I was thinking about writing something cute like I resolve to get more bullish but that would be wrong. I try, in my own humble way, to "get" the market right. That means I am not bullish or bearish but Truthish (to further botch Stephen Colbert’s use of the word) and, as Buddah says: "There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting." Confucious reminds us that there are three methods by which we may learn wisdom: "First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest."
In that spirit, we will spend the day in reflection so that we are better able to start on that long road to the truth so that we will be better able to imitate the things that will work in the year to come while trying to avoid making mistakes that will give us bitter experiences.
This post is not about me – We had a fantastic year and I’ve already given some outlook for 2011 back on the 19th in that weekend’s "It’s Never too Early to Predict the Future" and our current position is short-term bearish in the Jan-April time-frame, looking for a pullback to at least 1,200 on the S&P and possibly back to 1,150.
After that, we are expecting a return to steady gains but without the irrational exuberance we’re currently experiencing. So no, I am not bearish – I simply think we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. Since we don’t know where the rally train will stop, we have our "Breakout Defense – 5,000% in 5 Trades or Less" from Dec 11th, which were a set of very bullish, highly levered plays where a little bet can pay off a lot if we simply hold our long-established breakout levels.
How much is "a lot"? Well my GE trade idea, for example, was to sell the 2013 $12.50 puts for $1.10 (net $1.15 in ordinary margin according to TOS) and to use that money to buy the 2012 $17.50/20 bull call spread for .95, which was a net .15 credit on a $2.50 spread that was on the money at the time. GE has gained about .75 since the 11th and…
I liked David Fry’s tweet (is that the right word – I feel so old when I don’t know this stuff!) yesterday which said: "SPY volume again pathetic at 55M shares. What’s there to write about today? Seems many investors still stuck on planes that aren’t moving." Dave was smart enough to take the day off – me, not so much. We did pick up another .20 with up the DIA Weekly $114 calls at 10:41 in Member Chat for $1.60and those were done at 1:05 for $1.80 as the market looked too risky to me. That was kind of silly as we do know that low volume is the bulls best friend but we’re trying to get back to cash each day on quick trades – especially on calls that expire on Friday!
As you can see from the Euro chart (click to enlarge), I’m not ready to give up on my bearish premise, which is essentially that Europe may be in worse shape than the US and the Dollar and – IF the EU runs into crisis – then the Dollar looks RELATIVELY better and, despite all of Timmy and The Bernank’s best efforts to destroy it – a strong dollar will pretty much undermine everybody’s bullish premise since the only real bullish premise people have is that our worthless currency will drive people into equities and commodities since Treasury and the Fed will artificially keep bond rates so low as to make them unpalatable alternatives.
Even Glenview’s Larry Robbins, who I thought would perhaps have an original thought in his Dow 20,000 premise, does not. The man entrusted with $4.8Bn of other people’s money predicts that p/e multiples will expand by, get this, 45% by the end of 2013 – rocketing the Dow to 20,000 despite just 5% annual earnings growth. Larry Robbins thinks those investing in 10-year treasuries aren’t doing so for the paltry return. They’re in it to front run the Fed and make a quick buck at the expense of the taxpayers. Once this trade is over, Robbins says, they have nowhere to go except the high quality equities in the stock market.
Read into any bull premise and you’ll find inflation at the heart of it. The Global Economy is not really improving but the numbers are looking up because it costs more money to do everything. Now,…
The November Mortgage Monitor report released by Lender Processing Services, Inc. (LPS) shows that the volume of loans moving to REO continued to drop as moratoria further delayed foreclosure sales. While the 90+ delinquency category has steadily declined, the number of loans moving to seriously delinquent status beyond 90 days far outpaced the number of foreclosure starts. Nearly 2.2 million loans are 90 days or more delinquent but not yet in foreclosure.
Foreclosure inventories also continued to rise for the fifth straight month as delinquent accounts are referred for foreclosure, but the sale of foreclosure properties continued to decline. When compared to January 2008 levels, the foreclosure inventory of Jumbo Prime loans is nearly seven times higher; the inventory of Agency Prime loans is nearly six times higher; and the foreclosure inventory of Option ARM loans is approaching five times the inventory in January 2008.
The report also shows that one-third of loans that are 90 days or more delinquent have not made a payment in a year; however, the number of new problem loans declined nearly 5.4 percent from October, which is opposite of the seasonality trend that typically impacts new delinquencies this time of year. Self-cures for loans one to two months delinquent increased in November to a six-month high.
In the month of November, 261,153 loans were referred to foreclosure, which represents a 0.7% month-over-month decline. The total number of delinquent loans is nearly 2.1 times historical averages – and foreclosure inventory is currently at 7.7 times historical averages.
As reported in LPS’ First Look release, other key results from LPS’ latest Mortgage Monitor report include:
Total U.S. loan delinquency rate: 9.02 percent
Total U.S. foreclosure inventory rate: 4.08 percent
Total U.S. non-current* loan rate: 13.10 percent
States with most non-current* loans: Florida, Nevada, Mississippi, Georgia, New Jersey
States with fewest non-current* loans: North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming, Montana
Charts From The Report
The report is 34 pages long. Inquiring minds may wish to give it a closer look. Here are a few select charts.
Oh boy is 2011 going to be an exciting year! Some things that I think might happen:
-Volatility is going up across the board. If you have the stomach for the swings that are coming across all markets there is a ton of money to be made; balls and timing are all that are necessary. The markets will create dozens of opportunities to make and lose.
-There will be 50 days with a swing in the S&P greater than 1%. There will be 10 days where gold swings $50. There will be two days with a drop greater than 100 bucks. Most of the big moves will be down moves. Bonds will not be spared the volatility.
-Gold will be higher a year from now but off its peak. At some time in the fall, gold will be near 1,800 and the New York Times will do a front-page story that gold is on its way to 2,000. That will be the high point of the year.
-Copper will continue to rise. This metal will benefit as the poor man’s gold. Why buy an ounce of something for $1,600 when you can have a whole pound of something else for only $5? The logic is compelling only because there is no logic. Increasingly, it will become understood that money does not hold value. Copper will do a better job of storing value then a Treasury Bond.
-The US bond market is in for a heck of a year. The 30-year will trade at BOTH 3% and 5%. Higher rates will come early in the year, then the deflation trade will come back into vogue.
-Spain will be the next sovereign debtor that falls prey to the market. This will happen before the end of the 1st Q. The package to bail them out will exceed $500b. This will exhaust the EU resources. There will be very high expectations that contagion will then move to Italy. That will not happen in 2011 (2012?) The European Central Bank will step up to the table (finally) and support the market for Italy. Sometime between March and June Italian bonds will be a great buy.
-The IMF will contribute $125b to the Spanish bailout. The US portion
I hope you got everything you wanted this holiday season and, most importantly, I hope you had time to spend with your family. I’m waiting for mine to wake up – waiting for my children to come out of their rooms so I can videotape (gosh I’m old, there’s no tape anymore) them in those first moments of Christmas morning – how can I not be of good cheer anticipating that?
It occurred to me, though, that I have something I can give you. Not peace on earth but perhaps peace of mind heading into the New Year – a way to help insure some future prosperity with a few inflation-fighting stock picks that can brighten up your virtual portfolio, which also can be used to help balance the budget against unexpected cost increases.
This isn’t an options seminar or one about risk or leverage – these are just a few practical ideas you can use to hedge against inflation as it may affect your everyday life using basic industry ETFs and some simple hedging strategies to give you an opportunity to stay ahead of the markets if they keep going higher.
Idea #1 – Hedging for Home Price Inflation
Let’s say you have $20,000 put aside for a deposit on a home but you’re not sure it’s the right time to buy. On the other hand, let’s say you are worried that home prices will take off again (I doubt this but you never know). XHB is the homebuilder’s ETF, currently at $17.46 and they bottomed out at $7.77 in 2009 and were in the $40s back in 2006.
You can sell 20 contracts of the XHB 2013 $14 puts for $1.70 each ($3,400) and that obligates you to buy 2,000 shares of XHB at $14 (20% off the current price) and you can use that money to buy 30 2013 $15/18 bull call spreads for $1.40 ($4,200) so another $800 out of pocket and you have 30 $3 contracts for net $800 that pay back $9,000 if XHB simply gains .54 by Jan 2013. These bull call spreads, however, do not pay off early – the ETF needs to be above $18 at Jan 2013 options expiration day (the 18th).
So you are putting up $800 in cash and the margin requirement on the sale will be roughly $7,000 (1/2 of the potentially…
When confronted with a balance sheet recession the math regarding economic growth gets relatively simple – either the government spends in times of below trend private sector spending or the economy contracts. For several years now I have maintained that we are in a balance sheet recession – an unusual recession caused by excessive private sector debt. Although this balance sheet recession created the risk of prolonged weakness I have been quick to dismiss the persistent discussions that compare this to anything close to a second great depression - as I showed in 2009 the comparisons were always ridiculous. The much closer precedent was Japan, where the economy actually expanded throughout their balance sheet recession, but a persistent malaise left a dark cloud over the private sector as they paid down debts.
Over the last year I have consistently expressed concerns that the USA was going to suffer the same fate as Japan, which consistently scared itself into recession due to austerity measures. At the time, most pundits were comparing us to Greece and attempting to scare us into thinking that the USA was bankrupt, on the verge of hyperinflation and general doom. I wrote several negative articles in 2009 & 2010 berating public officials who said the USA was going bankrupt and that the deficit was at risk of quickly turning us into Greece, Weimar or Zimbabwe. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. The inflationists, defaultistas and other fear mongerers have been wrong in nearly every aspect of their arguments about the US economy.
US government default was never on the table, the bond vigilantes were not just taking a nap and now, with the passage of the most recent stimulus bill it’s likely that we’ve (at least temporarily) sidestepped the economic decline that was likely to accompany a decline in government spending. Richard Koo, however, believes we are repeating the mistakes of our past. In a recent strategy note he said:
“The situation in Europe is no different from that in the US. I therefore have to conclude that the western nations have learned nothing from Japan’s lessons and are likely to repeat its mistakes.”
I have to disagree here. The most important factor impacting economic growth in the prior year…
Consumer prices for virtually everything remain uninflated…ex Food and Energy of course.
MarketBeat’s Dave Kansas sees nothing for the Inflationistas to latch onto in this morning’s reading:
In November, the CPI rose a scant 0.1%, giving consumer prices an anemic 1.1% rise during the last 12 months. The so-called core, which excludes food and energy, also rose 0.1%, for an annual rate of 0.8%. Both readings are well below the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 1.7% to 2%.
Reports like these keep the green light on for the "Students of the Depression" running monetary policy.
For discussion’s sake, Peter Boockvar at The Big Picture has a slightly more alarmed take on the report…
The absolute CPI price index (aka cost of living) is now at the 2nd highest reading on record at 218.88 seasonally adjusted, just a hair off the all time high of 219.10. The core rate, which the Fed loves to focus on, is at an all time record high.
Baruch complains that his thoughts about QE2 were indirectly misrepresented by James Suroweicki in The New Yorker (THE BIG UNEASY). And if the line describing the market as an "undead homicidal zombie" is used, Baruch should at least get a link and credit, (taken out of context though it was). While Baruch’s article, Quantitative Queasing expressed reservations, he was most certainly not "hysterical" but rather reflective. In fact, I posted it in an attempt to balance out more critical articles. - Ilene
James Suroweicki is using Baruch’s (rather good) line, the “undead homicidal zombie market” as grist to his anti-anti QE2 mill.
What’s most striking about the attacks on QE2 is how hysterical they are. People aren’t just suggesting that the Fed’s policy—which is quite modest relative to the size of the U.S. economy—might be ineffective or mildly inflationary. Instead, they’re accusing the Fed of “injecting high-grade monetary heroin” into the system, pursuing a policy that “eviscerates” the middle class, and potentially giving birth to an “undead homicidal zombie market.”
The main problem with this of course, is that this last bit never happened. No-one ever accused the Fed of potentially creating an undead homicidal zombie market.
“I’m not saying we’re in an undead homicidal zombie market,”
And there we could let it lie.
Although to be fair, I did add “though we may be” as quite frankly I was not very sure of anything at that particular moment. Communicating this lack of certainty was the point of the post, which was about feeling confused and worried. But nevertheless, in the offending line above, Baruch was trying to stop going too far down the path of a metaphorical flight of fancy about undead cats. To avoid, if you like, hysteria.
So James S. has it completely arsy-versy. Clearly he hadn’t actually read Baruch’s post, and by the way James, in the unlikely event you ever read this one, if you do choose to misquote me disapprovingly the least you could do would be to drop us a link, no? Probably you have an outdated editorial policy that prevents you from doing so, but still, this is the 21st century.
Calling one’s opponents “hysterical” is, moreover, quite a cheap rhetorical shot,…
In March of 2009 when Ben Bernanke first appeared on 60 Minutes, he was bold enough to admit that the Fed was effectively printing money. Those balls are long gone (maybe they got caught in the printing press) and he’s back to lying through his beard in the hopes that we’re all too stupid to notice.
"One myth that’s out there is that what we’re doing is printing money. We’re not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. What we’re doing is lowing interest rates by buying Treasury securities. And by lowering interest rates, we hope to stimulate the economy to grow faster. So, the trick is to find the appropriate moment when to begin to unwind this policy. And that’s what we’re gonna do."
Perhaps ole JDA is losing it and has lost the ability to add zeroes correctly but if I’m reading that right, our friends at the Fed printed $3,738,000,000 in a week and has printed $55,134,000,000 in new money since December 2, 2009.
I remind dear reader that footnote 16 which follows "Currency in circulation" disclaims that number as "estimated". So it could be more, it could be less. Knowing those lying rat b*st**ds at the Fed, that number is way undershot but hey, what do I know?
Is that right? Maybe we should go back a few more balance sheets just to make sure. Let’s see how much they’ve been printing, shall we?
We are crushing our levels as the market flies ever higher. Our 11,500 target on the Dow looks sure to be tested and we’re already flipping bullish with our "Breakout Defense" trades, in which our goal is to make 5,000% in 5 trades or less. We are not ashamed to jump on the bullish bandwagon – if they are giving away money, we’ll stand in line with everyone else, only we’ll take a larger share – thank you very much. We certainly know how to use leverage just like a Bankster – we have a spread and we’re not afraid to use it!
Speaking of Banksters, the must-read article of the weekend is the NY Times piece that goes into surprising details of secret bank meetings that are regularly held in NY where the Gang of 12 (just 9 of them) do their best to manipulate the derivatives market, influence regulations and regulators and, of course, crush their competition. The article even goes so far as to name my old friends at ICE as possibly maybe having something to do with these shenanigans and I am SHOCKED at these allegations as the good people at ICE were so good about telling me how I had things all wrong when I made similar statements last year (which I now legally know cannot be proven and therefore must not be true).
And thank goodness that the commodity and derivatives clearinghouse that was founded by Big Banks and is controlled by Big Banks cannot be proven to be operating in favor of Big Banks because we wouldn’t want to think that the Big Banks had some preferential treatment (beyond the access to the discount window and the TARP money and the POMO money, etc.) – that would just be unAmerican. By unAmerican, I mean the old America that they write about in the Declaration of Independence and the original Constitution, of course – not the Corporate Kleptocracy this country has developed into. Under the new guidelines, leveraging your influence and having the government rob the people to increase your profits on which you don’t pay taxes is the very definition of patriotism, isn’t it?
Ah well… As I said last Monday, this is really Somebody Else’s Problem because we are in "get it while the gettin’s good…
Improvement in first time unemployment claims is slowing. Actual, not seasonally manipulated data, including an adjustment for the usual weekly upward revision, shows that the year to year rate of change is on the cusp of a possible upside breakout, which would be good news for stock market bears if it happens.
Initial Unemployment Claims Chart- Click to enlarge
Here’s why it’s mind blowing. I’ve plotted it below on an inverse scale with the S&P 500 overlaid.
Unemployemt Claims and Stock Prices - Click to enlarge
Major US Markets including (NYSEARCA:DIA), (NYSEARCA:SPY), (NASDAQ:QQQ), and (NYSEARCA:IWM) dropped over 3% each on Italian bond fears and an increased worry that Europe will not be able to bail out its 4th largest economy. Furthermore, the iShares MCSI Italy Fund (NYSEARCA:EWI) wiped out over 9% today, further illustrating the dire situation in Italy and the European Union: ...
The second economic disappointment of the day comes from the Dallas Fed, which dropped from -2.0 to -11.4 on expectations of -9.0- this was the 4th consecutive negative print month. The report was, in a word, horrible, with just 2 of the 15 constituent indices posting an increase, and the bulk solidly in the red, led by Unfilled and New Orders which dropped 16.8 and 11.2, respectively: not good for economic growth. On the employment side there was nothing good either, with both employment and hours worked declining by -...
Bloomberg reports that Diana Containerships (NASDAQ: DCIX) files to offer stock up to $172.5M. Diana Containerships says that Diana shipping will also buy $20M of stock.
Top 5 RisersStockRatingAnalysisVLOSTRONGBUYAn increasingly positive growth rate of past earnings, along with improving expectations for long term growth, make Valero a good prospect for high returns.KROSTRONGBUYKronos Worldwide has been gaining recognition from analysts as a good canditate for achieving higher than expected earnings along with higher overall projected valuation.SFIBUYiStar is one of the top candidates projected to achieve both higher than previously projected earnings in the short run and a higher earnings growth rate in the long run.AMATSTRONGBUYApplied Materials has been...
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February is now past, and the Biotech Porfolio is loaded with winners and a miss (PLX). MRK is down a bit, but I expect that trade to recover, and one could be more agressive and double down on it, or play another round at the Jan13 $30 options for roughly the same price. Below is the summary, and note the grey boxes are ones that did not fill. I am still a fan of BMRN, and like DEPO as well. Now let's look at a few others.
Table 1. PSW Biotech Plays Since January 2011
 
Our newest play is Momenta Pharmaceuticals (MNTA), who is pursuing a three-part business model which includes complex generic equivalents in partnership with the Sandoz division of Novartis, proprietary compounds, and follow-on- biologics (FOB). It seems that this company is tied up in competition/litigation wit...
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...
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I am still trying to get more bullish. 
How much is "a lot"? Well my GE trade idea, for example, was to sell the 2013 $12.50 puts for $1.10 (net $1.15 in ordinary margin according to TOS) and to use that money to buy the 2012 $17.50/20 bull call spread for .95, which was a net .15 credit on a $2.50 spread that was on the money at the time. GE has gained about .75 since the 11th and…
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Even Glenview’s Larry Robbins, who I thought would perhaps have an original thought in 
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Idea #1 – Hedging for Home Price Inflation
Wheeee, everything must be great! 
Ah well… As I said last Monday, this is really 
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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
(
