Moral Hazards Amok

Peak Oil for Dummies

Oh, pleeeeeeeeeeease! The alarmists have been screaming about peak oil since the 1920s. They were obviously wrong then and they're also wrong now. Oil shale, oil sands, and new technologies allowing producers access to oil fields of much greater capacity than anything we've tapped so far... We're swimming in the stuff if the democrats and their radical Marxist allays will just allow us to produce it.

Let me also point out that our natural gas reserves in the US contain more twice the energy contained in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. It's very easy to start building trucks and cars that run on NG, and indeed we will soon start making that transition. Epiphany, folks, it’s very easy to transition to a NG transportation economy and we’re beginning to do so. Problem solved for several more generations.

A much better article would have been about why peak oil is a myth, complete with much better references. But then again, no doubt our young author probably has a political agenda.

Tough Times for Netflix - Barron's

Grabbing a disk from a kiosk on a Friday while you're in Wal-Mart shopping for pet food is convenient and easy. Returning it back on a Monday when you have a million other things you need to do is often a significant investment of resources and a pain for many of us.
______________________

"BTW, the 'saving gas' argument is a bit bogus: nobody is expected to hop into the car for a 5-mile expedition to the nearest kiosk. The whole idea behind a kiosk is to snag the consumer while (s)he's already out of the house ... that's why they're located in malls and retail stores..."

Tough Times for Netflix - Barron's

Until you put a Redbox right next to my mailbox I won't be interested. The value that Netflix adds to the customer is that we don't have to burn gas and time returning the disks. Also, I doubt that Redbox has a million selections in their kiosks.

Not a significant threat to Netflix, imho.

The Ultimate Commodities ETF Guide

Pretty much everything in this list looks like it’s at the top of a short term trading channel except for --- WOW look at that! UNG!

Pull it up on a weekly chart and notice the extremely high trading volume of this last week’s breakout. This train is just now leaving the station and still has much farther to run. Good luck all.

DNDN is a $7 stock - beware

(I'm disappointed in the editors of Seekingalpha, who I believed to have better publishing standards than this. "Scibby" is simply a basher on a yahoo message board (user ID "scib2") and this article is simply a copy and paste of one of his recent posts.

"saynothingunlessgood" has easily debunked Scibby's poor attempt at FUD, with his reply noted below.)

"You are pretty unconvincing to an educated professional if he/she can read financials for themselves. Try to reasonable/realistic!

That is, $93mllion is long term debt, $26 million is current and they have $110 in short term investments (read CASH!) Oh, and that was as at 31.03.09 BEFORE they raised $190 million in equity that now can be used to TOTALLY REPAY ALL DEBT leaving the company TOATLLY DEBT FREE and with over ANOTHER US $100 million of cash to operate for at least a year at a burn rate of two times previous rate!

Got this? Hope so. So that we don't have to read foolishness. If you have some real info., please post."

Why Did Dendreon Execs Cash Out on Friday?

I am absolutely astounded at what shorts will do to try and kill a technology that is a quantum leap forward towards a cure for cancer. RegExpert, it's so sad that you were caught with your pants down so short on DNDN, but does that really justify hysterical statements of FUD such as this?

"Plus, did you see the vaccine administration procedure??? It is very cumbersome!! One needs to take out patients cancer cells, modify it with provenge and then re-inject back to the patients............this is too cumbersome for a 4 months survival extension......."

A couple of trips to a specialist is to too cumbersome? Would you rather these poor souls simply take Taxotere, whose side effects include hair loss, anemia, low levels of white blood cells, blood in the stool, severe mouth sores, and severe vomiting and/or diarrhea?

Also, 4 months of life extension is only the beginning with this technology because down the road Dendreon, or someone will find a way to lever this type of technology into much greater lengths of survival, and probably even cancer cures in many cases.

For the shorts who are trying to make a buck here by killing this technology consider this; most of you at sometime during your lifetime will watch someone you care about or even love die horribly from cancer. Provenge is a technology that just might have prevented that. Was a couple of dollars worth it?

A Game of Confidence

I’m not sure many of us agree. We’ve watched the expansion and collapse of one of the greatest credit bubbles in human history. It began as the shadow banking system spectacularly destructed after playing a key role in helping to create this credit supercycle. Then we observed $50+ in derivatives blowing up in our faces. Now we’re watching trillions in toxic debt contaminate almost all financial instruments, bringing down the world’s banking system, and we’re also witnessing the beginnings of a morbid death dance of many of the world’s governments in their beginning stages of collapse.

Loss of confidence? Well, that would be the stock market continuing its collapse after realizing that Obama and his team of socialists are actually amplifying the problems with their failed Marxist policies and incompetent handling of this mess. Now THAT’S lack of confidence!

The Bull Run Begins This Week

This one's my favorite.

"One of the great orators of our times will inspire the world this week."

Let's see...

Dow 7,949.09 -332.13 -4.01%
Nasdaq 1,440.86 -88.47 -5.78%
S&P 500 805.22 -44.90 -5.28%

What was it that Cramer called him after today's mini crash, oh yes... "Babble Oboma." "I'm just telling it like it is", he said.

Bump. Let's keep this article popular so we can keep making fun of it.

10 Interesting Stocks Under $10

Thanks, zeronimo. +1

The Dow's Lost Decade

Good work, Fred.

AAPL is a great company with great potential, yet it’s my opinion that it’s also great short and will be unless it breaks above $90 and stays there.

Pull it up on a candlestick chart and notice the incredible support it had around $87. Yet on Thursday, (Nov 20) it broke down through that support very convincingly with high volume. That strong support is now strong resistance.

Friday, it set an even lower low but did not make it back to Thursday’s high. It also deviated from the general market in that the $SPX was up 6.3% but AAPL was up only 2.6%.

Fundamentally, this consumer stock hasn’t yet been punished enough to reflect market realities, imho. The great credit superbubble has burst (as I’ve been pointing out for months) and iPods, iPhones, and music downloads at .89(?) are not a necessity that today’s shell-shocked and credit contracting consumer really needs to have.

This stock has some support around $70, but I expect it to break through that without much effort.

I’ll go long when we start to crawl out of this financial vortex.

Disclosure; purchased April puts on AAPL last week.

Three Areas of Opportunity for the Bold

"I collect $1,300 to pay out $930 each month while watching the value of the property more than double in coming years."

If this current real estate crash, which we’re probably only half way through, hasn’t dramatically driven home the fallacies in that line of reasoning, then nothing I can possibly say here will.

And yes I know that $1300 is more than $930, but that's not cash flow positive btw. After expenses and the inevitable repairs, you need a ratio that's closer to 2:1.
gl

Five Signs of a Market Bottom

1. How do we know that the VIX has hit an all time high for this bear market? Maybe it has, but it’s also still in a clear uptrend. We thought that Oct 10 and Oct 16 would also be the all time VIX highs.

4. Ok, so there’s one prominent perma-bear who flipped. We still have too many people who are now bullish looking for value plays (traps), and way too many others now calling this a bottom.

The bottom will be in when talking heads and bloggers have stopped calling for a bottom and it will arrive quietly.

Impending Inflation? The Global 'New Deal' All but Guarantees It

User 270430, thanks for the link that you provided explaining how inflation work itself into a monetary system such as ours. (mises.org/story/2901)...

However, in most ways the article actually argues in favor of deflation. Here are a couple of its more salient quotes:

“The wavelike movement affecting the economic system, the recurrence of periods of boom which are followed by periods of depression, is the unavoidable outcome of the attempts, repeated again and again, to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion. There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion.” Ludwig von Mises – 1949

And this one…

“However, banks' limited equity capital wouldn't allow expanding credit and money supply any further, whatever the amount of excess reserves. Perhaps even more important, a contraction of the means of payment, accompanied by a sudden stagnation of credit supply, can be expected to exert downward pressure on money prices, production and employment.”

At this point in the crisis, the government will attempt to rescue the banking system so lending can begin again. The first strategy is injecting peoples' tax money into banks. The second strategy is buying banks' risky assets, and the third is monetizing banks' risky assets.

We are now, or soon will be, doing all three, but here’s the key, credit will still continue to collapse. Even after the Fed’s efforts, banks and finance companies will not be willing to lend so extremely promiscuously again. As previously pointed out, lending standards will be much tighter in the years ahead.

Also, at least for a few years, individuals and business will not wish to borrow nearly as much again as jobs are being lost and prices for everything is in freefall. As JasonC so diplomatically puts it…

“No, prices are not going to trend up after a brief scare.

Earth to inflationary brainstorm clueless people, please write on a blackboard 500 times, "the demand for money is not a constant".”

Deflationary Depression: Where Do We Go from Here?

Seekingalpha truncated my list. Let's try this:

DBA,DBC,DIG,GLD,VTI,
HYG,ITB,URG,IYR,IYF,
MOO,OIL,UNG,URE,
HSG,XLY,XME,SLV

Deflationary Depression: Where Do We Go from Here?

Good explanation of the meltdown, yet I'd like offer an exception to one of your comments;

"the central banks' inability to raise rates to combat inflationary pressure,"

Go back to stockcharts and create a new list, add the following then view:

DBA,DBC,DIG,GLD,HYG,IT...

What inflationary pressures?