SHORTS ON HIGH VOLUME

[Alechko]

thanks. what do you think it`s gonna be like today for the likes of MSFT, INTC, MS, HAL and YUM Brands?

nobody knows, no one

btw: i don't trade godzillas

[Alechko]

check FAZ, now @ $16.70

FAZ is close to $20, metalhamer: I guess you bought it :34:

[Alechko]

если тко-то инвестировал в преф. P or K of WAMU это самое время расмотреть арбитраж с коммон wamuq.pk
напомню что серии P в октябре стоили $1.3-$2 сейчас $80
K was $0.1, now they are around 2.5-3
H стоили pennies сейчас $26
это достаточно рискованно, но 20-30% стоить пустить на арбитраж
good luck, wamu long and strong

[Alechko]

если тко-то инвестировал в преф. П ор К оф ЩАМУ это самое время расмотреть арбитраж с коммон щамуэ.пк
напомню что серии П в октябре стоили $1.3-$2 сейчас $80
К щас $0.1, нощ тхеы аре ароунд 2.5-3
Х стоили пенниес сейчас $26
это достаточно рискованно, но 20-30% стоить пустить на арбитраж
гоод луцк, щаму лонг анд стронг

WAMUQ после того как судья оправдал EC WAMUQ stocks выросли from 0.13 to 0.21

glta longs!

[Паша]

Цитата 07/30/2008:

свои личные данные на форум не выношу
а так зависит от стратегии, чуйства рынка и потраченого времени
дэйли трэйдерс который сочитают лонг/шорт/техникал и фандаментал в среднем 1-3% в день
професионалы do 5-7%

Цитата 08/01/2008

я не открыл эту тему год или 5лет тому назад когда каждый идиот делал деньги
сегодня маркет падает, июнь - один из страшних месяцев (июней) со времен великой депресии
делать деньги в сегодняшем маркете - искуство
через пол года - год я не буду здесь писать
потому что все, практически 99% будут делать бабки

Alechko, интересно, что изменилось в вашем подходе, тактике и знаниях за последние полтора года?

[Alechko]

Цитата 07/30/2008:

Цитата 08/01/2008

Алечко, интересно, что изменилось в вашем подходе, тактике и знаниях за последние полтора года?

абсолютно ничего, приблезительно через полгода начиная с августа 2008, говорим о феврале 2009, все кто был лонг, сделали бабки независимо куда ивестировали деньги

если тебя интересуют личные показатели - я их не обсуждаю даже с ближайшими родственниками

[Паша]

абсолютно ничего, приблезительно через полгода начиная с августа 2008, говорим о феврале 2009, все кто был лонг, сделали бабки независимо куда ивестировали деньги

если тебя интересуют личные показатели - я их не обсуждаю даже с ближайшими родственниками

Alechko, я могу вытащить финансовые сводки за последние десятилетия и самостоятельно посмотреть кто и какую прибыль/убыток получил, сделав лонг или шот ставки. И ваши личные показатели меня абсолютно не интересуют.
Вопрос был совсем другой, и очень грустно, что Вы за своими цифрами-показателями не улавливаете даже его суть.

[Alechko]

Алечко, я могу вытащить финансовые сводки за последние десятилетия и самостоятельно посмотреть кто и какую прибыль/убыток получил, сделав лонг или шот ставки. И ваши личные показатели меня абсолютно не интересуют.

молодец

Вопрос был совсем другой, и очень грустно, что Вы за своими цифрами-показателями не улавливаете даже его суть.

Паша эта цитата да и сам вопрос это демагогия, а я ее игнорирую
хорошая комедия, или трава попожет Вам понять настроение
если неt ничего конкретного добавить по теме - тогда в сад

[Alechko]

Watchdog: Bailouts Created More Risk in System

Bailout watchdog: Response to financial crisis response leaves US with even more risk
By DANIEL WAGNER
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON



The government's response to the financial meltdown has made it more likely the United States will face a deeper crisis in the future, an independent watchdog at the Treasury Department warned.

The problems that led to the last crisis have not yet been addressed, and in some cases have grown worse, says Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the trouble asset relief program, or TARP. The quarterly report to Congress was released Sunday.

"Even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car," Barofsky wrote.

Since Congress passed $700 billion financial bailout, the remaining institutions considered "too big to fail" have grown larger and failed to restrain the lavish pay for their executives, Barofsky wrote. He said the banks still have an incentive to take on risk because they know the government will save them rather than bring down the financial system.

Barofsky also said his office is investigating 77 cases of possible criminal and civil fraud, including crimes of tax evasion, insider trading, mortgage lending and payment collection, false statements and public corruption.

One case concerns apparent self-dealing by one of the private fund managers Treasury picked to buy bad assets from banks at discounted prices. A portfolio manager at the firm apparently sold a bond out of a private fund, then repurchased it at a higher price for a government-backed fund. A rating agency had just downgraded the bond, so it likely was worth less, not more, when the government fund bought it. The company is not being named pending the outcome of Barofsky's investigation.

Barofsky renewed a call for Treasury to enact clearer walls so that such apparent conflicts are less likely.

Treasury said it welcomed Barofsky's oversight but resisted the call to erect new barriers against conflicts of interest. The new rules "would be detrimental to the program," Treasury spokeswoman Meg Reilly said in a statement. The existing compliance rules "are a rigorous and effective method of protecting taxpayers," she said.

Much of Barofsky's report focused on the government's growing role in the housing market, which he said has increased the risk of another housing bubble.

Over the past year, the federal government has spent hundreds of billions propping up the housing market. About 90 percent of home loans are backed by government controlled entities, mainly Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration.

The Federal Reserve is spending $1.25 trillion to hold down mortgage rates, and millions of homeowners have refinanced at lower rates.

"The government has stepped in where the private players have gone away," Barofsky said in an interview. "If we take government resources and replace that market without addressing the serious (underlying) concerns, there really is a risk of" artificially pushing up home prices in the coming years.

The report warned that these supports mean the government "has done more than simply support the mortgage market, in many ways it has become the mortgage market, with the taxpayer shouldering the risk that had once been borne by the private investor."

Barofsky's report echoed concerns raised by housing experts in recent months, as home sales and prices rebounded. They warn that the primary reason for the turnaround last year has been billions of dollars in federal spending to lower mortgage rates and prop up demand.

Once that spigot of cash is turned off, they caution, the market will be vulnerable to a dramatic turn for the worse. Daniel Alpert, managing partner of investment bank Westwood Capital, wrote in a report that national home prices are bound to fall 8 to 10 percent below the lows of last spring.

"The lion's share of the remaining decline will occur in markets that saw sizable bubbles but have not yet retrenched," he wrote.

Officials from the Obama administration counter that massive federal intervention has helped the housing market stabilize and prevented more dire consequences.

Barofsky's report also disclosed that, while the Obama administration has pledged to spend $75 billion to prevent foreclosures, only a tiny fraction — just over $15 million — has been spent so far. Under the Making Home Affordable program, only about 66,500 borrowers, or 7 percent of those who signed up, had completed the process as of December.

He said the key to preventing future crises is to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, create and improve loan underwriting and supervision of banks. He stopped short of endorsing specific proposals for overhauling financial regulation, but said many of the proposals would go far to improving the system.


Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

:hmm: DOW is going to 5000

[Alechko]

How Politics Caused Fiscal Disaster
MINYANVILLE STAFF JAN 29, 2010 1:00 PM
And how central banks threaten prosperity by printing money backed by nothing.





Editor's Note: This article was written by David Stockman, who was elected to U.S. House of Representatives for the 95th Congress and was reelected in two subsequent elections, serving from January 1977 until his resignation January 1981. He then became Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, serving from 1981 until August 1985. He was the youngest cabinet member in the 20th century. After leaving government, Stockman joined Wall St. investment bank Salomon Bros. and later became a founding partner at New York-based private equity firm, The Blackstone Group. He left Blackstone in 1999 to start his own private equity fund, Heartland Industrial Partners, L.P., based in Greenwich, CT.


My proposition today is that we’re in a fiscal calamity caused by the further, and perhaps, final triumph of politics. Admittedly, I issued this very same forecast awhile back -- 23 years ago to be exact. But I’m not reluctant to try again. Having read Grant’s continuously since 1988, I’ve learned there’s no shame whatsoever in being early -- even often!

The Triumph of Politics was published early, mainly in the unflattering sense that I’d not completed my homework. I was hip to statist fiscal and regulatory evils, but had only dimly grasped the Austrian masters’ wisdom on money; that is, in printing money backed by nothing, central banks inherently threaten prosperity. So today I’ll add the proposition that fiscal decay is the inevitable step-child of the very monetary rot that the Austrians -- Mises, Hayek, Rothbard -- so deplored.

My tardiness on money perhaps owes to the Reagan Revolution’s disinterest. Secretary Don Regan averred that sound money could be readily attested by the height of the Dow while his deputy, a monetarist, gauged it by the width of M2.

Even Alan Greenspan, that is, Greenspan version 1.0, urged not to worry. Gold, he assured Ronald Reagan, was meant to anchor -- not the Fed’s actual balance sheet, but something more ethereal, like perhaps its state of mind.

My libertarian screed thus omitted money while cataloging the Reagan Revolution’s lesser shortcomings. These included gargantuan deficits, subsidies for favored Republican constituencies like farmers, homebuilders and exporters, a complete whiff on entitlements, and protectionism for dying industries like steel and textiles -- even for a motorcycle company whose ticker symbol, fittingly, was HOG.

Then, too, there were tax giveaways to real estate, oil and gas, and, come to think of it, to any other worthy industry with the foresight to hire a pair of Gucci loafers domiciled on K-street. On top of this, came the big defense budgets at a peacetime record 7% of GDP. Deep Federal deficits thus stretched as far as the eye could see.

Yet, I didn't perceive that this already alarming fiscal ledger would be further aggravated by two looming tectonic shifts. Oddly enough, these financial temblors were rooted in history’s most consequential pair of train cars.

The first was the sealed car that took Lenin to Moscow in 1917 -- a 75-year trip to hell and back that finally ended in 1991 when a Moscow politician, whose normal confrontations were with a Vodka bottle, was inspired to mount a Soviet tank and command the Red Army to stand down. Promptly thereupon the US defense budget was stood down, too, dropping overnight to approximately 3% of GDP -- half its prior size. This unexpected game changer coupled with marginal tinkering on taxes and spending computed out to a balanced budget. Soon enough, the fiscal all-clear horn was sounded by no less than Wall Street’s own money man, Secretary Rubin.

In fact, the fiscal equation was just then tumbling into a fatal descent. And it is here -- let’s pinpoint the exact date at Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” call in December 1996 -- where the Austrian men separate themselves from the Keynesian and Friedmanite boys. The latter continued to quibble about how to measure money, whether it was growing too fast or slow and if more or less financial regulation was needed.

Peering through a different frame, however, the Austrian notes that US money GDP was about $10.0 trillion at the time the Maestro let his exuberant cat out of the bag. Under an honest monetary regime this nicely rounded number might have stalled-out indefinitely -- owing to the Great East Asian Deflation just then gathering a head of steam.

The truth is, the extraordinary force of economic nature represented by the mercantilist export machine that sprung up in East Asia in the late 20th century was profoundly deflationary. Absent puffed-up domestic credit, the in-coming Asian trade would have flattened American employment, wages, incomes and prices. In so doing, it would have kept money GDP bottled-up at around $10 trillion, thereby denying the next decade’s debt-fueled rise in both output and prices which took money GDP to $14 trillion.

By Austrian lights, then, this $4 trillion difference represents counterfeit GDP, owing to the false conversion of unsupportable borrowings into current income -- debt which is now being forcibly liquidated. This bubble-driven inflation of money GDP also caused government revenues to swell unsustainably, thereby camouflaging for more than a decade the fiscal deficit’s actual, far more frightful, aspect.

There's no mystery in this contra-factual history. With money anchored to a standard, say gold, the armada of containerships steaming from the Pacific Rim into Long Beach would have brought massive trade deficits, but also would have set in motion their own correction. Taking flight in the opposite direction, gold bullion, not paper dollars, would have been on the backhaul to East Asia.

In turn, an old-fashioned drain on America’s gold would have obviated a lot of fatuous jawing about the Chinese being seven-feet-tall economically or excessively addicted to an alleged financial opium called “over-saving." Instead, without need for a single meeting of the open market committee, the loss of gold would have presently caused a sharp contraction of domestic bank reserves, a shrinkage of loans by an approximate 10 times multiple thereof and a sharp rise in the rate of interest on the dollar markets.

Admittedly, consumption, imports, money wages, jobs and cost-bloated domestic enterprises would have all been laid low by such hard money discipline. But having thus been put to the mat, a nation of aging and now over-priced workers -- and bankers, too -- wouldn't have found it expedient to live high on the hog. Instead, they would have discovered the “new normal” of higher savings, fewer credit cards, lower consumption, and slimmer paychecks -- all on their own and about a decade sooner. It goes without saying that believers in the elixir of counterfeit money and credit, which is to say Keynesians, monetarists, and Goldman Sachs (GS) partners, will dismiss all this as flat-earth doctrine -- fossilized ideas pre-dating the discovery of government’s wondrous power to manage the macro-economy.

Still, a doctrine that holds out the state as an agent of economic betterment suffers from some deep flaws of its own. Decades of experience show, for example, that fiscal stimulus is an exercise by which one class and region steals from another. But the worse flaw is the hallowed central bank doctrine that deflation is always bad. In fact, wrong-headed deflation fighting is what generated the boom of the 1920s and the subsequent bust -- a scenario repeated almost exactly during the last decade.

The famous quote from "Bubbles Ben" about the Fed at Milton Friedman’s 90th birthday is thus replete with irony. Said Bernanke in November 2002: “You’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry...we won’t do it again.” But the Fed did it again, generating the most massive speculative bubble ever. And this time the Fed even assured that if a bubble should ever break, it would stand ready to -- well -- rinse and repeat!

Here, the Austrians note that the central bankers' allergy to deflation is rooted not in sound economics, but in weak politics; in the catering to the pressures of promoters, speculators and borrowers. In fact, the Austrians showed that deflations owing to powerful secular cost-reduction trends -- whether based on new technologies, new economic geographies, or new forms of enterprise -- are healthy. They raise real incomes and wealth, even as they cause commodity prices to fall.

Thus, the East Asian export machine far outranked every other cost-crasher in recorded history. It bested the Internet, Walmart (WMT), Henry Ford’s moving assembly line, central station electric power, the railroads, canals, the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and, while we're at it, let’s throw in the wheel, too!

The Fed’s strategy in the face of the Great East Asian Deflation, then, was exactly upside down. It should have raised interest rates and liquidated credit in order to encourage a deflation of domestic wages, prices, and corporate cost structures which were no longer competitive or viable in the new global markets. But by keeping interest rates absurdly low on the pretext that the “core” CPI Index was, as it was pleased to say, “well-anchored," the Fed thwarted the fundamental economic adjustments that were vital for the American economy to regain its footings.