ICSC Retail Store Sales:-2% W/W, vs. flat last week. +3.2% Y/Y, vs. +2.7% last week. Heavy weather and high gas prices led to the sharp decline. [View news story]
Every time they get a back number on a report they blame it on the weather. LOL It must be storming out 24/7. Why don't they just be honest and say "Our economy is a drag." Housing is in the toilet, unemployment reached a new 52 week high! and on top of all that our GDP.......is.....Going Down Period!
But the good news is Playstation Network is Back up!
Rule no. 1 of 10 rules for rookie day traders: Before you press the Enter key, you must know when to get in, when to get out, and what to do if the trade doesn’t work out as expected. [View news story]
Rule #3 Don't fall for penny stock scams that are nothing more than pump and dumps, like LEXG. Stick with good solid companies that have grreat fundamentals and move atleast 5 M volume a day. Oh and do exactly the opposite of what cramer tells you.
FX markets yawn as Treasury Sec. Geithner defends the greenback, saying "we will never embrace a strategy to weaken the dollar ... our policy has been and will always be, as long as I will be in office, that a strong dollar is in the interest of the country." [View news story]
Alcoa (AA): Q1 EPS of $0.28 beats by $0.01. Revenue of $6.0B (+22% Y/Y) misses by $0.1B. (PR) [View news story]
Well they sure didn't knock it out of the park. Very disappointing actually giving all the high expectations of AA today! This stock is dud and I am glad I did not take a chance on it.
March Employment Trends Index: +8.1% Y/Y to 100.9 vs. 100.3 in Feb. (revised). "In the last six months, employment excluding construction and state and local government has been growing faster than almost any other six-month period in the past decade, [but] we do not expect a turnaround in those sectors, which are still lagging," The Conference Board says. [View news story]
Yeah good paying jobs moved over seas for service jobs that pay nothing! Some recovery. Its all going to explode in the end when retail and auto numbers plummet with high gas and food prices and no housing market.
ICSC Retail Store Sales:+2.3% W/W, vs. -0.5% last week. +2.6% Y/Y, vs. +3.3% last week. "Rising employment and strengthening income are more than offsetting high fuel and food costs and are giving a boost to retail sales." [View news story]
You are jumping the gun. High Gas and Food costs have not had enough time to show up on the charts yet. Oh but they will and when they do the numbers will be very upsetting for retailers.
When Gas and Food prices are high Consumers spend less. Alot less!
As expected for this wave count , we have seen some more downward movement from the S&P. Again, it has failed to make a new low. . At this stage a triangle formation moving to the downside is looking more favorable
Those hoping for a slowdown or reversal in food inflation won't find support from Syngenta's (SYT +4.4%) latest report. The crop protection and seed company lifts its outlook, seeing nothing to stop growing demand for grain as the world increases meat consumption. [View news story]
Futures point to a positive open, with benchmark S&P +0.2%. Deal news from Ensco-Pride, Danaher-Beckman, and AOL-HuffPo, with Sanofi-Genzyme due any day now. Later: Obama speaks to the Chamber of Commerce
Here is a quote from some CEO who got out just before the 2000 peak : “Later, CEOs, who sold shortly before the peak [2000] would claim that they just got lucky. ‘Who knew?’ one told The Wall Street Journal. But it seemed that many knew. This was not what corporate PR departments dismissed as ‘part of a regular pattern of selling.’ This was a sudden bulge in insider sales. By February of 2000- just weeks before the Nasdaq would peak – insiders were selling 23 times as much stock as they bought, compared with the typical ratio of 10 to 1. In July, they were not fooled by a summer rally; that money the ratio remained at 22 to 1.”
Here is what has happened over the last couple weeks 2011: Insiders have officially marked the top of the stock market: last week’s insider selling of all stocks (not just S&P) hit an all time record of $4.5 billion. This is the biggest weekly number ever recorded by tracking company InsiderScore.com: as Sentiment Trader highlights no other week before had more than $2 billion in net selling. Furthermore, selling in just S&P companies hit a whopping $2.8 billion: over 4 times more than the week prior! As such the ratio of insider selling to buying is now meaningless. Even Bloomberg, which traditionally just posts the data without providing commentary to it, highlighted this ridiculous outlier:
“Insider selling at Standard & Poor’s 500 Index companies reached a record in the past week as executives took advantage of a two-year high in the stock-market to sell their shares.”
We hope those retail investors who dared to reemerge in the stock market and play some hot potatoes with the big boys, enjoy their brief profit as they once again end up being the biggest fools.
Nasdaq confirmed hackers breached its system multiple times over the past year, but motive remains a mystery. One theory is that hackers were looking for inside info to gain a trading edge, but terrorism, theft or wire fraud are possibilities too as the investigation is still in its initial stages. [View news story]
Nasdaq confirmed hackers breached its system multiple times over the past year, but motive remains a mystery. One theory is that hackers were looking for inside info to gain a trading edge, but terrorism, theft or wire fraud are possibilities too as the investigation is still in its initial stages.
THE U.S. STOCK MARKET IS RIGGED
Does the United States still have a stock market? Not really. In a real market, when there are more sellers than buyers, prices decline. And vice versa of course. That is called "price discovery"; or used to be. Since January of 2010 investors have withdrawn a net total of 81 billion dollars from U.S. stocks and funds, this week marking the 33rd consecutive week of outflows, while stock prices have staged a missile launch upward that started in mid-July. Floyd Norris of the New York Times confirms that outflows have remained at record high levels over the last four years. Some of the funds withdrawn resulted from industry insider selling, and much of that was re-invested in commodities and emerging markets. But a substantial amount, according to Charles Biderman, CEO of Trimtabs, was withdrawn by middle-class Americans to pay monthly bills.
In an unprecedented interview on CNBC, Biderman stated that the Federal Reserve is no longer denying the fact that it has been rigging U.S. markets nor is the Fed making any effort to hide it. An unrelenting and counter-intuitive rally has ensued, with stock prices gapping up at 4:00 AM night after night and never looking back. Even before the Fed initiated its POMO (Permanent Open Market Operations) injections of outright treasury buys in a program euphemistically titled "Quantitative Easing 2" (a.k.a printing money out of thin air) the Fed's daily zero percent loans of taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan were used almost exclusively to buy stocks - and then sell them again within minutes or even seconds. Investment banks use high frequency trading computers (HFTs) programmed to essentially steal money, one penny at a time, from any retail investor foolish enough to believe he could make money by trading or investing in stocks. Their computers, operating at speeds no human with a laptop could match, front-run orders, ensuring a profit on every trade. Wall Street investment banks have the right, unlike everyone else, to trade in increments of 1/1000 of a penny, allowing them to deny order fills by keeping the price 1/1000 of a penny below the bid. It is one of many questionable and even illegal practices engaged in by what the internet bears cartoons refer to as the "the Goldman Sack" and "the JP Morgue". The web cartoons have gone viral, as they say, and served to educate the uninitiated in the grand-theft-stock-market game being run by the Fed and the Wall Street gangs. The website ZeroHedge.com has, over the last year, published several articles by traders who have monitored ongoing price fixing and HFT computer games. Institutional broker, Gene Noser says that HFT trading systems threaten to destroy the entire capital market system. "[They] are unregulated, often under-capitalized, and provide no redeeming social function. As I see it, they exist to extract value from real investors one fraction of a penny at a time, over and over again."
The upshot of all of this is that while the economy has seen virtually no benefit from the Fed's massive liquidity injections, Wall Street's top bankers continue to enjoy annual bonus payments in amounts ranging from 24 to 111 million dollars. Trading records show that "the Sack" and "the Morgue" have earned profits in almost every single trading day in the last three quarters. How can that be? It can be because those two banks are the market makers, setting the prices, and then betting on the very prices they themselves set. Las Vegas casinos are pikers next to these guys, since casino profits are limited by law. Not so for the Wall Street gang. The big money players are not buying common stocks these days in any case. They make private equity deals and trade off-market and off-hours in something known as a "dark pool", a cyberspace location I have always pictured as a black hole in space. As George Carlin famously said, "It's a club, and you ain't in it".
From a technical point of view, traders expected a washout low in stocks last August. It never happened, as that was the moment when "the Ben Bernank" fired up his printing presses and digitally created billions of fictitious US dollars with which to buy stocks and bonds. The last time that a central bank in a western democracy printed money this wantonly was in Wiemar Germany. And most of us know how that ended: hyperinflation that produced the image of a wheelbarrow full of paper money required to buy a loaf of bread. In 2010 America, commodity price rises are showing up in higher grocery bills and gas prices, higher education costs and health-care costs, but so far nothing as dramatic as Zimbabwe's multi-thousand percent inflation. Could it still happen here? It could. There is a lag of 12 to 18 months for liquidity to show up in consumer prices, so we cannot know what prices will look like a year from now. Gold prices have risen steadily throughout the Bernanke liquidity rush, with silver showing parabolic gains over the last six months. Whether those price rises reflect a loss of faith in governments or a fear of inflation, the end result is the same. Our currency is being deliberately devalued, at a time when we are dealing with record job losses and wage depreciation.
For the moment, the dollar is holding up because of Moody's serial downgrades of some European government debt, most recently Portugal's bonds. Euro problems could cause the dollar to rise by default over the next two to three months. But at some point attention will turn back to the Fed's POMO operations, and the dollar could suffer a precipitous decline with little warning.
The POMOs are scheduled to continue with money printing of between one and 19 billion dollars - that is per day - through June of 2011. Where will the U.S. economy be when QE2 ends? It will be where it is now, as the Fed's money printing, while raising the costs of essential food and energy, has had no notable effect on job numbers or salaries. What it does do, with every uptick in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is increase the wealth of those who are already wealthy.
Key Market Drivers This Week: Continued Stimulus Hopes Keeping Market Afloat [View article]
The key take-away point is that after suffering the first 2 consecutive down weeks since August 2010, the index bounced back strongly to demonstrate continued upward momentum.
Here is a quote from some CEO who got out just before the 2000 peak : “Later, CEOs, who sold shortly before the peak [2000] would claim that they just got lucky. ‘Who knew?’ one told The Wall Street Journal. But it seemed that many knew. This was not what corporate PR departments dismissed as ‘part of a regular pattern of selling.’ This was a sudden bulge in insider sales. By February of 2000- just weeks before the Nasdaq would peak – insiders were selling 23 times as much stock as they bought, compared with the typical ratio of 10 to 1. In July, they were not fooled by a summer rally; that money the ratio remained at 22 to 1.”
Here is what has happened over the last couple weeks 2011: Insiders have officially marked the top of the stock market: last week’s insider selling of all stocks (not just S&P) hit an all time record of $4.5 billion. This is the biggest weekly number ever recorded by tracking company InsiderScore.com: as Sentiment Trader highlights no other week before had more than $2 billion in net selling. Furthermore, selling in just S&P companies hit a whopping $2.8 billion: over 4 times more than the week prior! As such the ratio of insider selling to buying is now meaningless. Even Bloomberg, which traditionally just posts the data without providing commentary to it, highlighted this ridiculous outlier:
“Insider selling at Standard & Poor’s 500 Index companies reached a record in the past week as executives took advantage of a two-year high in the stock-market to sell their shares.”
We hope those retail investors who dared to reemerge in the stock market and play some hot potatoes with the big boys, enjoy their brief profit as they once again end up being the biggest fools.
The FDIC will propose tomorrow that major bank execs have 50% of their bonuses deferred for at least three years to help curb excessive risk taking. After three years, the execs can receive varying amounts of their deferred pay depending on the performance of the company during that time. [View news story]
THE U.S. STOCK MARKET IS RIGGED
Does the United States still have a stock market? Not really. In a real market, when there are more sellers than buyers, prices decline. And vice versa of course. That is called "price discovery"; or used to be. Since January of 2010 investors have withdrawn a net total of 81 billion dollars from U.S. stocks and funds, this week marking the 33rd consecutive week of outflows, while stock prices have staged a missile launch upward that started in mid-July. Floyd Norris of the New York Times confirms that outflows have remained at record high levels over the last four years. Some of the funds withdrawn resulted from industry insider selling, and much of that was re-invested in commodities and emerging markets. But a substantial amount, according to Charles Biderman, CEO of Trimtabs, was withdrawn by middle-class Americans to pay monthly bills.
In an unprecedented interview on CNBC, Biderman stated that the Federal Reserve is no longer denying the fact that it has been rigging U.S. markets nor is the Fed making any effort to hide it. An unrelenting and counter-intuitive rally has ensued, with stock prices gapping up at 4:00 AM night after night and never looking back. Even before the Fed initiated its POMO (Permanent Open Market Operations) injections of outright treasury buys in a program euphemistically titled "Quantitative Easing 2" (a.k.a printing money out of thin air) the Fed's daily zero percent loans of taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan were used almost exclusively to buy stocks - and then sell them again within minutes or even seconds. Investment banks use high frequency trading computers (HFTs) programmed to essentially steal money, one penny at a time, from any retail investor foolish enough to believe he could make money by trading or investing in stocks. Their computers, operating at speeds no human with a laptop could match, front-run orders, ensuring a profit on every trade. Wall Street investment banks have the right, unlike everyone else, to trade in increments of 1/1000 of a penny, allowing them to deny order fills by keeping the price 1/1000 of a penny below the bid. It is one of many questionable and even illegal practices engaged in by what the internet bears cartoons refer to as the "the Goldman Sack" and "the JP Morgue". The web cartoons have gone viral, as they say, and served to educate the uninitiated in the grand-theft-stock-market game being run by the Fed and the Wall Street gangs. The website ZeroHedge.com has, over the last year, published several articles by traders who have monitored ongoing price fixing and HFT computer games. Institutional broker, Gene Noser says that HFT trading systems threaten to destroy the entire capital market system. "[They] are unregulated, often under-capitalized, and provide no redeeming social function. As I see it, they exist to extract value from real investors one fraction of a penny at a time, over and over again."
The upshot of all of this is that while the economy has seen virtually no benefit from the Fed's massive liquidity injections, Wall Street's top bankers continue to enjoy annual bonus payments in amounts ranging from 24 to 111 million dollars. Trading records show that "the Sack" and "the Morgue" have earned profits in almost every single trading day in the last three quarters. How can that be? It can be because those two banks are the market makers, setting the prices, and then betting on the very prices they themselves set. Las Vegas casinos are pikers next to these guys, since casino profits are limited by law. Not so for the Wall Street gang. The big money players are not buying common stocks these days in any case. They make private equity deals and trade off-market and off-hours in something known as a "dark pool", a cyberspace location I have always pictured as a black hole in space. As George Carlin famously said, "It's a club, and you ain't in it".
From a technical point of view, traders expected a washout low in stocks last August. It never happened, as that was the moment when "the Ben Bernank" fired up his printing presses and digitally created billions of fictitious US dollars with which to buy stocks and bonds. The last time that a central bank in a western democracy printed money this wantonly was in Wiemar Germany. And most of us know how that ended: hyperinflation that produced the image of a wheelbarrow full of paper money required to buy a loaf of bread. In 2010 America, commodity price rises are showing up in higher grocery bills and gas prices, higher education costs and health-care costs, but so far nothing as dramatic as Zimbabwe's multi-thousand percent inflation. Could it still happen here? It could. There is a lag of 12 to 18 months for liquidity to show up in consumer prices, so we cannot know what prices will look like a year from now. Gold prices have risen steadily throughout the Bernanke liquidity rush, with silver showing parabolic gains over the last six months. Whether those price rises reflect a loss of faith in governments or a fear of inflation, the end result is the same. Our currency is being deliberately devalued, at a time when we are dealing with record job losses and wage depreciation.
For the moment, the dollar is holding up because of Moody's serial downgrades of some European government debt, most recently Portugal's bonds. Euro problems could cause the dollar to rise by default over the next two to three months. But at some point attention will turn back to the Fed's POMO operations, and the dollar could suffer a precipitous decline with little warning.
The POMOs are scheduled to continue with money printing of between one and 19 billion dollars - that is per day - through June of 2011. Where will the U.S. economy be when QE2 ends? It will be where it is now, as the Fed's money printing, while raising the costs of essential food and energy, has had no notable effect on job numbers or salaries. What it does do, with every uptick in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is increase the wealth of those who are already wealthy.
Bank of America (BAC) agreed to pay $410M to settle lawsuits claiming the bank had deceptively managed client accounts, resulting in excessive overdraft fees. Citigroup (C), JPMorgan (JPM) and Wells Fargo (WFC) were named in related lawsuits. [View news story]
Naz hacked?
THE U.S. STOCK MARKET IS RIGGED
Does the United States still have a stock market? Not really. In a real market, when there are more sellers than buyers, prices decline. And vice versa of course. That is called "price discovery"; or used to be. Since January of 2010 investors have withdrawn a net total of 81 billion dollars from U.S. stocks and funds, this week marking the 33rd consecutive week of outflows, while stock prices have staged a missile launch upward that started in mid-July. Floyd Norris of the New York Times confirms that outflows have remained at record high levels over the last four years. Some of the funds withdrawn resulted from industry insider selling, and much of that was re-invested in commodities and emerging markets. But a substantial amount, according to Charles Biderman, CEO of Trimtabs, was withdrawn by middle-class Americans to pay monthly bills.
In an unprecedented interview on CNBC, Biderman stated that the Federal Reserve is no longer denying the fact that it has been rigging U.S. markets nor is the Fed making any effort to hide it. An unrelenting and counter-intuitive rally has ensued, with stock prices gapping up at 4:00 AM night after night and never looking back. Even before the Fed initiated its POMO (Permanent Open Market Operations) injections of outright treasury buys in a program euphemistically titled "Quantitative Easing 2" (a.k.a printing money out of thin air) the Fed's daily zero percent loans of taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan were used almost exclusively to buy stocks - and then sell them again within minutes or even seconds. Investment banks use high frequency trading computers (HFTs) programmed to essentially steal money, one penny at a time, from any retail investor foolish enough to believe he could make money by trading or investing in stocks. Their computers, operating at speeds no human with a laptop could match, front-run orders, ensuring a profit on every trade. Wall Street investment banks have the right, unlike everyone else, to trade in increments of 1/1000 of a penny, allowing them to deny order fills by keeping the price 1/1000 of a penny below the bid. It is one of many questionable and even illegal practices engaged in by what the internet bears cartoons refer to as the "the Goldman Sack" and "the JP Morgue". The web cartoons have gone viral, as they say, and served to educate the uninitiated in the grand-theft-stock-market game being run by the Fed and the Wall Street gangs. The website ZeroHedge.com has, over the last year, published several articles by traders who have monitored ongoing price fixing and HFT computer games. Institutional broker, Gene Noser says that HFT trading systems threaten to destroy the entire capital market system. "[They] are unregulated, often under-capitalized, and provide no redeeming social function. As I see it, they exist to extract value from real investors one fraction of a penny at a time, over and over again."
The upshot of all of this is that while the economy has seen virtually no benefit from the Fed's massive liquidity injections, Wall Street's top bankers continue to enjoy annual bonus payments in amounts ranging from 24 to 111 million dollars. Trading records show that "the Sack" and "the Morgue" have earned profits in almost every single trading day in the last three quarters. How can that be? It can be because those two banks are the market makers, setting the prices, and then betting on the very prices they themselves set. Las Vegas casinos are pikers next to these guys, since casino profits are limited by law. Not so for the Wall Street gang. The big money players are not buying common stocks these days in any case. They make private equity deals and trade off-market and off-hours in something known as a "dark pool", a cyberspace location I have always pictured as a black hole in space. As George Carlin famously said, "It's a club, and you ain't in it".
From a technical point of view, traders expected a washout low in stocks last August. It never happened, as that was the moment when "the Ben Bernank" fired up his printing presses and digitally created billions of fictitious US dollars with which to buy stocks and bonds. The last time that a central bank in a western democracy printed money this wantonly was in Wiemar Germany. And most of us know how that ended: hyperinflation that produced the image of a wheelbarrow full of paper money required to buy a loaf of bread. In 2010 America, commodity price rises are showing up in higher grocery bills and gas prices, higher education costs and health-care costs, but so far nothing as dramatic as Zimbabwe's multi-thousand percent inflation. Could it still happen here? It could. There is a lag of 12 to 18 months for liquidity to show up in consumer prices, so we cannot know what prices will look like a year from now. Gold prices have risen steadily throughout the Bernanke liquidity rush, with silver showing parabolic gains over the last six months. Whether those price rises reflect a loss of faith in governments or a fear of inflation, the end result is the same. Our currency is being deliberately devalued, at a time when we are dealing with record job losses and wage depreciation.
For the moment, the dollar is holding up because of Moody's serial downgrades of some European government debt, most recently Portugal's bonds. Euro problems could cause the dollar to rise by default over the next two to three months. But at some point attention will turn back to the Fed's POMO operations, and the dollar could suffer a precipitous decline with little warning.
The POMOs are scheduled to continue with money printing of between one and 19 billion dollars - that is per day - through June of 2011. Where will the U.S. economy be when QE2 ends? It will be where it is now, as the Fed's money printing, while raising the costs of essential food and energy, has had no notable effect on job numbers or salaries. What it does do, with every uptick in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is increase the wealth of those who are already wealthy.
ICSC Retail Store Sales: -2% W/W, vs. flat last week. +3.2% Y/Y, vs. +2.7% last week. Heavy weather and high gas prices led to the sharp decline. [View news story]
But the good news is Playstation Network is Back up!
Rule no. 1 of 10 rules for rookie day traders: Before you press the Enter key, you must know when to get in, when to get out, and what to do if the trade doesn’t work out as expected. [View news story]
Potash (POT): Q1 EPS of $0.84 beats by $0.04. Revenue of $2.20B (+28.6% Y/Y) beats by $0.19B. Shares +1.42% premarket. (PR) [View news story]
FX markets yawn as Treasury Sec. Geithner defends the greenback, saying "we will never embrace a strategy to weaken the dollar ... our policy has been and will always be, as long as I will be in office, that a strong dollar is in the interest of the country."
[View news story]
Alcoa (AA): Q1 EPS of $0.28 beats by $0.01. Revenue of $6.0B (+22% Y/Y) misses by $0.1B. (PR) [View news story]
Look for the market to keep going down tomorrow.
March Employment Trends Index: +8.1% Y/Y to 100.9 vs. 100.3 in Feb. (revised). "In the last six months, employment excluding construction and state and local government has been growing faster than almost any other six-month period in the past decade, [but] we do not expect a turnaround in those sectors, which are still lagging," The Conference Board says. [View news story]
ICSC Retail Store Sales: +2.3% W/W, vs. -0.5% last week. +2.6% Y/Y, vs. +3.3% last week. "Rising employment and strengthening income are more than offsetting high fuel and food costs and are giving a boost to retail sales." [View news story]
When Gas and Food prices are high Consumers spend less. Alot less!
As expected for this wave count , we have seen some more downward movement from the S&P. Again, it has failed to make a new low. . At this stage a triangle formation moving to the downside is looking more favorable
bradstradingchart.blog...
Q4 GDP (2nd estimate): +2.8% vs. +3.3% expected, +3.2% preliminary. Q4 GDP Deflator +0.4% vs. +0.3% expected, +0.3% preliminary. [View news story]
Doug Kass says Paul Tudor Jones has called a top in the S&P 500 (now -0.6% to 1,317), and for a rally in bonds. Updated 12:40 p.m.: Denied. [View news story]
bought 10K of etf CORN
Those hoping for a slowdown or reversal in food inflation won't find support from Syngenta's (SYT +4.4%) latest report. The crop protection and seed company lifts its outlook, seeing nothing to stop growing demand for grain as the world increases meat consumption. [View news story]
Bought 10K of etf CORN
Market Preview: Futures point to a positive open, with benchmark S&P +0.2%. Deal news from Ensco-Pride, Danaher-Beckman, and AOL-HuffPo, with Sanofi-Genzyme due any day now. Later: Obama speaks to the Chamber of Commerce. [View news story]
Here is a quote from some CEO who got out just before the 2000 peak :
“Later, CEOs, who sold shortly before the peak [2000] would claim that they just got lucky. ‘Who knew?’ one told The Wall Street Journal. But it seemed that many knew. This was not what corporate PR departments dismissed as ‘part of a regular pattern of selling.’ This was a sudden bulge in insider sales. By February of 2000- just weeks before the Nasdaq would peak – insiders were selling 23 times as much stock as they bought, compared with the typical ratio of 10 to 1. In July, they were not fooled by a summer rally; that money the ratio remained at 22 to 1.”
Here is what has happened over the last couple weeks 2011:
Insiders have officially marked the top of the stock market: last week’s insider selling of all stocks (not just S&P) hit an all time record of $4.5 billion. This is the biggest weekly number ever recorded by tracking company InsiderScore.com: as Sentiment Trader highlights no other week before had more than $2 billion in net selling. Furthermore, selling in just S&P companies hit a whopping $2.8 billion: over 4 times more than the week prior! As such the ratio of insider selling to buying is now meaningless. Even Bloomberg, which traditionally just posts the data without providing commentary to it, highlighted this ridiculous outlier:
“Insider selling at Standard & Poor’s 500 Index companies reached a record in the past week as executives took advantage of a two-year high in the stock-market to sell their shares.”
We hope those retail investors who dared to reemerge in the stock market and play some hot potatoes with the big boys, enjoy their brief profit as they once again end up being the biggest fools.
Nasdaq confirmed hackers breached its system multiple times over the past year, but motive remains a mystery. One theory is that hackers were looking for inside info to gain a trading edge, but terrorism, theft or wire fraud are possibilities too as the investigation is still in its initial stages. [View news story]
THE U.S. STOCK MARKET IS RIGGED
Does the United States still have a stock market? Not really. In a real market, when there are more sellers than buyers, prices decline. And vice versa of course. That is called "price discovery"; or used to be. Since January of 2010 investors have withdrawn a net total of 81 billion dollars from U.S. stocks and funds, this week marking the 33rd consecutive week of outflows, while stock prices have staged a missile launch upward that started in mid-July. Floyd Norris of the New York Times confirms that outflows have remained at record high levels over the last four years. Some of the funds withdrawn resulted from industry insider selling, and much of that was re-invested in commodities and emerging markets. But a substantial amount, according to Charles Biderman, CEO of Trimtabs, was withdrawn by middle-class Americans to pay monthly bills.
In an unprecedented interview on CNBC, Biderman stated that the Federal Reserve is no longer denying the fact that it has been rigging U.S. markets nor is the Fed making any effort to hide it. An unrelenting and counter-intuitive rally has ensued, with stock prices gapping up at 4:00 AM night after night and never looking back. Even before the Fed initiated its POMO (Permanent Open Market Operations) injections of outright treasury buys in a program euphemistically titled "Quantitative Easing 2" (a.k.a printing money out of thin air) the Fed's daily zero percent loans of taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan were used almost exclusively to buy stocks - and then sell them again within minutes or even seconds. Investment banks use high frequency trading computers (HFTs) programmed to essentially steal money, one penny at a time, from any retail investor foolish enough to believe he could make money by trading or investing in stocks. Their
computers, operating at speeds no human with a laptop could match, front-run orders, ensuring a profit on every trade. Wall Street investment banks have the right, unlike everyone else, to trade in increments of 1/1000 of a penny, allowing them to deny order fills by keeping the price 1/1000 of a penny below the bid. It is one of many questionable and even illegal practices engaged in by what the internet bears cartoons refer to as the "the Goldman Sack" and "the JP Morgue". The web cartoons have gone viral, as they say, and served to educate the uninitiated in the grand-theft-stock-market game being run by the Fed and the Wall Street gangs. The website ZeroHedge.com has, over the last year, published several articles by traders who have monitored ongoing price fixing and HFT computer games. Institutional broker, Gene Noser says that HFT trading systems threaten to destroy the entire capital market system. "[They] are unregulated, often
under-capitalized, and provide no redeeming social function. As I see it, they exist to extract value from real investors one fraction of a penny at a time, over and over again."
The upshot of all of this is that while the economy has seen virtually no benefit from the Fed's massive liquidity injections, Wall Street's top bankers continue to enjoy annual bonus payments in amounts ranging from 24 to 111 million dollars. Trading records show that "the Sack" and "the Morgue" have earned profits in almost every single trading day in the last three quarters. How can that be? It can be because those two banks are the market makers, setting the prices, and then betting on the very prices they themselves set. Las Vegas casinos are pikers next to these guys, since casino profits are limited by law. Not so for the Wall Street gang. The big money players are not buying common stocks these days in any case. They make private equity deals and trade off-market and off-hours in something known as a "dark pool", a cyberspace location I have always pictured as a black hole in space. As George Carlin famously said, "It's a club, and you ain't in
it".
From a technical point of view, traders expected a washout low in stocks last August. It never happened, as that was the moment when "the Ben Bernank" fired up his printing presses and digitally created billions of fictitious US dollars with which to buy stocks and bonds. The last time that a central bank in a western democracy printed money this wantonly was in Wiemar Germany. And most of us know how that ended: hyperinflation that produced the image of a wheelbarrow full of paper money required to buy a loaf of bread. In 2010 America, commodity price rises are showing up in higher grocery bills and gas prices, higher education costs and health-care costs, but so far nothing as dramatic as Zimbabwe's multi-thousand percent inflation. Could it still happen here? It could. There is a lag of 12 to 18 months for liquidity to show up in consumer prices, so we cannot know what prices will look like a year from now. Gold prices have risen steadily throughout
the Bernanke liquidity rush, with silver showing parabolic gains over the last six months. Whether those price rises reflect a loss of faith in governments or a fear of inflation, the end result is the same. Our currency is being deliberately devalued, at a time when we are dealing with record job losses and wage depreciation.
For the moment, the dollar is holding up because of Moody's serial downgrades of some European government debt, most recently Portugal's bonds. Euro problems could cause the dollar to rise by default over the next two to three months. But at some point attention will turn back to the Fed's POMO operations, and the dollar could suffer a precipitous decline with little warning.
The POMOs are scheduled to continue with money printing of between one and 19 billion dollars - that is per day - through June of 2011. Where will the U.S. economy be when QE2 ends? It will be where it is now, as the Fed's money printing, while raising the costs of essential food and energy, has had no notable effect on job numbers or salaries. What it does do, with every uptick in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is increase the wealth of those who are already wealthy.
Key Market Drivers This Week: Continued Stimulus Hopes Keeping Market Afloat [View article]
Here is a quote from some CEO who got out just before the 2000 peak :
“Later, CEOs, who sold shortly before the peak [2000] would claim that they just got lucky. ‘Who knew?’ one told The Wall Street Journal. But it seemed that many knew. This was not what corporate PR departments dismissed as ‘part of a regular pattern of selling.’ This was a sudden bulge in insider sales. By February of 2000- just weeks before the Nasdaq would peak – insiders were selling 23 times as much stock as they bought, compared with the typical ratio of 10 to 1. In July, they were not fooled by a summer rally; that money the ratio remained at 22 to 1.”
Here is what has happened over the last couple weeks 2011:
Insiders have officially marked the top of the stock market: last week’s insider selling of all stocks (not just S&P) hit an all time record of $4.5 billion. This is the biggest weekly number ever recorded by tracking company InsiderScore.com: as Sentiment Trader highlights no other week before had more than $2 billion in net selling. Furthermore, selling in just S&P companies hit a whopping $2.8 billion: over 4 times more than the week prior! As such the ratio of insider selling to buying is now meaningless. Even Bloomberg, which traditionally just posts the data without providing commentary to it, highlighted this ridiculous outlier:
“Insider selling at Standard & Poor’s 500 Index companies reached a record in the past week as executives took advantage of a two-year high in the stock-market to sell their shares.”
We hope those retail investors who dared to reemerge in the stock market and play some hot potatoes with the big boys, enjoy their brief profit as they once again end up being the biggest fools.
The FDIC will propose tomorrow that major bank execs have 50% of their bonuses deferred for at least three years to help curb excessive risk taking. After three years, the execs can receive varying amounts of their deferred pay depending on the performance of the company during that time. [View news story]
Does the United States still have a stock market? Not really. In a real market, when there are more sellers than buyers, prices decline. And vice versa of course. That is called "price discovery"; or used to be. Since January of 2010 investors have withdrawn a net total of 81 billion dollars from U.S. stocks and funds, this week marking the 33rd consecutive week of outflows, while stock prices have staged a missile launch upward that started in mid-July. Floyd Norris of the New York Times confirms that outflows have remained at record high levels over the last four years. Some of the funds withdrawn resulted from industry insider selling, and much of that was re-invested in commodities and emerging markets. But a substantial amount, according to Charles Biderman, CEO of Trimtabs, was withdrawn by middle-class Americans to pay monthly bills.
In an unprecedented interview on CNBC, Biderman stated that the Federal Reserve is no longer denying the fact that it has been rigging U.S. markets nor is the Fed making any effort to hide it. An unrelenting and counter-intuitive rally has ensued, with stock prices gapping up at 4:00 AM night after night and never looking back. Even before the Fed initiated its POMO (Permanent Open Market Operations) injections of outright treasury buys in a program euphemistically titled "Quantitative Easing 2" (a.k.a printing money out of thin air) the Fed's daily zero percent loans of taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan were used almost exclusively to buy stocks - and then sell them again within minutes or even seconds. Investment banks use high frequency trading computers (HFTs) programmed to essentially steal money, one penny at a time, from any retail investor foolish enough to believe he could make money by trading or investing in stocks. Their computers, operating at speeds no human with a laptop could match, front-run orders, ensuring a profit on every trade. Wall Street investment banks have the right, unlike everyone else, to trade in increments of 1/1000 of a penny, allowing them to deny order fills by keeping the price 1/1000 of a penny below the bid. It is one of many questionable and even illegal practices engaged in by what the internet bears cartoons refer to as the "the Goldman Sack" and "the JP Morgue". The web cartoons have gone viral, as they say, and served to educate the uninitiated in the grand-theft-stock-market game being run by the Fed and the Wall Street gangs. The website ZeroHedge.com has, over the last year, published several articles by traders who have monitored ongoing price fixing and HFT computer games. Institutional broker, Gene Noser says that HFT trading systems threaten to destroy the entire capital market system. "[They] are unregulated, often under-capitalized, and provide no redeeming social function. As I see it, they exist to extract value from real investors one fraction of a penny at a time, over and over again."
The upshot of all of this is that while the economy has seen virtually no benefit from the Fed's massive liquidity injections, Wall Street's top bankers continue to enjoy annual bonus payments in amounts ranging from 24 to 111 million dollars. Trading records show that "the Sack" and "the Morgue" have earned profits in almost every single trading day in the last three quarters. How can that be? It can be because those two banks are the market makers, setting the prices, and then betting on the very prices they themselves set. Las Vegas casinos are pikers next to these guys, since casino profits are limited by law. Not so for the Wall Street gang. The big money players are not buying common stocks these days in any case. They make private equity deals and trade off-market and off-hours in something known as a "dark pool", a cyberspace location I have always pictured as a black hole in space. As George Carlin famously said, "It's a club, and you ain't in it".
From a technical point of view, traders expected a washout low in stocks last August. It never happened, as that was the moment when "the Ben Bernank" fired up his printing presses and digitally created billions of fictitious US dollars with which to buy stocks and bonds. The last time that a central bank in a western democracy printed money this wantonly was in Wiemar Germany. And most of us know how that ended: hyperinflation that produced the image of a wheelbarrow full of paper money required to buy a loaf of bread. In 2010 America, commodity price rises are showing up in higher grocery bills and gas prices, higher education costs and health-care costs, but so far nothing as dramatic as Zimbabwe's multi-thousand percent inflation. Could it still happen here? It could. There is a lag of 12 to 18 months for liquidity to show up in consumer prices, so we cannot know what prices will look like a year from now. Gold prices have risen steadily throughout the Bernanke liquidity rush, with silver showing parabolic gains over the last six months. Whether those price rises reflect a loss of faith in governments or a fear of inflation, the end result is the same. Our currency is being deliberately devalued, at a time when we are dealing with record job losses and wage depreciation.
For the moment, the dollar is holding up because of Moody's serial downgrades of some European government debt, most recently Portugal's bonds. Euro problems could cause the dollar to rise by default over the next two to three months. But at some point attention will turn back to the Fed's POMO operations, and the dollar could suffer a precipitous decline with little warning.
The POMOs are scheduled to continue with money printing of between one and 19 billion dollars - that is per day - through June of 2011. Where will the U.S. economy be when QE2 ends? It will be where it is now, as the Fed's money printing, while raising the costs of essential food and energy, has had no notable effect on job numbers or salaries. What it does do, with every uptick in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is increase the wealth of those who are already wealthy.
Bank of America (BAC) agreed to pay $410M to settle lawsuits claiming the bank had deceptively managed client accounts, resulting in excessive overdraft fees. Citigroup (C), JPMorgan (JPM) and Wells Fargo (WFC) were named in related lawsuits. [View news story]
THE U.S. STOCK MARKET IS RIGGED
Does the United States still have a stock market? Not really. In a real market, when there are more sellers than buyers, prices decline. And vice versa of course. That is called "price discovery"; or used to be. Since January of 2010 investors have withdrawn a net total of 81 billion dollars from U.S. stocks and funds, this week marking the 33rd consecutive week of outflows, while stock prices have staged a missile launch upward that started in mid-July. Floyd Norris of the New York Times confirms that outflows have remained at record high levels over the last four years. Some of the funds withdrawn resulted from industry insider selling, and much of that was re-invested in commodities and emerging markets. But a substantial amount, according to Charles Biderman, CEO of Trimtabs, was withdrawn by middle-class Americans to pay monthly bills.
In an unprecedented interview on CNBC, Biderman stated that the Federal Reserve is no longer denying the fact that it has been rigging U.S. markets nor is the Fed making any effort to hide it. An unrelenting and counter-intuitive rally has ensued, with stock prices gapping up at 4:00 AM night after night and never looking back. Even before the Fed initiated its POMO (Permanent Open Market Operations) injections of outright treasury buys in a program euphemistically titled "Quantitative Easing 2" (a.k.a printing money out of thin air) the Fed's daily zero percent loans of taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan were used almost exclusively to buy stocks - and then sell them again within minutes or even seconds. Investment banks use high frequency trading computers (HFTs) programmed to essentially steal money, one penny at a time, from any retail investor foolish enough to believe he could make money by trading or investing in stocks. Their computers, operating at speeds no human with a laptop could match, front-run orders, ensuring a profit on every trade. Wall Street investment banks have the right, unlike everyone else, to trade in increments of 1/1000 of a penny, allowing them to deny order fills by keeping the price 1/1000 of a penny below the bid. It is one of many questionable and even illegal practices engaged in by what the internet bears cartoons refer to as the "the Goldman Sack" and "the JP Morgue". The web cartoons have gone viral, as they say, and served to educate the uninitiated in the grand-theft-stock-market game being run by the Fed and the Wall Street gangs. The website ZeroHedge.com has, over the last year, published several articles by traders who have monitored ongoing price fixing and HFT computer games. Institutional broker, Gene Noser says that HFT trading systems threaten to destroy the entire capital market system. "[They] are unregulated, often under-capitalized, and provide no redeeming social function. As I see it, they exist to extract value from real investors one fraction of a penny at a time, over and over again."
The upshot of all of this is that while the economy has seen virtually no benefit from the Fed's massive liquidity injections, Wall Street's top bankers continue to enjoy annual bonus payments in amounts ranging from 24 to 111 million dollars. Trading records show that "the Sack" and "the Morgue" have earned profits in almost every single trading day in the last three quarters. How can that be? It can be because those two banks are the market makers, setting the prices, and then betting on the very prices they themselves set. Las Vegas casinos are pikers next to these guys, since casino profits are limited by law. Not so for the Wall Street gang. The big money players are not buying common stocks these days in any case. They make private equity deals and trade off-market and off-hours in something known as a "dark pool", a cyberspace location I have always pictured as a black hole in space. As George Carlin famously said, "It's a club, and you ain't in it".
From a technical point of view, traders expected a washout low in stocks last August. It never happened, as that was the moment when "the Ben Bernank" fired up his printing presses and digitally created billions of fictitious US dollars with which to buy stocks and bonds. The last time that a central bank in a western democracy printed money this wantonly was in Wiemar Germany. And most of us know how that ended: hyperinflation that produced the image of a wheelbarrow full of paper money required to buy a loaf of bread. In 2010 America, commodity price rises are showing up in higher grocery bills and gas prices, higher education costs and health-care costs, but so far nothing as dramatic as Zimbabwe's multi-thousand percent inflation. Could it still happen here? It could. There is a lag of 12 to 18 months for liquidity to show up in consumer prices, so we cannot know what prices will look like a year from now. Gold prices have risen steadily throughout the Bernanke liquidity rush, with silver showing parabolic gains over the last six months. Whether those price rises reflect a loss of faith in governments or a fear of inflation, the end result is the same. Our currency is being deliberately devalued, at a time when we are dealing with record job losses and wage depreciation.
For the moment, the dollar is holding up because of Moody's serial downgrades of some European government debt, most recently Portugal's bonds. Euro problems could cause the dollar to rise by default over the next two to three months. But at some point attention will turn back to the Fed's POMO operations, and the dollar could suffer a precipitous decline with little warning.
The POMOs are scheduled to continue with money printing of between one and 19 billion dollars - that is per day - through June of 2011. Where will the U.S. economy be when QE2 ends? It will be where it is now, as the Fed's money printing, while raising the costs of essential food and energy, has had no notable effect on job numbers or salaries. What it does do, with every uptick in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is increase the wealth of those who are already wealthy.