tedstr's Comments

Pimco's Bill Gross, manager of the world’s biggest bond fund, cuts Treasury holdings and boosted cash to the most since the Lehman collapse in 2008 amid increasing speculation that interest rates will rise. Over the past month, Pimco's Total Return Fund went to cash holdings of +7% from -7%, while Treasury holdings fell to 51% from 63%.

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:56:11 -0500

Slingwing I too am heavy in some MLPs and mortgage vulture REITs. NOt sure how to read the latest moves.

On Dec 18 02:33 PM SlingWing9 wrote:

> I'm holding several MLPs that are skyrocketing. Is that related to
> this discussion?
>
> I'm also holding TBT, short bonds, and doing ok. This seems to suggest
> to keep that position. Do you agree assuming Bill Gross is correct?
>
>
> Foreign investments through ETFs would appear to be the clear winner
> as well as currency ETFs. Do you agree again assuming Bill Gross
> is correct?

Pimco's Bill Gross, manager of the world’s biggest bond fund, cuts Treasury holdings and boosted cash to the most since the Lehman collapse in 2008 amid increasing speculation that interest rates will rise. Over the past month, Pimco's Total Return Fund went to cash holdings of +7% from -7%, while Treasury holdings fell to 51% from 63%.

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:54:15 -0500

Watch what Ben does, not what he says. He will stop buying Treasuries long before he says. I belive it is already underway. If the troubled bankls can hang on and not let their new tangible common equity (ie the common they just sold to us retail punters) drop in a pull back, they will survive more bad mortgages to come as housing collapse #2 happens when Ben lets the rates climb.

Good guess on the state help on the way Javos

Taleb goes berserk on the upcoming Bernanke reappointment: "I cannot believe that we... can accept living in such a society. I am not blaming Bernanke (he doesn't even know he doesn't understand how things work or that the tools he uses are not empirical); it is the Senators appointing him who are totally irresponsible."

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:44:23 -0500

Dude needs to switch to decaf.

Natural Gas: Worst Investment Ever?

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:31:00 -0400

Certainly much has to do with supply...we have more than ever. But the big controlling factor is usage and that is driven by industrial demand, principally electricity. Electricity demand has been dropping for months due to our indistrial over capacity. utilities are slowing generation or switching to coal and hydro plants to preserve margins.

This all makes a perfect storm for Nat Gas prices and a perfect buying opportunity once in a decade. A slight bump in electricity demand will send the utilities back to Nat Gas ASAP and a nice bump back up in price.

Recession Is Over; Depression Has Just Begun

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:26:15 -0400

Recession is when your neighbor is out of work. Depression is when you are out of work.

Nice article.

Employment in Crisis

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 07:10:40 -0400

This is not so complicated folks. The social change that is happening is that the dual income home is fading. More women are finding that they do not need or want to work as much. Some men are finding they do not need or want to work as much. Some of this takes the form of early retirement. Some is just moms staying home. Some is discouragement, some is just making choices.

To be sure unemploymnent is high, but not all of the non-employment seeking workers are still discouraged workers. This is a very significant social change that will have profound effects on consumption and savings for the next generation.

The past 25 years of runaway consumption in the US was fueled by the two income home and disproportionate wealth in the upper middle class (ie "mass affluence"). This will be replaced by increasing hourly wages for a reduced labor force, reduced consumption and increased savings rate.

Local Media's Hidden Asset: Their Salesforce

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:01:04 -0400

CBS and Classifieds 2000 tried this 10 years ago and failed miserably. Others in the Yellow Pages space also tried it and failed.
Times are different now, but the key is the incentive and the TRUE motivation of the sales force.

Most traditional media assets are now so impaired that their salesforce and their owners are willing to try anything though I would argue that 90% of traditional media sales people don't undertstand, don't like, don't use, and resent, digital media.

With 30 years in traditional and digital media sales, I never met anyone from the Yellow Pages or directory business until I got into the web. The web is very much the directory business culture. It's like a cultural wall between the two worlds.

Ten Reasons for an Imminent Stock Market Crash

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:49:49 -0400

Would someone please explain the difference between flash trades and pump and dump. Sorry but this whole rally is beginning to smell like manipulation.

There is nothing wrong with 1050-1200 on the S&P. But the fear of something less and the flash trading could easily set off a big sell off down to 800-900 with a recovery just as fast.

Marc Faber: Equities Safer than Dollars

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:54:45 -0400

Faber may be a smart guy but we need to stop all this alarmist talk and get on with fixing the problems.

I am a very typical consumer and I spend about 80% of my monthly purchases on things that stay in the US. My mortgage, education for my children, telcom, entertainment and food. I heat and cook my food with natural gas which is in vast oversupply and mostly American.

I fly mostly on American built planes, I buy mostly American built software and I hire Americans to run my town and educate and protect my family.

Yes my cars are foreign but my Toyota was built here by Americans.

5 Excellent, Non-Pipeline Income Stocks

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:11:33 -0400

Sorry I meant MLPs

5 Excellent, Non-Pipeline Income Stocks

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:09:24 -0400

Seems to me these commodity related MLPs are the way to go right now. I am long LINE and looking at several others. With certainly better than 50/50 shot that we are going to have rising energy and commodity prices over the next year and potentially rising interest rates, these two forces may cancel each other out with these ETFs effectively hedging the 10-11% payout and the share price.

Anyone disagree?

Don't Ignore Low Interest Rates

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 10:40:24 -0400

Right but that PE includes one time charge offs. One of the problems in this recession (and many others) is that earnings enter a "get out of jail free" period. CEOs can write off all their mistakes with impunity which exacerbates the problem. I believe this is where we were in March. This recession is particulalry bad because of the huge bubble in financials.

Market Outlook: Expect a Major Shift in Bond and Equity Correlations

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:57:58 -0400

Dian, brilliant piece. I am moving into oil and gas MLPs as they seem a perfect "middle course" to take.....increasing commodity prices should play well for them though the high leverage ones could be in for some trouble. thoughts?

Natural Gas ETF Premium Reaches 20%: Time to Unload?

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:36:00 -0400

Looks fairly simple to me.

Look at the LNG shipments. They're not stopping. Foreign producers just keep em coming and we have the new terminals to take it.
Meanwhile industrial demand for gas and electricity is down significantly.
Add in a developing shortage of storage capacity.
Throw in a dash of the evil squid manipulating the markets and compounding the short

Mix thoroughly and voila you get < $2.00 for NG.

CFTC will now turn on the oven and set for position limits. Insert the UNG ETF and bake for about 1 hour.

Remove from oven and sprinkle lightly with winter seasoning

Short squeeze. Nicely rising back to something that gets closer to the oil price tracking history and a well baked squid that will be delicious for all who dine with them

Global X Launches the First Nordic ETF

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:32:08 -0400

,,,mn

A Jobs-less Apple Would Not Need Google

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:27:24 -0400

Everyone forgets that Google is a (new kind of) media company not a tech company and it will become more so in the years ahead. It makes money by selling advertsing and has come up short on virtually every other venture it has tried. It clearly has an incredible foundation in its search algorithyms and web index but even enterprise search, a tiertiary market for them at best, is a weak sister.

I can think of only one other example where media hardware and media publishing have combined and been successful, NBC/RCA.

CBS tried owning TV manufacturing and marketing in the early years and failed badly. RCA did nicely with radio sets in the early years of raqdio but never actually did real well in marketing TVs and was only in the hardware business because they invented it, but mostly made money by licensing their color TV process to others. They actually had a better long term business in selling professional gear to the industry.

MSFT continues to try and fail at being both a tech company and a software company.

Googel is a one trick pony, albeit a very large and successful one, but they would do well to stay out of the software and hardware business. Apple should learn from MSFT and stay out of the web publishing/advertising business.

Being a news and information portal supported by advertising is a way different business than making ipods or PCs

Greenlight's Einhorn: Buying S&P 500 and General Electric Puts

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:12:28 -0400

You guys saying leverage was not the problem is like saying the teenager who had a few beers driving a wreck at 75 MPH on a country road, speed was not the problem when he kills himself.

Irresponsibility, equipment quality, bad judgement, and speed (leverage) ALL were the problem except that your odds of surviving the wreck at 20MPH are way better

3 Energy MLPs for the Price of One

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:14:45 -0400

LINE reccomended by Cramer last night...for what it's worth. Any opinions on that.

Paying for News: Let's Get On with It

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:42:10 -0400

I'll go you one better. Not only has it been proven time and again that people do not want to pay for news (and most other internet content)...they don't even want to REGISTER for free on news sites. The essence of the web will simply never let this change.

Paying for News: Let's Get On with It

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:49:43 -0400

Biggest problem the newspaper business has is not the Internet. Their biggest problem is that the amount of news published has expanded hugely over the past 50 years. The problem is this expansion was fueled by both the franchise exclusivity of newspapers and by the growth of ad dollars in all media.

We are going to find out that, um actually, we don't need all that news. Most of it is useless and does not change our lives. Much of it is now, we can see via the web, duplicated in hundreds of places.

Take both of those factors away and what do you have. A lot less news. And we won't be missing most of it.

Has the Housing Market Hit Bottom?

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:00:09 -0400

This is all you need to read.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Cheap money fueled by Fannie and Freddie and a politcal agenda to have a poor minorities own homes paid off well over the past 10 years and achieved its purpose...albeit now with a price due.

A natural spinoff of this was an added bubble at all price points.

The only unknown is what happens to an illiquid asset when, looks to me like about 10-15% of the demand, is taken away. I don't know but it would seem pretty certain that at least a 10-15% price decline is in the cards. We're already there, so my guess is that its more like 2-3x that amount so 30-50% nationwide average decline seems a achievable.

But without the government programs to fuel this (and without the wall street CDO enablers) there is no way that we are going to see any kind of return of this demand, which means we have to create it by population expansion and a tiny annual % increase in % population homeownership which is more the historical norm.

With baby boomers downsizing and population growth projections only running about 1% a year this could take some time.

This assumes rates don't go to Pluto with inflation next year when the world get's a little less eager to buy our debt.

Remember the banks were give a reprieve by the govmnt on Mark to Market in May when they were allowed to keep more non performing loans in Tier1. This has no doubt slowed the write offs and foreclosures. By all my local accocunts, short sales are still very diffecult. No one wants to take a haircut. Why would you when you can still carry the loan. But this too shall change

Six Myths About Smart Grid

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:55:08 -0400

a bunch a snake oil being sold by GE and Goldman Sachs to power the next bubble

this country has become manic in it's need to generate successive BS to power absurd margin crap

How about lets build some nice dams and nuke plants and wind farms transmission lines to make some nice cheap power so we can go back to building great stuff cheap as China that doesn't break or poison you.

California: The Haves and Have-Nots

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:45:02 -0400

You want a vision of the future...take a look at Massachusetts....socia... along the Charles. This is what you get when the ruling class is liberal socialists and voter turnout drops below 30-40%. The only people voting are the vested interests feeding at the trough milking the capitalist system, hiring their friends for bloated government and perpetuating the inbreeding.

In Mass people brag about "the great joab I'aw got by bruaddah Jimmy from Southie workin at the Turnpike authority. Fuc--in' A"

The Greed Factor: How Leverage Became a Dirty Word

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:37:33 -0400

When you steal a lot from a few it is easy to get caught. When you steal a little from many it is much harder. Madoff stole a little from thousands for a very long time. That's why he got away with it. But a lot of these people need to do some soal searching.

It's like a chain letter. It's just a little extra return. Must be OK.

You were all stealing from each other. That's how a Ponzi scheme works. Did this thought never cross your mind through all the years of unwavering outsized returns? Or did you just think you were smarter and luckier.

Former 'Black Swan Fund' Traders Now Betting on Hyperinflation

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:06:20 -0400

If I make 300% on $1 or 3% on $100. What's the difference. The difference is that if things are less than great, I may still get back my $100 betting on 3%. Betting on 300% there's a good chance I lose it all.

Citigroup Is Too Important to Fail, Which Is Why It's a Great Long Term Investment

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:58:05 -0400

Citi preferreds is the way to play it. 11%-12% while you wait for things to improve. 11% is just fine with me for the next 10 years.

My Week with Bing

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:49:27 -0400

Fred,

After less than a week I would agree with you. A couple of thoughts.

My favorite fuctionalities like getting quotes from a stock symbol, getting flight status from flight numbers, finding data, replacement parts, or accessories for obscure home elctronics or other home repair work all seem to have yielded similar results.

Ambiguous product or corporate names seemed to work well when searching for brands, proper names appeared first.

Bing does not appear to have crawled LinkedIn as deeply. Everything related to no-so-famous people, as you pointed out does not appear as deep. Spell check was absent with some interesting results for some commonly misspelled famous names. My own background from LInkedIn or elsewhere did not show up except for a position I held 9 years ago on a directory site I had never heard of.

Which may be MSFT's biggest issue. Our media choices, and web search is a media choice not a technology choice, is so much driven by perception and perceptions can be formed by very minor differences particulalry when the switching cost is zero and the behaviors are repeated dozens of times a day.

After a while of ever-so-slightly less accurate, slightly less precise, results, a little voice kept saying "I know I would have found that first at Google. No cash lost. No bad feelings. No warranty repairs. Just my time.

Good luck with that MSFT.

Why Isn't Microsoft's Strategy Working Anymore?

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:02:59 -0400

The Wintel oligopoly is over. Nuff said. MSFT will be like a nice huge utility only with increasing competition

NBC CEO Jeff Zucker says Hulu will start breaking even soon.

Thu, 28 May 2009 20:39:26 -0400

What BS. Do people actually believe this stuff and why don't execs like this in public companies be held accountable for for forward looking BS

National Bankruptcy? Not Quite Yet

Fri, 22 May 2009 07:46:42 -0400

Who would bet against this?
www.Economagic.com/cha...