Here's what you show people who say "it's their fault" with some qualification to who constitutes "them". No, it's not Obama, Barney Frank, Bush, John Bohener, Chuck Shumer, Nancy Pelosi or any of a number of other losers who should be drawn and quartered after tar and feathering (Lloyd Blankfien comes to mind, along with a few others in the same business). It's ALL of them, and getting you to think it's Tweedledum vs Tweedledee just keeps one or the other clown running things.
The real picture
You see, it's not elected people running the show, hasn't been for quite a long time. Ever notice how every candidate promises change, then can't deliver any for some reason? You changed the wrong guys, guys.
Re: The daily link
Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2012 1:11 pm
by Doug Coulter
Good cartoon on whether we hate each other to death - or entertain ourselves to death. I don't think it's necessarily exclusive, we seem to manage both at once.
If things were sane, if markets depended on truth, or rational evaluation of fundamentals, this guy might be dead-on right - but perhaps if they were really rational, youtube would no longer be available and the world would be one big "world spring" revolution. You know, if the hundreds of trillions of bad CDS paper in dark pool trading was revealed so we could even see the fundamentals, and the fact that all the major banks book values are negative numbers at this point. But, given we have what we have, here goes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... UvmUtWm-HE
Reality seems to be more like this:
OF late, I've just been swing trading - too fast to log it on this board, by the time you could read it, the trade is done - I am usually trying to decide what to do right up to the mouse click, and don't do more possible trades than I do. Then more often than not, I'm calling it wrong and getting out pretty quick too. This is one tough market. What has been working for me is a barbell approach. I've held for example AGNC longer than perhaps any other issue for quite some time - nice dividend, and if you manage to buy in dips, usually showing some nice green cap gains. Gold, Silver - at present I'm down to core holdings in ETFs and physical, maybe I'm missing a move, but my system is flashing a fairly weak buy - then sell, then buy, over the last few days. I try to get the middles of the big moves, and there's usually time. i also picked up a but of TLT the other day at the bottom of its range, and it's green now. Yes, I know our bonds can't go up, and must go down - eventually. It's still a part of diversity, and I am watching, meanwhile it pays out a little more than my cash account does and it's going up.
At the other extreme of the barbell, I've been trading in and out of some oddball things - short the market as a whole with SPXU, in and out of FAX and VXX, and managed to catch a really nice move on of all things, GM, which looks like stalling out just now. That's not a big one (too bad, it was good) so I'll probably just put on a trailing stop there and see what happens.
We've come up out of the last trading range, and are into the higher one we had before it. We could be about to really break out, or bounce of the top of the higher range, so I'm more short oriented than otherwise right now - we've got a lot of junk coming out of Europe that might push us back out of the land of unicorns at any time. The fundamentals really aren't all that great, and sooner or later, we notice that as a market. There's just no volume out there at the moment which is ominous enough - it allows for rather big swings on nothing but a whim, so it's a good time to be careful and watchful.
Good luck out there...
Re: The daily link
Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2012 8:33 pm
by Doug Coulter
A nice long one for the weekend. This won't be new to avid market followers, but perhaps some haven't seen this, and linking things here seems to keep them around longer than on most boards, so...Kyle Bass, in a situation where he's not being interrupted constantly and can just talk. Some real gems in here. THis is one of the few guys I really listen to. I don't always agree - with anyone - but only some people are even worth the effort to disagree with. Kyle is one of the better ones out there. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V3kpKzd ... 573EB9F542
There are some really funny comments in the midst of this "doom and gloom porno". I'll try to get back and add those times so you can skip to them.
13:25 - if you think a 50% writedown is going to save Greece - you've lost your mind. 19:33 - debt to gdp vs war 20:42 - shit, barney, make it count! 42:00 - paper gold bugs. Straight talk, no bs "thanks, give me the gold" 47:00 ".gov - we're just going to export our way out of this. How? We're gonna kill the dollar." 48:40 Bernanke means "rates low forever" because he's stuck. Can't raise them - can't afford to roll our debt if he does. 59:40 the "give a shit" factor 1:01:10 "good-good? 1:04:30 "don't believe these governments"
In fact, just listening to this again, after some time - the guy is calling them pretty close.
Is a zerohedge article pointing out something almost everyone missed. It's more than possible, via a number of interesting tricky ways, for a private entity to print money legally through various derivatives. No, no one gets out printing plates (neither does the Fed) but the result spends just the same. When the crunch happened, one of the results was that much of this funny money went poof. As a result, while we are of course having a lot more inflation than reported, due to the Fed running the presses overtime - the numbers don't match up. That's because the numbers for "official" money are wrong due to this off books money.
And, they've done it again! We are now in a crazy flood of more private funny money, to the tune of hundreds of trillions worth, all waiting to go poof again as soon as some trigger happens (Euro?).
Just read and weep. Nothing whatever seems to have been learned. Short term gain, get the bonus, quit, who cares if the world burns after that.
You will very rarely hear me say "there ought to be a law" but I'm almost saying it now. The trouble with any law of course, is who watches the guards - and we already know they are corrupt, inept and so on.
Markets actually down 50% compared to gold since the boom/crash. So all the cheerleading about new highs has to kind of be taken with a grain of salt. Or would that be gold? Lots of grains.
Dow/gold - real returns
Re: The daily link
Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 6:33 pm
by Doug Coulter
Stunning presentation of a new theory of chart reading. I'm not so sure I buy into this yet, but it sure is intriguing and after the first few seconds, the music's nice too.
Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2012 3:40 pm