fxtrader07

Are You Short or Long China?

the chinese can have it both ways. the americans can't.
face it, the motherland of all bubbles (i.e. the u.s.) is of declining importance to nations like china. sure, they will feel the negative impact of a recession. but it won't matter to them even half as much as a few years ago

Is Google Apps the Next Microsoft Office?

I really don't understand all the hype about web-based office applications. I would never, ever write documents, letters, spreadsheets or the like online, regardless who offers the service. privacy is something that has a very high value to me so i'd rather spend a few dollars for a desktop office suite than running the risk that everythin i write ends up in the ever more hungry data collecting databases of some businesses (and whoever else collects them). It may be a"nice to have" feature in certain areas, but overall it will be one of the many money-sinking never profitable avenues followed by IT companies that will just be a continuation of the senseless money spending/wasting that started in earnest in the late 1990s. In a way, taken all together the IT/software/applicatio... branch is probably one of the largest wasters of money and resources ever.

Greenspan's Latest: Oil Boom Will Likely 'Go on Forever'

@NY EE & Travis: the point is not to find "someone" to put all the blame on. rather, to identify those who acted the least responsible even while holding the most influential positions. There can be zero doubt that the position of the Fed chairman was and is one of the most powerful of the entire planet. Its influence will slowly diminish along woth the diminishing role of the US Dollar and of the USA but it will remain very powerful for quite some time to come. There can be zero doubt as well 8since it is all well documented) that Greenspan as no other Fed chairman before him has been providing easy and cheap money whenever any perceived problem occured. Compare prices back when greenspan took over in 1987 to those that there are now. Greenspan has "achieved" a 70-80% collapse of the purchasing power of the dollar (and thats the ultra- conservative calculation) within his 20year s at the helm of the fed. his forecasts regarding the economy were wrong 9 out of 10 times. And btw, while we speak of putting the blame on someone: Greenspan himself has refused any and all responsibility and blamed it on everybody else but him.
@travis: nice job of repeating the official mantras without even bordering to think about their silliness. I suggest you look into some books e.g. peter schiff#s "crash proof" or even read some earlier articles and speeches by greenspan which totally falsify each and every of your points.
regarding lon-term rates: Greenspan made it clear time and again that he wanted long-term rates low and that he would keep short-ter, rates low as long as possible. There was very active encouragement by the fed of getting the long yields very very low via excessively low short term rates. how did it work? well, by virtually guranteeing market players that short term rates won't be raised anytime soon and even if, not very much, greenspan induced a much wanted run by big institutions to buy long bonds and financing that with lower short-term debt. that m,echanism brought the long bonds slowly but steadily down to absurd levels and that is still the case today! It is a vastly distorted market. Even offcial inflation runs at more than 4% now and the unmassaged and unmanipulated numbers are way above that (just think of the nonsense of "core-cpi" being cpi less the most needed things (energy and food) with the most inelastic demand). In a free (i.e. not manipulated) market nobody would buy 10yr/30yr treasuries yielding barely 4% and hence losing money in real terms! so give me a break her. the notion trhat the fed cannot and is not manipulating long-term rates is pure nonsense disproved by reality

A Short Comment on Shorting

Hey Quaker, fine that it works for you (these days). However, shorting stocks is a sucker's game long term. odds are very high against you. but confident as you sound, i am sure you will notice in advance when the market starts killing shorties again.
Btw, it strikes me that plenty of people got very rich long-term who never shorted or even directly hedged a position. I have yet to come across someone who got rich long term shorting - barring perhaps one out of a million who tried. if you are confident to belong to this 0.0001%, well go ahead. otherwise you might find out what's truly working long term the hard way
and not to forget: a strategy enhancing the profits by writing covered calls regularly or occasionally will probably beat a long-only or shorting portfolio most of the time

TheStreet.com on Primus Guaranty: Wacky and Uninformed

another great article, Tom

@reclined: good points though i doubt that the company will disclose what exact amount of dry powder it still has.
apart from that, i simply don't see anyone willing right now to start a company like PRS. the banks are trying to get out of a business they in most cases were running with too little regard for risk. hedge funds are in many cases reeling for cash as well. most important though: it seems you cannot easily replicate a mgmt team like the one running PRS. talk about a moat. others are blowing up left and right - these guys are expanding business! maybe their higher cost structures are due to more resources deployed for really careful analysis. I mean, genius and talent apart, there is very much hard work involved in running a cds business in a superior way- so employing a few very bright and high-paid analysts may be costlier - but pay off ultimately. but i guess, tom could explain what i am just guessing

4 Indications Fed Rate Cuts Are Near an End

you are way off the mark and miss the most important markets to the story. forget the stock markets and look at the credit markets and the emerging muni-bond crisis . its not just about the monoline insurers there but about the brokers and banks making no longer a market due to capital constraints and auctions have failed en masse. the credit markets are priced for catastrophy and even though they can be wrong at times there is in any case a huge disconnect between the equity markets and the bond markets right now. since the bonds are way more important to the economy and financing than the stocks, the fed will continue to ease. imho they won't stop short of 2.00 for the fed funds and even a 1,xx is not ruled out.

Insider Confidence Makes E*Trade a Buy

"heavy insider buying"??? are you kidding? apart from the fact that these may be concerted buys to suck people like you in, the numbers are not impressive at all
apart from that etfc will be shocking people when they have to report how many customers they have lost over the past weeks.
certainly, there are way better and lower risk insider plays out there.
and lo and behold - the author himself seems not quite willing to put his money into etfc

Sherwin Williams: Don't Miss the Boat

hey dean, truly comprehensive analysis on your part.
at least it made for an easy, quick read. LOL

WTF Headline of the Day: "Dow 18,500? Believe It"

18500 is a bit of a strect, yes, but not at all ruled out. if the fed and the govt can prevent a real meltdown of the financial sector and the conomy for another couple of years then those heavy liquidity injections, low interest rates and surging inflation will also tend to propel stock prices upward. after all, they are not purely financial assets but have some value based on real assets and on earnings power. so a dow at 18.000 is no big deal, actually. It might just be that these 18.000 in real-dollar terms (real inflation adjusted - not by the cooked ex-inflation-cpi) may be worth less than todays 12.5k

Latest Walk-Away: Toll Brother Family Member

looks like Toll is taking a toll on the Toll family. LOL. nice find, though i doubt it will be more than lipservice by the company

Reading Between the Lines of the Jobless Claims Data

always wonder about the importance that is given to these numbers by many people.
first, they are lagging indicators
second, the are frequently revised, often 1 year later and often by a huge margin then questioning what they were really worth at the time of original release
third, the leave out all those people who are self-employed but forced to give up, and boy, is that number a big one these days
fourth, these numbers are massively cooked, massaged and "adjusted" by the BLS
adding it all up, these numbers make for frequent large up and down swings in the bond , stock and currency markets even though they contain almost zero verifyable content or put it differently: as a forecasting and even as a look-back analytical tool they are pretty much worthless

as a side note, it seems odd that the largest economy in the world that is lately so absessed with collecting data and information about each and every person has yet to come up with a comprehenseive and reliable labour statistics. in Europe, these numbers are highly accurate (even though "right-sized" and "adjusted" for political purpose, too) based on real, filed claims and on real, reported employment by virtually all employers while the U.S. for some inconceivable reason continues to rely on polls and door-to-door interviews (guesstimates)

Yahoo Makes Its Case in Letter to Shareholders

well, talk is cheap. and so far all that yahoo's mgmt has accomplished over the past years is that the stock got cheap, too.
they will continue to disappoint and underdeliver - be it alone, with msft or with another partner. it's a great franchise but the business is in a sustained decline losing more and more out to goog and no true reversal is insight

Is Yahoo Really Worth More Than Microsoft Offered?

@mkreisel: interestingly, yahoo's mgmt doesn't care at all. keeping their jobs seems their premier occupation these days and greedy shareholders follow in blind faith, all the well-documented disappointments notwithstanding
what a joke

Citi's Merrill Note Should Boost Shares

hard to believe that merill haveing shown its complete failure in risk management and exercise of prudence should now become the poster child of both.
the franchise might still be a good one and i am not proposing an aggressive short here but when this financial mess is over, we will be at least 1-2 years further down the road and a number of former sources of revenues will have ceased to exist.
then, the U.S.A will slowly but steadily´lose its statust as the financial centre of the world which will shift towards Asia
this is not a small blip here, this is a watershed event. the glory days for america's big financial firms are over and they are not going to return anytime soon
smaller businesses, smaller revenues (smaller bonuses? - i doubt it) are there to stay. what we saw over the past 10 years were excesses. the return to normalcy means getting used to normalized. much smaller earnings as well

Yahoo's Board: If Extortion Fails, It Isn't Our Money Anyway

great article summing up the doubletalk of yahoo's mgmt which has miserably failed in the past
reading through the irrationally exuberant expectations by some yahoo shareholders on various message boards it is evident that the overall market is far from done on the downside (some near-term rallies notwithstanding). people there are out in droves expecting at least 40 or even 50$/share for their yahoo holding even though the market priced them at less than 20$ a few days ago
it is truly stunning to watch the people on a sinking ship (yahoo) bargain with the saviour's crew (msft) about how much they should get for getting saved.
perhaps msft should simply drop its ill-considered offer and leave those morons at yahoo on their own. maybe a year from now, even the last shareholder of yahoo wil have figured out that receiving 31$ for a share in a ever sinking ship in fact was a gift from heaven