Good Morning As Israel/Hamas fight escalates the prices for both gold and oil rise. Recent price behavior for oil has been a strong opening and a quick fade by 10am. Unless the Gaza turmoil escalates I expect oil to resume its recent pattern, down. Storage …
All posts in Stock Market Comments
A disappointing day. Once again my gold positions (DGP, GLD) bailed me out. That’s not a good sign. Corporate bonds are getting the nod from numerous quarters. I painted that picture last week: junk bonds historically have a 4 1/2% default rate but have recently …
Noon, Monday, December 22nd With GE, GOOG, and GS all down this market isn’t going anywhere. My Amazon idea was errant, to say the least. But am still thinking revenues w/b higher. Here is a good site to check sector strength/ weakness: MarketGauge by Dataview, …
Good Morning. Futures are pointing to a moderately positive opening. We may be getting a Santa Clause rally both before and after Christmas. The TED spread indicator on Bloomberg.com: Investment Tools again appears to be improving. Remember that a ratio of 1.40 to 1.60 indicates …
Closed End Funds Late December is the time to dig for CEFs. Most share holders are under water and sell to establish tax losses. Since many CEFs are thin traders these sales push the share prices way below the NAV. A good place to begin …
Junk
By now almost is everyone is familiar with the junk bond default rate. The scenario goes like this: the historic default rate of bonds rated BBB or lower is about 4%. Yet, the recent pricing of junk bonds indicates a default rate of about 21%. …
Crushed
I saw GE weakening over the last two days, I even commented on it. Idiot. Go with the obvious. The 3-G’s; Goldman, Google and GE are great market tells. The market finds it difficult to go up without at least two and preferrably all three …
No Where Man
Not much happening. As suggested yesterday there doesn’t seem to be a catalyst to move shares. With a growing recognition that the Fed is out of bullets the markets are on their own for a while. And with expriation tomorrow traders will be cautious adding …
Initial claims still a crusher but we are becoming inured to numbers above half a million. Unemployment clearly headed to double digits. Wilbur Ross, my pal (well, not really a pal, but acquaintance) from our days at Rothschild Inc. suggested this morning on CNBC that …
Front Running
Wednesday, 9:30pm More on Maduff. It turns out I had most of it correct. But I missed the front running part. When we handed off an order to Maduff he would own it. In other words it was off our books and on his. So, …