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sabato 05 maggio 2007 |
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 If you've read anything at all about us...
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sabato 05 maggio 2007 |
Up & Down Wall Street: Bubble 2.0
 Prof. Reddam, residing in Laguna Beach with 20 racehorses in training, no doubt is enjoying life a lot more these days than the purchasers of his former company. General Motors last week reported a 90% plunge in first-quarter earnings, largely stemming from big losses at GMAC Financial Services on subprime mortgages. GM still has a 49% stake in GMAC, which has seen the retirement or resignation of the CEO, CFO and treasurer of its ResCap mortgage unit in recent weeks. Liquidity, the colt, has speed early on, Sandy says, but probably will get stressed out and lack the kick to sustain him down the stretch. In any case, the choice of his name says something about the zeitgeist, at least among thoroughbred owners who compete at this level. (Don't ask what the name of 50-1 shot Imawildandcrazyguy implies.) Liquidity, in the financial sense, also made for a burst of speed for subprime lending out of the gate, but hasn't been enough to sustain these marginal mortgages down the stretch in recent months. The liquidity hasn't disappeared, but simply moved to other arenas. |
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lunedì 09 aprile 2007 |
End Of The Month Is Payday For Stocks Too
 Woody Allen once remarked that 80% of success is just showing up. The corollary to this for stock market investors may be that 100% of success is not showing up 80% of the time. In other words, just a handful of days each year add up to the entire return for stocks with the rest pretty much a wash. This is a key selling point for buy and hold investing since it's just as easy to miss out on these up days as it is to sit out one of the down days and, on average, one is better off taking the good with the bad. Devotees of the efficient markets hypothesis scoff that only a clairvoyant investor with all the up days marked on his calendar could hope to make money hopping in and out of the market on a consistent basis. As it turns out, though, no crystal ball is necessary to identify those days and capture all of the market's return - they occur like clockwork every month. In one of the more bizarre challenges to market efficiency, all of the stock market's historical return could have been captured over the past 110 years by holding stocks for four days each month or 20% of all trading days. |
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sabato 31 marzo 2007 |
Current Yield: Party Like It's 1929
 The U.S. government took square aim at its own foot Friday by putting sanctions on Chinese paper imports. The move threatens to hurt an already slowing U.S. economy, to boost an inflation rate running too high for the Federal Reserve's comfort, to exacerbate the dollar's downtrend and to thwart capital inflows in the bond market, where yields are edging higher. In a replay of tariffs slapped on steel imports in 2002, the Commerce Department said it would impose tariffs of 10.9% to 20.4% on Chinese coated papers in retaliation for subsidies Beijing provides. The dollar reacted negatively to the protectionist measure, which recalls the currency's drop in the wake of the steel tariffs. Although later reversed by the World Trade Organization, those levies helped set off a 35% decline in the dollar against the euro in the following year, writes Ashraf Laidi, CMC Markets' chief foreign-exchange analyst. |
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lunedì 27 novembre 2006 |
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Viewed against the Standard & Poor's 500's showing, recent hedge-fund returns have been satisfactory -- but not stellar. The CSFB/Tremont index tracking broad hedge-fund performance is up about 13% in the past year, compared with 16.34% for the S&P. Hedge-fund pros insist, however, that their portfolios aim to capture much, if not all, of the upside in bull markets and, more important, protect against losses in bear markets. Also, the CSFB/Tremont index has a standard deviation that's about half that of the S&P 500's, implying lower volatility. |
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venerdì 03 novembre 2006 |
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As a new year approaches, global market analysts and pundits will polish their crystal balls and issue proclamations about where to put your money. So it's worth paying attention when investment strategists at Merrill Lynch & Co. offer an early preview of investment ideas they expect will be the foundation for their research in 2007.
The 10 themes that Richard Bernstein, Merrill's chief investment strategist, and colleague Kari Pinkernell outlined in a report to clients this week all share a common goal: finding industries and companies at attractive valuations that can grow earnings against the backdrop of a coming worldwide economic slowdown. |
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martedì 17 ottobre 2006 |
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Monopoly. Cartel. Price-fixing. The words conjure images of workers toiling in African diamond mines or of the imperious black-hatted robber barons of a century ago. These days, those colorful descriptors are being applied to far more mundane characters: credit rating analysts, the bespectacled pencil-pushers responsible for assigning letter ratings to companies' debt issues and credit-worthiness. Yet, these ratings are a billion-dollar business. Not only do they influence how investors value a company's bonds, but they are also key to how expensive it will be for corporate borrowers when they raise funds in the bond market. |
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