frosty

State TV says Iran’s top legislative body has confirmed Ahmadinejad victory in the disputed June 12th Presidential election after recount. (BreakingNews)

Let's put "Iran's top legislative body" to work on the Minnesota senate race. We'll have a winner tomorrow.

Real-Time Search: How to Capture Consciousness

Everyone should read "Feed", by M. T. Anderson. It might be the best $7.99 you will ever spend. Written in 2004, just after the internet had gone through its first explosive growth phase, it's real time social network via a computerized, wireless link to a neural implant (the Feed) is only a few evolutionary steps away. Remarkably prescient and profound in a humorous and entertaining way.

OMG! Kindle is implantable! I gotta tweet Amazon right away! Wait a few months to buy the book, then buy the Kindle Feed and it can be downloaded directly into your mind!

Boeing's Dreamliner Nightmare May Present Investor Opportunity

Three times in the last 10 or so years, when it appeared that Boeing was on the verge of becoming the most successful company on the planet, they made me cry. The last time was roughly a year ago when Airbus could do no right and Boeing was landing so many 787 orders they needed faster computers to count them all. Crash - a strike knocked the bottom out of the stock and I lost again. This may be the best time of all to buy Boeing, but over my 10 year history with the company I've seen payola fines, criminal investigations, strikes, overly rosey forecasts, etc., etc., indicative of a management culture that I will never trust again. There are thousands of other companies to invest in.

Boeing's Dreamliner: Still Grounded But Its Stock Could Soar

Three times in the last 10 or so years, when it appeared that Boeing was on the verge of becoming the most successful company on the planet, they made me cry. The last time was roughly a year ago when Airbus could do no right and Boeing was landing so many 787 orders they needed faster computers to count them all. Crash - a strike knocked the bottom out of the stock and I lost again. This may be the best time of all to buy Boeing, but over my 10 year history with the company I've seen payola fines, criminal investigations, strikes, overly rosey forecasts, etc., etc., indicative of a management culture that I will never trust again. There are thousands of other companies to invest in.

Boeing Delays 787's First Flight- Yet Again

Three times in the last 10 or so years, when it appeared that Boeing was on the verge of becoming the most successful company on the planet, they made me cry. The last time was roughly a year ago when Airbus could do no right and Boeing was landing so many 787 orders they needed faster computers to count them all. Crash - a strike knocked the bottom out of the stock and I lost again. This may be the best time of all to buy Boeing, but over my 10 year history with the company I've seen payola fines, criminal investigations, strikes, overly rosey forecasts, etc., etc., indicative of a management culture that I will never trust again. There are thousands of other companies to invest in.

Falling Global Stock Markets - Threatening Moving Averages

If you use the EMA instead of the SMA, S&P 500 never penetrated the 200 day MA. In fact the 200 day EMA is resistence and the 50 day EMA is support. Why use EMA? It minimizes the influence of the “high” days from last Sept & early Oct, before the cliff plunge. Go to BigCharts and try it. Then do the same for DJIA, DJTA, RUT and NASDAQ. RUT briefly broke up through the 200 day but has since ranged between the 200 and 50. The only one sitting atop the 200 day EMA is NASDAQ and even for this the 50 and 200 have yet to crossover. I cast my vote with the crowd that expects the 50 day to be broken to the downside by all of these! A supporting indicator for this is DMI- which has crossed over (for all except for NASDAQ).

Tuesday Outlook: Commodities, Global Markets

Most of you characters who like to draw horizontal support-resistance lines also use the SMA as a signal indicator. However, the 200 day SMA includes last Sept & early Oct when the markets were still relatively high. Those days form 180-200 days ago carry the same weight as recent days in the SMA. If you use the EMA, which weights recent days more than long ago days, a different picture emerges. Since early April, for both DJIA and DJTA, the 200 day EMA is resistance and the 50 day EMA is support. SPX shows nearly the same (support is somewhat above the 50 day EMA). In none of these cases, however, have the indexes penetrated the 200 day EMA. So the "convergence" of the 200 day SMA and the horizontal "resistance" line doesn't, in my mind, hold as much significance as the fact that the 200 day EMA has not been penetrated. Why favor the EMA over the SMA? It's a matter of "what have you done for me lately?" versus "remember when?".

Market Outlook: Looking Forward to a Data-Heavy Week

The SMA tells one story, the EMA tells another. Since early April, the DJIA has been bounded below by the 50 day EMA and above by the 200 day EMA. The average has not penetrated the 200 day EMA resistance nor the 50 day EMA support. The DJTA shows exactly the same pattern. The S&P 500 shows nearly the same pattern with the EMA 200 as resistance and EMA 50 just recently showing support. You can draw horizontal lines on graph paper if you choose, but clearly, DJIA has been in an upward channel since early April and my guess is that a breakout through either EMA will set the trend for the next several months. I might be wrong, but as I guage the near term on prospects for the economy (for businesses and consumers), I would bet more on the 50 day pentration than the 200 day.

Swine Flu: Why You Can Ignore the Hype

Perhaps I missed your admission. It's now a little past 6 weeks and H1N1 is now pandemic and people are dying almost daily as it appears to spread worldwide and worsen. It's not the worst thing to happen yet, but it could turn out to be. That one thing the news is for, to alert people what is possible. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes YOU WRONGLY CRITICIZE THE MEDIA FOR DOING THEIR JOB. Be a man and fess up.


On Apr 28 01:35 AM Jeff Farley wrote:

> I will admit I under estimated the swine flu in 6 weeks if it is
> still a huge enough issue to be the lead story on every newscast
> and newspaper like it was today...and those of you who are believing
> the media hype now will admit your were wrong if it has totally blown
> over.

Tuesday's Closing Update: Broadly Lower

VIX is on the move again ahead of quadruple witching day. Does this and the two day tumble foretell a BIG selloff on Friday?

Uptick Rule: Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

If the uptick rule did no harm for 70 years, then what is the harm of reinstating it? As you say, " . . . an uptick rule seems ineffective for liquid markets, for which it is not all that hard to find a plus tick." But then again, perhaps it might be effective in limiting abusive shorting practices. Who knows? I side with do "no harm for 70 years."

As to naked short selling, this should be a crime. In essence, it allows anyone in the world to create shares for the purpose of selling them. Only boards of directors should be allowed to create shares in their own companies. I would love to sell my neighbor's house, but I don't own it and he won't lend it to me. If I sell it anyway (and get caught), I will go to jail.

Shorting rules and laws need to be tightened because so much trading is dominated and controlled through program trading by hedge funds and other less public mega-investment groups. It's not the normal individual independent investor like you and me who abuses shorting practices, rather it is the outfits with the sophiticated computer models. They shouldn't be allowed to create stock for sale just so they can make a short term profit which naked shorting seems to be mostly about.

The Case for Allowing TARP Repayments

How about your aunt????? Don't you feel sorry for her????? Wow!


On Jun 10 12:39 AM mac123449 wrote:

> My aunts house is being auctioned off next thursday hasn't made a
> mortgage payment in 10 months but they still let her live there that
> whole time i'm not a big fan of the banks but i almost feel sorry
> for them in this situation there going to take a huge loss.

The Case for Allowing TARP Repayments

TARP funds should be immediately recycled to taxpayers, SS recipients and the unemployed. Hopefully, then, these funds will quickly trickle up as people pay off their mortgage arrears, credit card debt, etc., thus enabling bank executives to maintain their bonuses and lifestyle.

Banks: Rebuilding the House of Cards

This is deplorable. The banks have looted, even reposessed the homes of America, thrown their and others' workers out onto the street, taken billions in bonuses out of tax revenues, and then they also get to lie about their income and balance sheets. I apologize, following accounting prinicples can't be lying. As far as the houses go, you have to believe in the sanctity of a contract. Congress does - it's the law and justice is blind. Which means lady justice can't see the little guy at all. Tough luck homeowners, a contract is a contract. Tough luck taxpayers, we have to save our banks (and our bankers!!!) at all costs or else where would we be?

Stocks Will Fall 37% or Gold Will Rally 60%

Sorry - this was pretty dumb. Over the last 106 years American mens' average height has been 5'7". For the last 10 years, it has averaged 5'9". In order to return to the long term average, one of two things must occur: we either need to increase immegration of shorter men or we have to develop a human de-growth hormone to treat tall men.

Anything quantative with a long enough history can be averaged over 106 years. That doesn't make the average meaningful, i.e., descriptive enough to guide current day actions. In fact it is likely a fallacy to believe that we're likely to return to the mean. A case in point is the Hunt brothers back in the late 70's. They calculated the historical relationship between silver and gold (I believe it was 20:1 at the time) and began buying silver as they claimed it was underpriced (actually they were attempting to corner the silver market). A number of reputable analysts agreed with their theory (you can't argue with averages, can you?) and silver rocketed eventually to $50 per ounce in 1980.

Also, the 'trends' the author suggests: 29 years of this, 3 years of that, 34 years of another thing, 14 years of something else, 20 years of whatever, and now, 2000 - ? what's going to happen? Well actually, the Dow hit an all time high in 2007, so the last 'trend' should cover 27 years rather than 20 and the new one begins 2008 - ? No matter these are arbitrary periods and have no predictive value whatsoever - if the Dow magically recovers and goes ever higher we are still in the 1980 - 2xxx 'trend'. To infer from this data that 2008 begins a new trend of gold outperforming the Dow is absurd.

Finally, it should be noted that DJIA today is not the DJIA of 106 years ago. For there to be a valid relationship of 5.4 ounces of gold to none unit of the DJIA requires that the Dow be the same throughout all its history. Let's see . . . Walt Disney, Microsoft, Home Depot . . . hmmm. Incidentally, I read an interesting tidbit (I can't recall who I should credit for this) that if the Dow were recalculated to include only its survivors and what they had become, without any multipliers, the DJIA would have peaked at 35,000 in 2007. That's a lot of gold!

I take this article to be typical piece of goldbug propaganda.