Jeez

Good Picks Can Be Clobbered by Trading Trends

Good points, but presented in a repetitive and incoherent manner. However, this is a serious matter for all who seriously want to be investors and hope to think that market is "fair" and not unreasonably expect a decent return for good research and willingness to take reasonable risk.
After watching the market action, I strongly believe that there are too many trigger happy traders and too many algorithmic (computer based) trades taking place.

Faber, Rogers, Dent and Celente: Collapse Dead Ahead

"He said, he said and he said" - Great analysis!

Four Problems Undermining Future American Prosperity

When at it, why not look at the typical American mindset of "it is someone else's fault/responsibility".

Been to a PT (Parent-teacher) meeting lately? I have still to see one parent who is even to acknowledge that their child (and their parenting) has any shortcoming! Everything is teacher's responsibility. This is just a symptom. Look around the workplace - every young person has a prompt answer for everything that happens - invariably it is assignment of blame to something or someone.
Personal Responsibility anyone?

Wells Fargo: Whatever Happened to Bank Bears?

After all this data and research, at least you did decide to short WFC. How about all the philosophy of "market neutral". I was waiting to see that trick with your extreme pessimistic view.

However, remember you (and no one) can or should fight the fed - and they have made up their mind to prosper all these banks.

Is This the Capitulation Phase?

What's the point of this piece?

It's Time for Post-Apocalyptic Pricing

1. Most of the comments have nothing to do with the article!
2. The article itself does not say much. It is one of those "rearview" pieces, repeating what has happened.

Why I'm Exiting Cisco

This is the stupidest article I have ever read. Read the logic carefully and note that you could also be "published" (!) by doing a "replace" of CSCO with XYZ.
It is really irritating to see such articles on the front page of SeekingAlpha and then getting duped by such silliness. What a waste of time (I know - this comment is also waster of time!)

The No-News Market Move

If you knew all this, why did you not write this on Friday; so that I could have sold piles of my C and BAC shares first thing today morning! Why is it always after the horse has bolted that everyone comes out with ever smarter reason for the price action!!

Thanks for the list of gimmicks - something to remember next time I am tempted to pick some financials on the roadside.


On Apr 20 08:31 PM loko wrote:

> Legal Cover-Ups, Flim-Flam and Sham
> In the Big Bank's "Glowing"
> First-Quarter Earnings Reports
>
> Wall Street is aglow with the latest "better-than-expected" earnings
> reports by major banks. But take one look below the surface, and
> you'll see three of the most egregious accounting gimmicks in recent
> history.
>
> Gimmick #1. Toxic asset cover-up. In their infinite wisdom, global
> banking regulators have now agreed to let banks cover up their toxic
> assets by booking them at fluffy-high values, bearing little resemblance
> to actual market prices. Like magic, the bad assets are suddenly
> worth more, as hundreds of billions in losses are defined away.<br/>
>
> Gimmick #2. Reserve flim-flam. Every quarter, banks are required
> to estimate their losses and decide how much to set aside in loss
> reserves. If they deliberately guess too much in one quarter and
> too little in the next, they can shove all their bad earnings into
> earlier P&amp;Ls and make future P&amp;Ls look rosy by comparison.
>
>
> Gimmick #3. The great debt sham. Consider this scenario: A financially
> distressed real estate developer owes the bank $4 million. His revenues
> have plunged. He's lost a fortune in his properties. And he's on
> the brink of bankruptcy.
>
> Therefore, in the secondary market, traders recognize that loans
> like his are worth, say, only half their face value, or about $2
> million. So far, a very common situation, right?
>
> But now imagine this: He walks into the bank one morning and claims
> that he really owes only $2 million. Why? Because, in theory, he
> says, he could buy back his own loan for that price, thereby reducing
> his debt in half.
>
> In practice, of course, that's a pipedream. If he actually had the
> cash to buy back his own loans on the market, then he wouldn't be
> financially distressed in the first place. And if he weren't financially
> distressed, his loans wouldn't be selling on the market for half
> price.
>
> The reality is that he can't buy back his own debt and never will.
> And even if he could someday, he will still be on the hook for the
> full $4 million unless and until he files for bankruptcy and the
> bankruptcy judge decides otherwise.
>
> That's why the government would never let real estate developers
> — or hardly anyone else, for that matter — mark down the debts on
> their books and still stay in business. But guess what? The government
> lets banks do precisely that!
>
> It's the ultimate double standard: The banks get away with inflating
> their toxic assets. But at the same time, they're allowed to mark
> to market their own debts, which happen to be trading at huge discounts
> on the open market precisely because of their toxic assets.
>
> Accountants call it a "credit value adjustment." I call it cheating.
>
>
> Finding all of this hard to believe? Then consider ...
>
> How Citigroup Mobilized ALL THREE of These
> Gimmicks to Create One of the Greatest Accounting
> Shams of All Time in Its First-Quarter Earnings Report
>
> I'm outraged. But I'm glad to see that someone besides us is speaking
> out:
>
> * Meredith Whitney, one of the few no-nonsense analysts in the industry,
> says that the banks' latest reports are, in essence, "a great whitewash."
>
>
> * Jack T. Ciesielski, publisher of an accounting advisory service,
> calls it "junk income."
>
> * And Saturday's New York Times, picking up from their research,
> lays out precisely how Citigroup has transformed a massive loss into
> what appears to be a fat profit ...
>
> First, Citigroup deployed the Toxic Asset Cover-Up. By inflating
> the value of the bad assets on its books, it was able to beef up
> its after-tax profits by $413 million.
>
> Second, Citigroup used the Reserve Flim-Flam gimmick: By (a) shoving
> most of its bad-debt losses into last year's fourth quarter and (b)
> greatly understating its likely losses in the first quarter, the
> bank legally rigged its books to look like it had made major improvements.
> Even assuming no further deterioration in its loan portfolio, I estimate
> this gimmick alone bloated profits by at least another $1 billion.
>
>
> Third, Citigroup went all out with the Great Debt Sham, marking down
> its own debt and creating an additional $2.7 billion in purely bogus
> profits from this maneuver alone.
>
> So here's Citigroup's true math for the first quarter:
>
> So-called "profit"
>
> $1.6 billion
> Gimmick #1
>
> $0.4 billion
> Gimmick #2
>
> $1.0 billion
> Gimmick #3
>
> $2.7 billion
> Total gimmicks
>
> $4.1 billion
>
>
>
> Actual result:
>
> $2.5 billion LOSS!
>
> And all this despite the fact that Citigroup's loan portfolios actually
> deteriorated further in the first quarter. Based on its Q1 2009 Quarterly
> Financial Data Supplement, we find that:
>
> 1. Net credit losses in Citi's global credit card business surged
> from $1.67 billion at year-end 2008 to $1.94 billion by March 31.
> And compared to March 2008, they surged by a whopping 56 percent!
> (Page 9 of its data supplement.)
>
> 2. Foretelling future credit card losses, the delinquency rate (90+
> days past due) on those credit cards jumped from 2.62 percent at
> year-end to 3.16 percent on March 31 (page 10).
>
> 3. Credit losses on consumer banking operations jumped from $3.442
> billion on December 31 to $3.786 billion on March 31. And compared
> to the year-earlier period, they surged 66 percent (page 12).
>
> By almost every measure, Citigroup's first-quarter numbers are worse
> than they were just three months earlier and far worse than they
> were 12 months before.
>
> My forecast: Citigroup's effort last week to twist this into an "improvement"
> will go down in history as one of the greatest banking deceptions
> of all time.
>
> But Citigroup is not the only one. Nearly all other major banks are
> suffering similar surges in their credit losses and delinquency rates.
> Nearly all are using at least one of the same gimmicks to bloat their
> first-quarter profits. And every single one is destined to see massive
> new losses, driving their shares to new lows and the banking system
> as a whole into a far more severe crisis.

Technicals: Where Is the Pullback? What Pullback?

Key phrase is "SO FAR" - good luck to you!


On Apr 09 03:30 PM SteadfastMason wrote:

> I do not believe there is anything but smoke an mirrors behind this
> rally.
>
> Therefore, I continue to add to my short positions (cost-averaging
> down) as this rally continues. I also hold a few ETF Bulls that I
> will sell, shortly, saving that money untill the this rally's gains
> are at least zeroed out by the next leg down. I never use margin.
> I never fully invest the money I have to invest. I can wait for this
> rally to turn.
>
> Assuming the Gov't manipulators reach a point where they can't pump
> this market with more false data and threats of anti-shorting regulations
> I am certain this rally will make a significant reversal - within
> the next few weeks.
>
> This approach has worked pretty well for me, so far.

Beware the Semiconductor Rally - Barron's

For once the "comments" make more sense than the article itself. However, the author is just being provocative and contrarian and is "scared" by the fact how much these stocks have come up since Nov. BUT that assumes that there was any rationality in the markets in Nov.

Opportunities in the Oil Sector

Did you count your zeroes correctly? How about some reference to this information?


On Mar 11 01:18 PM User 224899 wrote:

> Why don't we simply and inexpensively recover the 2,000,000,000,000
> barrels of oil in the Bakken Formation (a.k.a. Williston) in Montana
> and North Dakota, as ordered by the president 3 years ago?
>
> I hope nobody is so mad about "Red State" dissent that the whole
> nation is being made to suffer, but that's sure what it looks like.

Is Potash Corp. Overpriced? (Part 2)

How come the author does not know what you know - "POT has multi-year contracts". Is this really true. That changes the outcome to a large extent.


On Mar 06 05:12 PM User 224899 wrote:

> Paul Choi wrote this: "Investors should recognize that K fertilizer
> is not ‘make or die’ fertilizer. It is a luxury, not a necessity."
>
>
> My response: Any corn crop fertilized with fertilizer that includes
> potash will produce twice as much corn per acre as the same corn
> crop with all other factors the same except no potash is in the fertilizer
> mix.
>
> So, Paul, you think people are going to elect to get half the yield
> from their crops in order to save on potash? I can just imagine the
> policy-making conversations in India: "I've got the answer, Rahkesh,
> we'll let twice as many millions of people starve because potash
> is too expensive this year. We'll just plow the bodies into the fields."
> That's brilliant policy, huh?
>
> We'll see how the Uralkali production goes, and if they can deliver
> what they say they can. Russians have managed to botch their potash
> production twice in the last couple of years due to unsuccessful
> mining practices (maybe they were unavoidable disasters, maybe they
> weren't). The Russians are playing hardball with the natural resource
> markets, if this winter's natural gas story is any indication, and
> when you play that close to the ragged edge you sometimes get cut
> on the blade.
>
> Finally, before anyone starts to think Uralkali is going to "bring
> down Potash Corp", or some other such silliness, let's not forget
> that last year Potash Corp wrote multi-year contracts with India
> and China, which covers deliveries to be made in 2009, and demand
> was so great in 2008 that Potash Corp was only able to make partial
> deliveries.
>

Is Potash Corp. Overpriced? (Part 2)

This is for amusement; don't tell me that you make investment decisions based on what you read here. Every trade has two sides and one can spin a tale either way.

PS: The author does declare that he is short POT. Of course, he is short - how would you take this article if he was long?

On Mar 06 08:50 AM manuel wrote:

> sorry but how do i know if people writing negative comments are shorting
> the stock? what would happen if someone shorts the stock and writes
> negative comments in about every blog commenting the stock? Would
> he get cought? would his comments be cancelled? If he delivers false
> informations?

Taking Prudent Approach: Exiting Potash

What an article! Did you get paid "by the words"? Anyone could have said what you said in a para. What a waste of time.

The Rally, When It Comes, Will Be a Doozy

Exactly my sentiments. There is no reason in the world why the sidelined money MUST get back in. The whole article is based on the premise that there is some natural law that says they must get back into the equity markets. Why not preferred or debt or bonds or commodities or FDIC backed paper.... Why must it be banks and GE and GM ?

AND the graphs are deceptive - they are percentage of S&P market cap. Well the graph will shoot up (actually double) just because "S&P market cap" is 50% down with any increase of $ being sidelined! So much for doozy fantasy....


On Mar 06 04:51 PM mr freddo wrote:

> This is a once in a century event so I don't believe that looking
> at cash levels is a reliable indicator of a rally. Any cash that
> is sitting on the sidelines at this point is damn happy and lucky
> to be their instead of riding out the equity debacle like a great
> deal of net worth is doing these days.
>
> That cash sitting out there has only one thing to fear right now
> and that's inflation. Look for some of that conservative cash to
> move into gold later on this year when inflation starts to roar.