March to Exit
by Insider Zone - March 16th, 2010 9:28 am
By Ilene
Let’s take a look at Insider Buying and Selling over the last week or so. These are screen shots from Finviz - the significant buys against a green background first and significant sells against the pink background second. All the buys fit into my screen shot but the sells did not. Click here to see all the sells.
Note that the largest buy in the group, for KITD was at a price of 9.73 (KITD is currently at 11.54). The buy was part of an Equity Offering rather than an open market purchase. Tuzman Kaleil Isaza’s (KITD’s Chairman and Chief Exec. Officer) history of buys is here.
Note selling in favorites such as CSCO, GOOG and AMZN.
Buys
Sells
Continuation of the sell list:
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New Highs For Techs
by Chart School - March 11th, 2010 10:49 am
Stock Market Commentary: New Highs for Tech and Small Caps
Courtesy of Fallond Stock Picks
Small Caps and Tech continued their good form. Technicals continue to support the move higher for Small Caps (Russell 2000) with new highs for the MACD and +DI line. The Russell 2000 would have to give up 25 points (or 4%) just to test breakout support at 650.
The prior underperformance of the semiconductors was undone with today’s 2% gain.
This revival helped keep the rally in the Nasdaq ticking over
But Large Caps didn’t quite live up to the gains of Tech and Small Caps
Last Friday’s breakout gap remains the most tempting pullback zone.
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The Gold Bubble
by ilene - March 10th, 2010 10:50 am
The Gold Bubble
Courtesy of RICK BOOKSTABER
This represents my personal opinion, not the views of the SEC or its staff.
I am not going to spend time here talking about how the price of gold is off-the-wall, that it is not just a bubble in the making, but a bubble waiting to burst. I don’t want to waste your time on that point.We all know it is a bubble.
George Soros has said “The ultimate asset bubble is gold”. Many of the top asset managers, such as Tudor and Paulson, are piling on; Paul Tudor Jones recently said gold “has its time and place, and now is that time.” The banks are echoing this view with their research. Goldman has a research piece that looks for gold to approach $1,400 in the next year. The more ebullient Charles Morris of HSBC has said, “I absolutely believe it’s heading into a bubble, but that’s why you buy it. ” He, along with a number of other professional and otherwise rational managers, looks for gold to move as high as $5,000 an ounce.
More interesting than this almost universal agreement is what that agreement tells us about the dynamics of the market.
The Naked Bubble
Usually the markets have the courtesy of giving cover for bubbles. We adorn the bubbles with some justification. Even if a guy is just after sex, he at least has the decency to act like there is some substance behind his interest. For the Internet bubble, it was that fundamental analysis based on the brick and mortar world did not bear relevance in the New Paradigm. For the Nikkei bubble, it was that the crazy P/E ratios were not considering one subtlety or another in the Japanese accounting system.
But with gold, no one seems even to care about giving a justification, other than “gold has been a store of value throughout 5,000 years of monetary history”. Which is fine as far as it goes, but that doesn’t say anything about what the price of that store of value should be.
Pump and Dump
Given that “hedge fund” and “highly secretive” are usually said in the same breath, don’t you get suspicious when so many of the top managers are so vocally out there about their gold investments? And when their positions are structured in a way that make them open to view? Paulson and Soros have huge positions in gold ETFs. We know that, because if…
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Test Post 1234
by Chart School - March 8th, 2010 11:29 am
S&P 500 Rebound Continues to Defy Trends
Courtesy of Trader Mark at Fund My Mutual Fund
There used to be a saying that markets fall much faster than they rise. Like many things the past year, historical trends such as that truism have been blown out of the water.
The S&P 500 is now up 7% in 3 weeks (the Russell 2000 is doing even better) and continues to steamroll anyone who stands in its way. The 8% correction in late January to mid February? Similary, it took 3 weeks. (Click to enlarge)
Our "ups" now happen as quickly as our "downs"… and yet again (a broken record) with little volume to show for it on the upswing. You can see that on the bars at the bottom of the chart, the only days the liquidity flood can be contained (selloffs) are on heavy volume days. Almost all lighter volume days mean sideways or upside action.
The beat goes on; another V-shaped, light volume rally to mimic those of 2009. Anyone using traditional technical analysis (use of volume) continues to look the fool.
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Test Post for MarketTamer
by markettamer - January 15th, 2010 3:25 pm
This is a test post to test where MarketTamers posts will appear and who will see them. Need some more text so here comes Ipsum Delorem.
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Sed nunc nisi, vestibulum non eleifend at, semper in nulla. Nam consequat odio vel nisl malesuada eleifend. Sed ac est dolor, nec vehicula felis. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Nulla vel enim et quam sollicitudin pharetra a vitae lectus. Aenean mollis nibh ut augue eleifend eget congue dolor pretium. Suspendisse mollis massa in mi porttitor pulvinar. Nunc imperdiet dignissim erat sit amet dignissim. Curabitur non mauris ligula, ut fringilla metus. Praesent vitae eros quis neque fringilla convallis vel non enim. Aliquam nibh tortor, fermentum vel tristique sed, posuere ut odio. Donec justo nulla, hendrerit eu malesuada at, tincidunt id dolor. Fusce ut dictum diam. Donec a lacus leo, ac vulputate elit. Aenean euismod eros nulla. Sed molestie cursus aliquet.
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Thirty-Three Percent Thursday - Big Chart Review
by Phil - November 17th, 2009 10:58 am
Whee - we finally made it!
In an UNBELIEVABLE move off the bottom over the past 6 months and one week, we have gained 58% on the S&P and have finally crossed into our 33% levels (from the highs) that we first set as upside targets back in our July Big Chart Review. At the time I said "I just don’t see that happening without a pullback" yet here we are, with barely a wiggle down since I wrote that on July 27th and up 20% from our July 13th S&P base at 880.
Have we been too bearish? Is it now natural for the market to rise 20% in 2 months without a pullback? Are we really 20% better off than we were 2 months ago? History tells us not to mess with the 5% rule so we SHOULD encounter powerful resistance here as we approach the zone of a roughly 60% move off the March lows as well as 30% off our highs - it’s going to be a rough 2.5% from here. As you can see from the above chart, we have already exceeded all previous recoveries by almost 100% at this point in the cycle. And why not, our government spent $9 TRILLION dollars to do it so we damn sure better have a pretty chart as a souvenir! The other rally that had a spectacular recovery was the the great crash of 1929 (the grey line).
In the 1929 crash, the stock market fell first, not the banks, which didn’t begin failing until 1932 as lack of electronic data and next-day mail meant it took a lot longer for the late payment and foreclosure cycle to start impacting bank balance sheets. Also, of course, they were nowhere near as maniacally levered as today’s institutions. In 1929 the banks did not play the market, they simply lent money to people who invested in stocks, businesses and properties that went bust so there were two distinct waves to the market crash in the Great Depression: First the people went broke, then the banks.
Unemployment in the US in 1930, a year after the crash, was only 8.7% - less than it is now. No one at that time thought it was important to help the average American get back on their feet after many of them lost their life savings and went deeply into debt as their homes dropped in value and jobs became scarce. It was only after…
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“Today I Think Of Myself As A Government Contractor……”
by ilene - September 17th, 2009 4:39 pm
"Today I Think Of Myself As A Government Contractor……"
Courtesy of Jan-Martin Feddersen at Immobilienblasen
![[No Easy Exit for Government as Housing Market's Savior]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AR590_EXIT_NS_20090914191413.gif)
No Easy Exit for Government as Housing Market’s Savior WSJ
After a year of extraordinary interventions in the economy, the federal government is starting to pare its support for the private sector. It doesn’t look that way to Peter Lansing, president of mortgage firm Universal Lending.
The Denver home lender sees every day how dependent the housing market has become on the government. At the height of the boom, just 20% of Universal’s mortgages were backed by the Federal Housing Administration, an arm of the government that guarantees loans to borrowers who can’t afford big down payments. Today, the FHA accounts for more than 80% of his business. For Mr. Lansing, this represents a new way of life — more government, more paperwork, but also a lot of sales that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
"Over 29 years in business, we’ve always thought of ourselves as being in the free-enterprise system. Today I think of myself as a government contractor,"
Over the past year, the government has intervened heavily at essentially every stage of the home-buying process. In fact, more than 80% of the new residential mortgage loans made this year benefited from some form of government support, according to the trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance.
Speaking of CHUZPAH…….
Einigen Bänkern sind selbstredend auch die 80% noch zu wenig……
Wells Fargo urges US to boost mortgage market
The US government should help revive the moribund market for big mortgages by getting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy large home loans from banks, the chief executive of the lender Wells Fargo urged in an interview with the FT on Tuesday. John Stumpf, whose bank originates a quarter of all US mortgages, called for an increase in the size of loans purchased by Fannie and Freddie, the troubled finance groups controlled by the authorities.
Buffet will be proud ……
Behind FHA Strains, a Push to Lift Housing WSJ
![[Broad Exposure chart]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NA-BA247_WFHA_NS_20090904192026.gif)
The FHA insures loans secured with down payments as low as 3.5%. But values in many markets in which it has been increasing its activity have fallen far more than that in the past year. The result:…
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More On My “Deflationary Collapse” Ticker
by ilene - September 17th, 2009 3:00 pm
More On My "Deflationary Collapse" Ticker
Courtesy of Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker
Boy, that got people’s attention.
We must change our economic course now and accept the contraction that MUST COME in order to save our economic and monetary system.
Yep.
It also drew critics, chief among them being people who claimed that "debt isn’t really growing at that percentage beyond GDP."
Oh yes it is.
In fact, I was being rather reasonable, in that I was using time periods going all the way back to the 1950s.
But - let’s focus in on "closer to today", specifically, 1990 forward.
I think we can all agree that the 1990s were tremendously good times for GDP, and were not nearly so destructive for debt, right?
Ok.
Well, I hate people telling me they think I’m being unrealistically "doom and gloomish", so I "de-theoreticalized" that chart a bit, and picked on more-recent times where the growth rates were pretty darn good and some of the really-expansive debt periods, particularly from the 70s, were not included.
Here are the ugly facts - not conjecture, not assumptions, not going back 50 years data, current and unassailable facts.
During the period from 1990 onward, GDP grew at a compound annual rate of 5.361%1. Debt during the same period, nearly 20 years, grew at a compound annual rate of 7.9401%.
It is worse if you look at 2000 onward - there GDP growth was 5.25% on an average annual basis, while debt growth was 8.6279%.
I thus have "recast" the 20-year forward graph for you in two forms - one assuming we can maintain the 1990 onward rates (which are more favorable) and the second assuming that the 2000 onward rates are what we face going forward.
Note that the GDP growth rate exceeds (by at least one percent and in most cases two percent!) the expected actual economic growth rate for at least the next five years from nearly all mainstream economists. I am also not building in any extraordinary increase in debt for the projected (by both the White House and CBO) increase in Federal Debt by $9 trillion over 10 years - a 100% increase - as it roughly corresponds with the expected debt increase in the economy as measured by previous trends. Nor am I including any of the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, which total some $70+ trillion dollars all on their own. Since my intent is to discover whether there is any rational basis for a belief that we can…
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Never Have So Many Stocks Been So Stretched Above Their 200ma.
by Chart School - September 17th, 2009 2:02 pm
More on the subject of overbought stocksm by Rob Hanna at Quantifiable Edges. H/t to The Pragmatic Capitalist.
My question: are conditions comparable between now and the four other instances of spiking overbought readings that Rob charts below? - Ilene
Never Have So Many Stocks Been So Stretched Above Their 200ma.
Courtesy of Rob’s Quantifiable Edges
Near the end of August I discussed that some of the breadth measures tracked by Worden were near all-time highs. This situation corrected itself as the market embarked on a brief selloff. Tonight two of their indicators actually registered their highest readings ever. These are T2109 and T21111 which track the number of stocks 1 and 2 standard deviations above their 200-day moving averages. Below is a long-term chart of T21111 with full history of the indicator going back to 1986.
I marked on the chart the 4 other instances that came close to the current reading. What you may notice is that these spikes were generally brief. Every case was followed by at least a mild selloff that worked off the severely overbought conditions. In no case did the extreme spike mark the end to the bull market that created it. It’s dangerous to read too much into only 4 instances, but a short-term pullback does seem reasonable. The current reading does not suggest a long-term top, though.
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THE STOCK MARKET HASN’T BEEN THIS OVERBOUGHT SINCE 1983
by ilene - September 17th, 2009 1:55 pm
THE STOCK MARKET HASN’T BEEN THIS OVERBOUGHT SINCE 1983
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
Excellent data here from Bespoke. The market hasn’t been this overbought in over 25 years:
This additional chart from Quantifiable Edge shows the extreme level of stocks above their 200 day moving average. The stock market hasn’t been this oversold ever in terms of this indicator:
Source: Bespoke Invest, QE
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
(