fxtrader07

No Uptick Rule: A Convenient Scapegoat?

Herb, you are a poster child for bad journalism (i.e. cooking negative stories about specially targetted companies all day that were told to him by his hedgefund friends and masters). Now, switching to a "analyst career" you stop pretending being a jourmalist any more. or so i hope at least.
Now you can directly provide your "independent" bashing "research". Not much will change, though. Your naked short selling friends (uh, oh, naked short selling doesn't even exits, right, Herb? Too bad for you, that even the SEC regards it as a huge problem by now) will call you up as usual telling you the stories as they need them to destroy ever more companies with false allegations and cooked-up "research".

Overstock.com: Patrick Byrne's Tenuous Grasp of Reality

Herb, you are surely one of the most blatant story-cookers out there.
"feeling sorry" for Byrne? No need, Herb. His conscience, I am 100% sure, is pure and clear. In this regard, you may start feel sorry for yourself. If there is any self respect and conscience left with you at all, that is.

The Case for Getting Short

sorry, i don't want to be short es futures here. play short term spy puts or oex puts or whatever - but not the futures!
looking at the pattern, it smells like a stinky normal a-b-c corrective pattern and if it really is, it will top out either at 1000 (SPX) or 1100 (SPX). likley, it vwill be 1.050 in the sp500.
longer term, this market will likely revisit the match lows and go lower - 400-500 would be my best guess.
that being said, you still could make money in individual stocks and corporate bonds without shorting anything.
However, I will scale into spome otm shorts here for protection.
remember, the heaviest rally off the 1932 lows went 75-80% that's tmhe maximum upside that i give this market off the march 09 lows and if it gets near to 60% i will sell 80% of my stocks and take 50% of the proceeds to go short the overall market

Why Punish the Whistle Blower?

If short selling were properly regulated and regulations really enforced (e.g. banning ANY NAKED SHORTING, disclosure requirements for substantial short positions similar to the long position reporting obligations, reinstating of the uptick rule) then a ban of legitimate short selling was not needed at all. But rather than doing their homework and fixing the stuff the SEC didn't bother to fix all those years, they now screw up things even further. Sort of a man hiding in a cave from the rain rather than just repairing the roof of his house.

SEC: Don't Mess with Market Mechanics

another moron who has no clue and cannot distinguish between naked short selling and the legitimate short selling against genuinely borrowed shares.
naked short selling is actually illegal already. so you have to wonder why an illegal practise gets banned just temporary and for a few selected privileged companies.
before you write such silly crap you might want to get some education about the ongoing crime and scam of naked short selling first.

John Hussman: Is There a Possibility of $60 Oil?

refreshing to see someone actually thinking about future supply-demand dynamics instead of the now oh-so-common dumb repetition of peak-oil-hype (where the only question discussed is when oil will break 200$, 400$,...)

Internet Content in Crisis: Are We Becoming Mental Grasshoppers?

great short article on the counter-productivity of the information flood and the internet. the modern media and communication facilities make us all so more procutive, don't they? Yes and No. They speed up things but very often at the expense of quality. Often things get taken unchecked and unquestioned leading to the blind copying of ideas and inputs and to a herd-mentality of thinking, arguing and vision. Strictly limitingand constantly monitoring and controlling one's moves through the jungles of information and mis-information, of facts, fiction, deception and information overkill will be more essential then ever.

Treasury Bonds: The Short of the Century

poor timing , i would say. t-bonds will be the short of the century at one point. but not just yet. Inflation isn understated, true. and the printing presses ran way too easy, also true. BUT: the fed hasn't been overly expansive in its monetary policy over the past years, contrary to what many believe and assume. Second, the demographics (retiring baby-boomers) and the deleveraging and asset-deflation that is going on will exert strong anti-inflationary pressure over the coming 2-3 years. We may well see 10-year yields of 2.5-3% before we get a 5%+ print. remember japan? 1-2% long term yields were certainly regarded by many as a 'short of the century', too. but look, how poorly that short has worked out for more than 5-6 years?
Shorting t-bonds seems to be the obvious 'surefire' trade these days. a tad too obvious, perhaps?
at the turn of 2009/2010 the time might be right. right now i think it will tie up money for quite some time right now when there are way sexier opportunities to deploy it.

Buy and Hold Is Dead

'To make big money we must stay flexible, be open minded and be willing to change our mind...'

That's certainly true - but why does that mean to flip stocks every month? Why should that mean the #end of buy-and-hold'?
Au contraire! It means exactly the oposite. In a time where people rush in and out of stocks like never before, the patient, smart ibnvestor wins even bigger versus the lemmings. It 'only' means to stomach even more noise and take another step backwards from the crowd's frenzy. It means holding a good portion of cash and then buying the screaming values when people dump them to chase the next hot investment topic.
Ken Heebner achieved truly great results - but he is one of the very very few people who make big profits with high turnover consistently. 99.9% of the people who trade in and out simply throw their money out the window where it will end up in the balance sheets of brokers and of the govt (via capital gains taxes).
I guess, five years from now the author will look at this article in disbelieve that he ever could write somethinmg that, uhm, short-sighted.

Economics of Oil Futures Trading, Part I

your article is absolute crap, really! You claim a PhD but you obviously have no clue about futures and commodities markets. And given your recent articles on economic matters (inflation, unemployment) thze same applies to general economics.
it is easy to talk in abstract terms about 'rising demand' and 'diminishing supplies' but when these are cited to prove something like causes for price movements one would think that a PhD couid come up with real, hard numbers and facts.
the same applies to the numbers behind money inflows into commodities markets. you simply ignore them - and then you call the article 'economics of oil futures'
I rest my case

The Tellurium Supernova Has Erupted

@Andrew: your increasingly hostile barking at mark reveals how high your emotions are running. calm down, emotional investing guarantees losses down the road. Rationalizing one's decisions and shooting the messenger of potentially disturbing news to your investment thesis is very common among retail investors as well as institutional fund managers. But in fact, you should welcome articles like that of mark because they could serve as a warning flag before things go bad - or they could serve to further strengthen your investment thesis upon genuine dismissal.
As i see it, Mark may be really on to something. (by the way, there are hundreds of smaller and larger companies out there that do respond to inquiries even when they do not come from Fidelity or Wellington. If FSLR doesn't - even after analysts ask, then this smells big time.)
And can't you see the contradictions lining up at FSLR?
first, they state in their filings that Te-prices have gone up 3-fold (btw, itself incorrect for the mentioned timeframe as the increase was much larger) but that this did not significantly affect them. a sentence later they admit that they break with their established practice and now entered into lonmg-term contracts to secure supplies.
then, and only upon analysts' requests an officer of fslr states in a cc that they 'identified' terrawatts of te-supply. READ CAREFULLY! 'identified' does not equal secured. nor does it say if or when they would be available
then comes the ominous job-offer along. Now, if that does not scream 'Te-supply problems ahead', i don't know what will. Again, the problem is NOT the price FSLR has to pay. The problem is that EITHER they do NOT GET the Te that they need OR that in order to sufficiently boost production and hence supply the price would have to rise to levels where it WILL make a huge difference to FSLRs bottom line. What is so hard about that to understand?
If I were you, rather than attacking Mark, I might try to genuinely counter his arguments - or upon failing so, you might think of reducing your position.
disclosure: i am slightly short fsl. i hold some other solar stock longs against a part of that position. My short thesis is not based on the te-issue, but simply because fslr is as overvalued and priced-for-perfection a stock (and that in an industry with high potential for disruptive technologies) as there is currently in the market

Asian Market Strategies for Stagflation

"there is lots of money on the sidelines" waiting to be invested. have heard that over and over,
Q1: is it really there and waiting?
Q2: Oil prices , as the prices for each and verything, are not growing into the sky. For all the peak-oil arguments (which are true, no doubt) they have yet failed to pinpoint some "fair" value or intrinsic value for oil. of course they can't - nobody can. make no mistake, the moment demand cools, the oilprices will drop (albeit not crash) there may be better entry points than 126$/bl

Markel's a Buffett-In-Waiting - Barron's

buffet is not the only one with a long-term outstanding track record.
so missing buffet does not equal mediocre returns, necessarily.

barron's writing a positive article on mkl is somewhat disturbing to me (me being significantly long the stock) as Barron's has earned a reputation with me over the past 2 years as having tuned into one of the worst financial publications out there with a lot of unfounded made-up articles either pumping or bashing stocks. In many cases it was quite obvious that this was not just due to simple journalistic incompetence but rather deliberation.

Time to Short Oil Due to Excessive Speculation? Think Again

the author obviously completely missed the point made in a must-read presentation made this week before the u.s. senate committee on homeland security regarding the massive build-up of commodities investments by long-only, price-insensitive index speculators like pension funds:
hsgac.senate.gov/publi...

these people may not create an uptrend - long term, the uptredn for commodity prices is there anyway, at least in nominal dollar terms. But they can extremely spped up and exacerbate this trend given the relative miniscule size of the world's commodities markets.
so while i am convincedn of oil reaching well above 160-200$ longer term, this years spike by over 35% in just 5 months is very much driven by artificial additional demand.
talk about crude oil etfs - people buying this stuff should not complain about $4 gasoline - because they helped to add additional demand in crude in the first place. to be clear: i do not blame them - it is as good a hedge as it gets. but they have simnply no right to complain about rising oil and gas prices as they are helping their rise.

JPMorgan, Bear Stearns: More Smoke from Wall Street

odds are pretty good that jpm eliminated a lot of bad exposure by simply taking over the counterparty to it (i.e. the winning bettor of the trades). Bear stearns was NOt really insolvent - but it got under a vicious attack from a handful of hedge fund and naked short sellers who were trying to drag the entire market down. if you can succeed in igniting a run - any bank will collapse. ANY! even the healthiest (which bear of course was not) so even though i believe that jpm got a very sweet deal here, i can understand and defend the fed's action in this particular case.
@trw88: there is a reason why this time the gloomers and doomers might be nearer to the truth than anyone else - and than anytime before...