user225084-justme's Comments

Japanese Investors Saying 'No Thanks' to Government Bonds

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:33:01 -0500

>>The Mainichi Shimbun (original in Japanese) reported early Thursday that Japanese Government Bonds’ (JGBs) popularity is rapidly falling among individual investors.

How did the report arrive at the conclusion made that the bonds popularity is rapidly falling??

Commodities: How to Trade Like Goldman Sachs

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:24:59 -0500

>>Goldman likes Summer 2010 NYMEX Natural Gas futures.

Translation: Goldman would like YOU to buy 2010 NYMEX Natural Gas futures.

Whether they would like to buy the same product for their own account is a completely different story....

I hope y'all understand that.

Wall Street Securitizing Life Insurance Policies. Seriously.

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:16:50 -0400

Y'all understand what this means

Wall St will *want* to have Death Panels(*), because the bonds will become more valuable that way.

(*) not that they didn't already. We need to privatize the Death Panels so that they can be run more efficiently.

Bill Gross: Dividend Stocks and Bonds Make Most Sense Now

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:26:47 -0400

To what extent is this just Bill Gross being self-serving and peddling his own bond products?

Does Bill Gross have a track record of predicting the bubble and making good recommendations when it mattered, around Aug-Oct 2007?

The Wisdom of Half Positions

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:01:49 -0400

As someone indicated earlier, one key operation in this system is to decide what constitutes a "full" and "half" position in the first place.

Otherwise the whole scheme degrades into "doubling down", rather than "singling down", which would be the name for Case2 above. And everyone knows that doubling down is "bad" :-)

Another problem with the recipe is that it does not define clearly what "dropping like a stone" means (case2). What time-scale are we talking about? A day? A week? Two weeks? Percentages?

Perhaps the biggest problem with the system is that it is somewhat wooly and vague.

Rosetta Stone IPO: Good Risk / Reward Trade Below $20

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:03:42 -0400

It should be illegal to float an IPO until all relevant financial information, are available on a multitude of financial web sites such as Marketwatch, Bloomberg, Yahoo and Google.

The data must include historical revenues, hsitorical earnings, size of offering, share totals and float, and number of unvested options.

The SEC should be responsible for enforcing the above requirement.

People buy into these IPOs without even reading the S-1 registration statement, basically "investing" blindly based on momentum and hype.

Big vs. Little: Bigger Banks Aren't Better

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:30:10 -0400

Her's something to keep in mind: If all banks assets consist of slivers of the same CDO paper, they will still all fail at the same time.

The fact that they are all *small* banks is not going to make all that much of a difference.

Upshot: The problem is more the nature of securitization, and not so much the size of the banks.

Another Sign of the Times: Torched Cars in the Desert

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:58:48 -0400

Look at it from a resource point of view:

This is an ecological disaster. First we spend tons of materials and energy on building cars, and then some dipsticks *burn* them, all in the name of preserving a *credit rating*.

Talk about obscene waste of resources and money.

Another Sign of the Times: Torched Cars in the Desert

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:58:48 -0400

How Do You Buy Spot Oil?

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:23:46 -0400

Ferdinand,

But perhaps the ETF funds such as USO do not use (or are not permitted to use) the full arsenal of futures, options and swaps?

Could that be the problem?

How Do You Buy Spot Oil?

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:49:31 -0400

Excellent article full of good data and good links/references.

USL, USO and the Contango Collapse

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:58:12 -0400

Can you provide some numerical measure of how the contango has reversed?

When I look at the futures prices today the slope of the forward curve does not seem all that different than it did 2-4 weeks ago.

Is there a site that plots a "contango curve" for each and every date, so that we can more easily compare and see for ourselves?

Book Review: Robert Hefner's 'The Grand Energy Transition'

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:20:33 -0400

>> Society is transitioning from an unsustainable past based on solid and liquid energy sources (coal and oil) to a future of sustainable life based on energy gases (natural gas, wind, solar, hydrogen).

Yeah, wind is a concerted motion of a gas (or rather a mixture of gases). What's your point? Solar energy emanates from nuclear fission reactions in the hot gases (actually plasma) of the sun. So what? That does not imply that natural gas somehow is the solution to all our energy problems on planet earth. This whole thing that "gas is common to all our solutions" is very disingenuous and totally misleading.

This book and the review is as ill-informed as people who go around thinking that their weight problems are caused by "toxins" in their food, and that "cleansing their body" will fix it. Of course the problem is simply that they ate too much fat and other energy-rich foods (fat, by the way is the human body's form of long term energy storage).

Book Review: Robert Hefner's 'The Grand Energy Transition'

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:04:49 -0400

The book (and review) makes it sound we have a choice between burning solid/liquid or gasous fuel, and our problem is mostly that we made the wrong choice.

This is just hogwash. There are limited supplies of all fossile fuels and for the last 100 years we have generally been burning all we can get our hands on as soon as we have extracted it from underground.

Alex Filonov is completely right about hydrogen being only an energy carrier, and not a very good one at that. There are very limited sources of natural gas, just as oil, and there are NO natural direct sources of hydrogen. Separating water into hydrogen and oxygen using a green power source (electric wind power) is literally a waste of energy. One would be better off just sending the electricity directly out on the grid.

Controlled fusion of heavy hydrogen is nowhere near practical,
and has yet to break even in terms of energy in/out.

In summary, all this talk about "gases being better" is very unproductive. Sure it would be better, if only we had abundant or unlimited sources of the valuable gases. We don't.

There really is no substitute for understanding basic physics and chemistry, This book is a perfect example of how wrong the lay-person can be.

Dr. Doom Responds on Wells Fargo

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:37:03 -0500

If Roubini had to send a letter to the editor each time someone misapplied his work, then he would be a very busy man.

But when people misapply his work, and then attribute the errant conclusions to him, I suppose he has to take the time to speak up.

Case in point.

Acknowledging Our 'Animal Spirits'

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 20:00:18 -0500

Keynes was a clever man, but I really wish he had come up with a more serious name than "animal spirits" to describe the psychological/behavior... component of human economic activity.

I would have expected Robert Shiller NOT to pick such a title of his new book, but perhaps the publisher thought "animal spirits" would play well with the more new-age "spiritual" type of consumers. It is a business to sell books, after all.

Pay Attention to Divergence Between Oil Price and ETF

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:48:11 -0500

Where do I find graphs and data for the rolling $WTIC index?

In Praise of Suze Orman

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:28:11 -0500

Suze Orman is a master of the very obvious basics of financial sense.

However, when she gets into the deeper end of the pool I'd not be inclined to follow her example (or advice).

Bond Expert: The Emperor Has No Clothes

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:07:05 -0500

On Feb 11 04:23 PM dieuwer wrote:
(...)

Good explanation! Basically it is a multi-lateral money-printing agreement that hides the printing behind the smoke and mirrors.

Rahm’s Doctrine and Breaking Up the Banks

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:32:34 -0500

Rahm doctrine? I thought it was the Bush doctrine that one can use disaster and distress as a smoke screen to start a war that is completely wrong and has no relation to the problem it is purported to "solve".

Rich Like Them

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 17:55:38 -0500

>> ...traveling through the 100 wealthiest zip codes in the US, getting stories from the wealthy that would give him time.

Heeeellllo. Do you really think people are going to tell you how to get rich? What they will do it is to serve up a load of self-serving drivel.

You are more naive than people that think that a Jack Welch business book *really* tells you what Jack Welch did to become CEO of GE. I'm quite sure that whatever he does NOT tell was very ugly indeed.

The Heretics of Finance

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 12:35:09 -0500

The problem with technical analysis is that it is neither technical nor analytic.

My take is that by choosing the time scale or diddling with some parameter one can get a technical analysis to support (pun intended) a wide range of outcomes that are mutually exclusive.

In plain English: It is all rubbish and vodoo.

The Short Case for JPMorgan

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 12:46:30 -0500

On Jan 17 08:35 AM Did U Think The Ponzi Scheme Would Last? wrote:

> CEOs pissed away trillions so that they could personally make hundreds
> of millions. We should just have given them 50 billion and told
> them to do the right thing.

Right on, I somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggested this a few months ago. Think of it as a sort of "protection-racket" or "Wall St private tax", where the I-banks promise not to destroy value if we give them a handout of a few billion a year.

Much cheaper than going through all the gyrations of pretending that there i something useful getting done and then losing trillions from it in order to get a few billion in bonuses.

Madoff sort of had it right. He just forgot to return 49B of the 50B.

10 Ideas for Newspaper Survival

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 10:23:00 -0500

How about QUALITY, RELEVANCE and TRUSTWORTHYNESS?

The reason I no longer subscribe to a newspaper is mainly related to the quality of the content.

After the national media essentially gave George Bush a free pass before the 2000 (and 2004) election, as well as showed their utter cluelessness or menace in allowing uncritically the lies and propaganda that led to the Iraq war, I no longer trust any of our major newspapers with the job of informing me about the world.

It is that simple.

Instead of printing balanced and critical news reports, the papers were i busy prattling on about the endlessly rising housing market and pandering to their advertisers from the National Association of Realtors.

Those are good enough reasons for me, and they are just the tip of the iceberg of omission, incompetence and misinformation that has been passing for 'news" the last 20 years.

The papers

1. Missed the Iraq war fraud
2. Missed the housing and economic bubble entirely

Does anyone need additional reasons not to subscribe to the newspaper?

With 75bp Cut, Fed Becomes the Most Aggressive Central Bank

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 01:16:36 -0500

Kathy Lien always gets excited when there is an opportunity to argue that the USD is going down.

Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with that, but on the other hand be aware that she has never posted an argument that USD would rise, even in the last 3 months when it rose 20% against some currencies.

In other words: Bias alert !!

Cisco Valuation So 'Silly' It's Time to Buy - JMP

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:12:58 -0400

What? Cisco has been going essentially nowhere for 5 years. And now, in the middle og a huge downturn, the analysts suddenly thinks Cco is a screaming buy, by looking backward?

I think not.

Time for Global Coordinated Easing

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:01:35 -0400

I'm not surprised ;-)

Time for Global Coordinated Easing

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:12:57 -0400

Translation: Kathy Lien is short dollar and wants Bernanke to reduce the interest rate to 0 so that she will get a chance to cover her position.

This article contains an extraordinary amount of mumbo-jumbo and nothing concrete about anything. I'm nor surprised.

Fannie and Freddie Did Not Cause This Crisis

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:17:49 -0400

It would be wiser to use the term "commission issue" or even "agent issue" (not "agency issue") when talking about commission/agent issues and FNM/FRE in the same gasp of air.

The problem with the terminology used in this article is that the reader can be confused because FNM/FRE loans are commonly referred to as "agency loans", in the sense of "via government agency". Although we all know that FNM/FRE are not really (or supposedly) "government agencies", the terminology seems to be very common.

Four Myths About the Free Market and Its 'Demise'

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:50:25 -0400

Good article, Rick.