Voice of Reason

Not Everyone Is In Trouble

There are many people and institutions to blame. Begin with the little monkey named Bush that has zero creditability and did what he does best, sit on his hands and mumble nonsense like everything is fine. Wink. Wink.. Then you have egg head Ben Bernanke that generates as much confidence in what he's saying as a bowl of cold oatmeal left on the kitchen counter overnight that has been behind the curve from day one and hasn't caught up let alone get ahead of the curve yet. Lets not forget Henry Paulson that seems unable to put five words together without stuttering. Where the hell do we find such idiots and give them so much power and responsibility only to see them fall flat on their faces over and over? Take the handful of fifth graders on the show called Are you smarter than a fifth grader and put them in charge. I doubt they could have done worse. In fact I know they would have done way better.

Speaking of idiots, Congress is front and center. Lets see, some couldn't vote for the original plan because it cost too much so 4 days later they approve a plan that costs over 100 billion MORE!

Then how about the executives at major banks and AIG? One guy smugly confirming, yeah, I got 1 million for consulting correcting the Congressman asking, no, not in a year, each month!

You want to know what's really wrong? Its the crazy "system". Where is it written that it's OK for investment banks, which by the way we don't have any more of, to leverage 20, 25, 30 even 40 to 1?

What kind of crap is it for so-called rating agencies to down grade companies' bond ratings, which drives their stocks lower, which in turn lowers the price more which makes it harder to raise capital which further delutes the current stockholder's equity. What kind of a circus is this?

What moron invented mark to market accounting?

Why did they get rid of the up tick rule?

Why are hedge funds allowed to engage in naked short selling which pushes companies to lose billions in value?

In case you haven't figured it out yet the real problem is confidence.

You can't trust what the president says, or Congress. The Bozos in charge at the Federal Reserve and Treasurary dept couldn't find their rear ends with both hands behind their back. Oh... and guess what, the fat cats on Wall Street and Main Street game the system and no matter what happens walk away with bags full og cash after wrecking companies in business for a 100 years while you see your investments race towards zero.

All that said, you know who the biggest idiots of all is?

Sorry, that would be Joe Average Investor, that's who. Just like in every Bear Market Joe at the very end panics and sells everything. Then Joe Six Pack sits on the sidelines as the market screams back up 20% or more, then gets back in missing most of the move back up.

People never learn.

Seeking E*Trade's 'Magic Moment'

I have a big bowl of popcorn and I am enjoying the multiple hissy fits. No wonder you guys can't make any money... you're too busy calling each other names. LOL!

E*Trade's Annual Shareholder Meeting Should Pressure the Shorts

E-Trade has been an attractive buy out prospect for years. All the other players have been lusting after it. The only thing that stopped them was they thought they could woo customers away in groves, hasn't happened. Most E-Trade customers tend to be loyal. Now that the banking disaster is starting to resolve, seems like clear sailing ahead from my viewpoint.

I suspect E-Trade will be North of $10 by this time next year if not sooner. I'm not selling, already made a nice profit, don't even have a protective stop at this point.

E*Trade: Hindsight with Binoculars

You can't take extremes either. You seem confused with analytical math. You're mixing apples and oranges and arriving at some really dumb conclusions. Look up bell curve for starters. I doubt E-Trade or any brokerage house will tell you specifics about their clients so at best it is a wild guess what the average account balance is and even a wilder guess who is or isn't an active trader or their tolerance for commissions.

I'm still amazed, though I shouldn't be over what can best be described as misinformation spouted in forums like this daily.

Why the E*Trade Shorts Have It Wrong

Personally I'm just putting my E-Trade position on the back burner and not worrying about it till things shake out more. It only represents less than 2% of my total stock positions so I'm willing to let it ride along with my Thornburg holdings along with a couple other current bow wow stocks that have the potential to double or more. Like with poker, sometimes it's time to double, other times fold, other times just do nothing but wait and sit things out. So for now I put these chips in my pocket and walked off to another table to see what other trouble I can get into. But I ain't cashing in my E-Trade or Thornburg chips. Not yet, no way. I'm patient.

E*Trade: Hindsight with Binoculars

Oh I don't know... You can't really take an average on something like this and try to analyize what it means like it's a baseball player's batting average or your bowling average. I suspect all the players have people opening relatively small accounts, others opening big fat ones. I also suspect people with accounts elsewhere may just be sampling the waters to see if they like E-Trade or not.

As far as handling paper work I had one situation that miffed me a bit almost a year ago. I sent them 100K worth of stock certificates with my name on them and my parents names already deceased. What on the surface should have been a simple transaction dragged on and on.

First I waited what I thought was a reasonable time... ten days for them to get the certificates. Heard nothing so I called. Guy I talked said they had no record of receiving them then offered they get 100,000 pieces of mail a day.

A couple days later it showed up on my account, but was blocked from trading on some kind of hold. Called again, they said I needed more paper work, some stupid power of attorney or something. I wasn't really going to trade the stock right then, so I played along.

Another week went by, nothing changed, I called again. Got a different guy, now they're saying also need some proof of residence. I point out to them their own web site says you don't need either of the things they asked for if the stock certificates are registered in joint tenandancy which they were aside from certified copies of death certificates with I send in with the stock certificates now weeks before. Yes, I now was getting pretty steamed.

Somehow after screaming a couple jerks I got transferred to some big shot who said he would run interference for me and he did. Resolved in a couple days along with a profuse apology. They blamed some over worked new guy in their back office for screwing things up. Which is something that can happen with any company no matter who you have an account with.

Every other time I called about something I got very prompt accurate help incuding making changes in Microsoft's brower that was interferring with their platform.

E*Trade: Hindsight with Binoculars

As far as I know E-Trade doesn't track ownership by percentage owned by Mutual Funds, it does show a total percentage held by institutions, but not a breakdown as far as I'm aware.

There's a great web site that does that. I forget the name of it. Somebody else will probably know. On this site you can enter a stock symbol and it will show which mutual funds are buying, holding, selling, total holding,etc. by entered stock symbol.

E*Trade: Hindsight with Binoculars

For Wez... E-Trade shows insider activity on graphs and shows the principle's name, shares traded, total shares held by principle and total worth of the shares. Once you log on from the default E-Trade page, pick a symbol then the ownership tab.

Under the fundamentals tab

Example I used Citygroup

Shares Outstanding 5.2 B
Institutional Ownership 59.95%
Number of Floating Shares 5.2 B
Short Interest as % of Float 2.41%

Also under that tab are rankings for Valuation, Management effectivness, operating ratios, profitability, growth rate, financial strength, divs and basic stuff like number of employees, company's address and a brief company overview. From here you also are one click away for getting full detailed quarterly and yearly P/L, balance sheet, income statement, cash flow and SEC filings.

On the Analysts tab, something I use a lot, you have the latest reports from CreditSuisse, Reuters,S&P, Rochdale,Sabrient and Thompson which usually change at least monthly often more often. Typically a 5-10 page PDF format report. From this page E-Trade also does a scatter chart of whatever the sector is of the symbol you looked up.

So for example if you got specifics on Citygroup, it plots it on the scatter chart for money center banks using a ranking from 5 to 1 (strong sell, to strong buy) based on the analysts tracking the sector. Then you can click on the dots on the chart and instantly get specifics. The idea of this kind of chart is you see at glance how each company is weighted against the other based on how they are ranked presently.

For example if you hover over Well Fargo on the scatter chart it currently is showing it as a 2.4 or buy. Then along side that is a bar chart ranking the symbol you currently picked, again in the example Citygroup showing ranking from all the analysts tracking the company in this case 26 so you get a quick snapshot how overall the stock is viewed performace wise from sell to buy in five bars.

Again, I don't know how this stacks up with other platforms, maybe they as good or better. I just like E-Trade used it a long time and I'm very comfortable with it.

E*Trade: Hindsight with Binoculars

I can't speak for other online companies, I like E-Trade's implementation since it is highly customizable. You basically have three levels. The default is a little limited, the second which I use called MarketTrader runs under Java. The third is Market Pro with even more bells and whistles.

Everything in the last two choices is in real time no 20 minute delays and you have as little or as much data as you want in multiple windows. Either of these options can be free depending on your trading activity or you can subscribe monthly or quarterly if I remember correctly for a small fee if your trading level is lower.

Each Window has it's own setup so if you want you can change text size, color schemes data shown for each seperately from the rest. Most windows can "float" so you can move them around and resize them almost anyway you want. Ditto for most of the columns as well as shifting them left or right.

I'll skip over the usual 'your acount' and trading windows which are pretty standard no matter what platform or company you use.

I display everything on one 22 inch wide monitor. My account window spans the top all the away across with about 2 inches height. The rest of the screen is divided into 3 main areas, The main window is tabed to shift between current positions which are updated in real time, a watch list tab where I can track multiple wish lists, a market depth tab that shows tic by tic for any stock or option plus graphic indicator of volume, etc., an options tab that shows the usual option related details and chart and research tabs. You can track both stocks and options in real time by symbol anywhere from 1 minute to 20 years history in the charting window, picking from line graphs, candle stick, etc.. You can overlay common charting toys like show volume, MACD signal, moving averages and so on.

Over at the right I set up a vertical watch list. This can be customized at will or you can select form hundeds of industires or averages already build it.

Again the ease at which you can shift back and forth is impressive. You simply sort by any column heading by clicking on it and get real time displays sorted by company name, symbol, last trade, percent change, etc., or if you want you can watch a sector, like I've been watching banks which have about 150 major banks build in, no need to manually enter them one at a time in the watch list, but you can make as many custom watch lists as you want. The last column adds a news tab so if anything is crossing the wires relative to a particular stock or sector it changes color.

You also can have several streaming ticker displays clicking between top stories and streaming headlines in another window which I set up at the very bottom. Add in a reseach tab which can bring you a whole host of data, plus access the the default research and history which gives a wealth of information on every stock symbol on the major exchanges plus earnings, P/L statements, other financial data, federal filings analyst ratings, reports, etc., etc..

It's a nice package, maybe a bit overwhelming at first but very easy to use after a couple days of getting use to all the data presented at once. Plus if you don't like your layout you can easily change it again in real time giving yourself as little or as much details as you need.

I also use it to track my mutual funds which I have outside of E-Trade. I only had to make a watch list adding the symbols and first thing in the morning I get an update on the NAV and the relative value/profit/loss of each plus the total by simply clicking a couple buttons to go to that particualr watch list. No more straining eyes trying to read the fine print in a newspaper.

As I said, I don't know how much of the above is duplicated on other platforms, but I'm happy with the ease E-Trade makes all this possible. You can also track about anything you want and have in your positions or watch list windows show it like open interest for options, price range for day or 52 weeks, Divs, most of the popular ratios, % gain, costs, etc. etc..

Why the E*Trade Shorts Have It Wrong

Did a little birdie whisper in your ear or are you just guessing?

In other words a lot of bluster and BS, short on facts. Got any?

The truth is you have no idea what E-Trade's or for that matter anyone's mortgage portfolio is made up of. Put your play money back in the Monopoly box where it came from.

E*Trade: Hindsight with Binoculars

Once again we see the dark side, ie "Analysts" running their mouths, quite an accomplishment since most have their foot stuck in their pie hole most of the time. My view, collectively the whole bunch of them aren't worth their weight in week old doggy poo.

I just completed an experiment. I have a 4 inch ring binder nearly full where I've been collecting Analysts' forecasts from some of the major reporting companies you can access off E-Trade on the banking sector for the past 9 months.

Conclusion: They're all over the map. Imagine, some poor sucker actually pays for this crap. At least I get it for free. So when some Bozo I'm not going to name either says E-Trade might go belly up you can do what I do. Use Google under images to find his mug, print it out, hang it up on a wall and throw stuff at it. Don't recommend pie or cake like Cramer users. That gets messy. ;-)

E*Trade: Primed To Turn Around?

It is obvious to anyone the gloom and doom mob have an agenda. One of the biggest evils in the market today is naked short selling. WHY is this even legal? Why the hell is ANY KIND of short selling permitted? It is absurd that you can sell something you don't own by borrowing a third party's money with the intended purpose of profiting by trying to cause misery on others.

WAY TOO MANY smart-ass types have plundered the stock, options and future markets with the intended purpose of trying to make a quick buck. That flys in the face of fundmential investing principles and it is long past the the time way tougher rules are enacted and ENFORCED.

E*Trade: Primed To Turn Around?

OK, to be fair I took a look...or tried to. Unlike the majors Think or Swim won't even let you really see their software until you register. Dumb. I'm not playing that game. The big boys like E-Trade, Amertrade, Scott Trade and Fidelity all at least give you a fairly extensive demo right off their web site...no need to open an trial account to get a feel what you'll get.

Since they don't brag about it on their web site I'm forced to conclude Think Or Swim offers little if any research or historical data or news ticker feeds. Another big minus again all the major players offer in varying degrees depending on which of their platforms you run. I prefer E-Trade's Market Trader over their Pro version.

As far as Options or Futures, I'm not really into that in a big way. Sorry, I don't want or need "some guy that sits around all day making commentaries'. I DO MY OWN HOMEWORK which again is where the rich resources E-Trade provides at no extra change comes in. In summary for me, it's the whole package, not just the ability to get lower commissions and I don't want a service that admits they specialize in options, that means they skim in other areas like the ones I mentioned.

E*Trade: Primed To Turn Around?

You expect serious investors to jump to a firm called Think Or Swim ? I wouldn't put any of my money in a firm named that no matter how good a platform they claimed to have.

I remember my mother telling me when she was growing up in Chicago in the early 1900's there used to be a Undertaker with the company name Ketchm and Killum.

Just like I would think anyone layed out in their Sunday finest at Ketchm and Killum may cause a raised eyebrow or two from those coming to pay their last respects as to how they met their demise I would hate to admit to having my funds at a place called Think or Swim. Too tacky for my tastes.

E*Trade: Primed To Turn Around?

Making wild assumptions again Wez? That your speciality? I've got a nice profit on E-Trade and expect it to increase markedly over the next 9 months or so.

As far as you getting sick of the topic, several posters handed you your head on a platter. So good idea, time you stop embarrassing yourself.