Archive for July, 2006
Today, and the past few days have been hectic for the market. The price of oil keeps rising and I need to sell my gas-guzzling van. So do we panic yet and where is the market going? Over at HipEgg we did a review of the Dow.
I don’t know if a TA is the right tool for the over all market, I don’t know that it isn’t. If TA is correct then we are testing support and could be looking at a correction soon but that is not the point. The point is, there is profit to be made in panic. As the aged Templar said to Indiana “You must choose, but choose wisely.”
Happy trading.
Saturday, Jul. 15, 2006
by Kevin
Certificates of Deposit are not for everyone but if you live long enough you will probably be considering them at some point. If you are going to invest with what banks currently call CDs then you should be smart about it. Using a technique called "laddering" or "stepping" you can improve your liquidity and maximize your returns over the long run by protecting yourself from downturns in market interest rates.
The market has come a long way since its last major crash — an event that transferred much wealth from the ignorant to the informed. It almost feels like deja vu when you see VCs lining up again to fund startups, or companies commanding unreasonable stock price multiples based on little more than hope for the future. Don’t you wonder what we’re not knowing this time around? I don’t wish to convince everyone to be value investors, but what if there’s a way to play a popular trend, but also err on the safer side of risk to avoid the extreme volatilities?
Renault saved Nissan in 1999. The partnership now boasts the highest profit margins in the industry. GM took a $10.6 billion plunge last year. Can the powerhouse French / Japanese duo rescue the US’s largest auto maker?
Devaluation of currency is not uncommon in other countries, but so far has been moderate in the U.S (in part because the dollar is the world’s currency). I recently discussed this in an article titled Speculating on the Future of the Dollar. But given our massive debt, budget deficit and trade deficit, a significant drop of the dollar against other world currencies (and corresponding increase in inflation as all types of imports become more expensive) becomes a possibility.
How can you protect your portfolio from a significant slide in the dollar?
WebWord has a good write up about Professor Feng Li who data mined the annual reports of 34,180 companies with some interesting results. Li counted the number of times words like “risk” and “uncertain” showed up in the reports and compared the data to previous years.
Professor Li discovered that a “big jump in words related to risk is usually followed by poor share performance” which makes a ton of sense. He built a model portfolio based on this data. The punch line is that he would have outperformed the S&P 500 index by 6% per year since 1995. Smashing!
Has anyone seen other analysies like this one? What else can we “data mine” to read the market?
We linked to WebWord before, for John Rhodes’ opinions on Microsoft and Web 2.0. (our article)
Monday, Jul. 10, 2006
by Jason
Ah, the tenbagger. That mythical creature from stock trading lore that grows 10 times in price. This is what dreams are made of. I like a quote from Jason Kelly’s book, The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing. “It takes only $10,000 and two tenbaggers to become a millionaire.” It’s simple in concept really. Find a fast growing company, hold on to it for 5 or 6 years, and sell it for a long-term windfall. The equivalent of 50-60% annually. It’s every investor-boy’s fantasy but mysteriously elusive. In fact there may only be a few stocks a year that turn out to be tenbaggers. So the question is how do you find them? Maybe I can help.
“Is now the time to jump into MSFT now that it is trading above its 30 day MA?” That was the question presented to me recently.
Before I go into the answer I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. I am a regular poster over at HipEgg. On that site I post under the pen name Jym Khana. My real name is Kevin Hamrick and I have been involved in investing for, well, many years. I even spent a very little time working for a couple of the big brokerage facilities. Regardless of that fact, everything I am presenting is only my opinion. I am no longer working with or for any financial institution and if I post on a stock that I own I will make that clear. In this case, I don’t own any MSFT stock.
Last week the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the 17th time in a row. This is dire news for the Homebuilder Industry because with every interest rate hike, it gets that much tougher for new home buyers to afford to buy a home. It also introduces an additional negative factor into the equation, in that existing homeowners become worried as to whether they are losing equity in their homes. This may induce them to panic and to put their homes up for sale. These same homeowners, many of whom took out ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) or “Interest Only” mortgages a few years back, will soon see reality knocking at the door.
