, I have often thought that the ability to "ignore" specific commenters that grate on one's nerves would be an easy solution to allow users to skip comments of other users they find consistently annoying. It does at times make for awkward threads if you've muted someone to whom someone else is responding, but I think the benefits outdo the losses.

Floating top-rated comments to the top of the comment stream is another popular idea. It concerns be because a) it disrupts the chronological order of comments, which is sometimes valuable and b) because it makes newer comments, which haven't yet been rated, less likely to be seen at all. However, as an option ("let me see the top comments on this article") I think it would be good - but I'd prefer to keep the default view as we have it currently.

The highly-popular comparison of the current hope that banks can earn their way out of trouble to Japan - whose Lost Decade seems to prove the fallacy of that assumption - fails to capture what went wrong in Japan, and why the U.S. is so different, James Surowiecki says.

Interesting theory. Wrong, though. We take our work far too seriously to spend most of our waking hours on this.

Suggestion to Cetin: It's great that you're bullish. Differences of opinion is what makes the markets function, and clearly you've been right at least over the extreme short term.

But why the need to constantly ram it down people's throats?


On May 09 09:59 PM mikebrah wrote:

> Cetin is just an inside joke amongst the Seeking Alpha webmasters.
> He has to be. Think about it, how could one man really be the first
> to post a comment on EVERY article EVERY day? And it adds that little
> something to the experience you don't get at other sites!
>
> Keep up the good work SA, er Cetin!
>
> MM