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11-21-2013, 06:35 AM #1926
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11-21-2013, 07:38 AM #1927Funky But Chic
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While I get that, it also feels like things are picking up steam and there's a shit ton of money still on the sidelines and people who've stayed out are getting convinced they're missing the boat and want in.
So, things are either about to fall apart or go through the roof. I see Dow 10K and 20K as about equally likely. Should we shit or go blind? Beat off or shoot someone? Who the fuck knows. How 'bout them Bruins?
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11-21-2013, 07:52 AM #1928"When the child was a child it waited patiently for the first snow and it still does"- Van "The Man" Morrison
"I find I have already had my reward, in the doing of the thing" - Buzz Holmstrom
"THIS IS WHAT WE DO"-AML -ski on in eternal peace
"I have posted in here but haven't read it carefully with my trusty PoliAsshat antenna on."-DipshitDanno
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11-21-2013, 08:23 AM #1929Funky But Chic
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I bet there's not 10 hawks fans who know those lyrics, they should just stick with the "doh-da-doh" bit.
Still it's better than the "7 nation army" thing you hear everywhere these days.
At least the Bruins fans are smart enough to know they're too dumb to learn lyrics:
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11-21-2013, 09:07 AM #1930
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11-21-2013, 12:03 PM #1931
Last edited by Pow4Brains; 12-09-2013 at 12:29 PM.
`•.¸¸.•´><((((º>`•.¸¸.•´¯`•.¸.•´¯`•...¸><((((º>
"Having been Baptized by uller his frosty air now burns my soul with confirmation. I am once again pure." - frozenwater
"once i let go of my material desires many opportunities for playing with the planet emerge. emerge - to come into being through evolution. ok back to work - i gotta pack." - Slaag Master
"As for Flock of Seagulls, everytime that song comes up on my ipod, I turn it up- way up." - goldenboy
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12-09-2013, 11:22 AM #1932
So this is interesting...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/how-...-you-1.2456677
How markets are rigged against you.
Everyday, trillions of dollars are exchanged by buyers and sellers, on trading floors across the world. The places that happens are colloquially known by the nebulous moniker of “the markets” and every time somebody buys a barrel of oil, a shipment of potash, a Royal Bank share or a Japanese yen, there’s a real person behind that transaction.
Historically, the system works because people have confidence in the system and believe they are treated the same as anybody else.
But it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the stories of powerful people cheating the system for their own gain. As the bad apples add up it gets harder and harder to ignore a troubling realization — “everything is rigged.”
That’s what financial journalist Matt Taibbi says in an interview with Amanda Lang airing on Monday night's The National. After years of reporting on some of the best examples of Wall Street stacking the deck in its favour, Taibbi has concluded that the entire system underpinning the global economy is rigged in some form or another. And it’s not just financial markets that are at stake. The real economy, with factories, services, goods and jobs for real people, is under threat.
'Certain people always win and certain people always lose.'- Matt Taibbi, financial journalist
“There’s a few smaller, inside actors who always seem to win,” he told the CBC’s Amanda Lang recently. “They have more information than anyone else.”
Everything from the price of food, to currencies, financial transactions known as “swaps” and interest rates implicated, he says. “We’ve got a lot of work to get it back to some place where it’s at least close to fair.”
“[Right now] it seems certain people always win and certain people always lose.”
Case study: Detroit
Detroit’s best known today as a case study in what happens to a declining manufacturing base. But the city was also home to a type of financial fakery that’s becoming all too common.
Investment bank Goldman Sachs has been accused of creating an artificial shortage of aluminum by buying warehouses in the city to store the metal, and then intentionally causing delivery delays to create artificial profits.
Through a subsidiary, Goldman owns 27 warehouses around the city, housing 1.5 million ounces of aluminum, for customers who pay to store it there.
The longer it’s there, the longer Goldman can charge its customers. But some started to complain that Goldman was making money by shuffling the metal between its warehouses – instead of out to its owners – and charging them more rent in the process.
The investment bank raked in $5 billion in just over three years simply from storing the metal, an eye-popping figure that drew the eye of New York Times journalist David Kocieniewski.
LME-WAREHOUSING
Goldman Sachs has been accused of stockpiling aluminum in its warehouses in order to charge more rent for storing it. (Ilya Naymushin/Reuters) (REUTERS)
“It used to be a six-week wait for metal and now it’s 16 months, what happened?” Kocieniewski asks.
“You hear their explanations – ‘there aren’t enough trucks [and] forklift drivers’ but Detroit’s unemployment rate is 25 per cent, so that seems kind of implausible. It was clear it was something that they were doing,” he says of the sudden scarcity.
The bank claimed it was working “feverishly” to deliver the metal to its eager customers. But in one video posted online by a warehouse worker, all you could see was aluminum stacked to the rafters, but not a single employee working to move it anywhere.
“One of the drivers who moved the metal said ‘well we just move it from one place to another, once we get one warehouse filled up we close it down and it’s a merry-go-round,’” Kocieniewski said. Every hour that metal is sitting there Goldman is just collecting money on it.
And that gets passed on to consumers by increasing the price of real goods like aluminum foil, pop cans and the siding on your house.
Case study: Inside information
New York’s Wall Street is a place where rigging has become sadly too commonplace.
One of the biggest recent examples was at a hedge fund from as Galleon, run by a man named Raj Rajaratnam. Insider trading is one of the oldest and least sophisticated ways of rigging a market, and Galleon is one of the most egregious recent examples. Under Rajaratnam’s watch, Galleon would routinely pay corporate insiders for information about their companies ahead of when they were disclosed to others. (That way the fund could trade in advance on any good news or bad news to come.)
What was so shocking about Galleon was the brazenness — how employees were caught on tape rigging the system, and not seeming to care. Even today, some people involved still don’t seem to quite see the problem.
“The bottom line was to make money … and if you weren’t adding to the end goal you were kind of useless,” says Turney Duff, a former trader at Galleon who’s written a book about his experiences there.
'I didn’t feel like we were going to get caught. You know, it felt like jaywalking'- Former hedge fund employee Turney Duff
“I’m not making excuses for my behaviour,” he told CBC’s Amanda Lang in a recent interview. “ I made a lot of mistakes and a lot of the decisions that I made … wasn’t based on right or wrong it was based on [lack of] consequences.
“I didn’t feel like we were going to get caught. You know, it felt like jaywalking.”
That mentality may be part of the problem — that there’s insiders at the top of a pyramid who feel they have the right to set prices and profit wherever they see fit, Taibbi and others say.
“The basis of all these problems that we’ve had in the last decade or so is that it’s a very insular community, this financial community. It’s a very small group of people making very, very weighty decisions and I think these guys, to them, it’s not real. It’s just a bunch of numbers on a paper,” Taibbi said.
Case study: rigging LIBOR
One of the most serious examples of rigging might be the London Interbank Overnight Rate or LIBOR which has apparently been manipulated by a handful of trading firms for their own profit. Trillions of dollars of real things like mortgage rates and student loans payments are priced off LIBOR.
LIBOR is set today the same way it has been for more than a century — via phone calls between traders, telling each other what rates they were giving out and taking in that day. In retrospect, it was gapingly open to abuse.
In a series of wiretapped phone calls unearthed by British regulators, traders could be heard doing favours for each other, lying to officials about the rate in order to meet their targets. It was a game to them, but one where people in the real world economy were the losers.
Conclusion: new tools needed
There’s a sense among the general public that nobody seems to be maintaining the integrity of the system. Bart Chilton, the head of U.S. regulator the Commodities and Future Trading Commission, says his office is committed to maintaining the system’s integrity. But, he says his office isn’t given the tools he needs to properly do the job.
“They don’t have enough people to do this stuff,” Chilton says. “[Washington] doesn’t care about about this and unfortunately Congress and government is very reactive.”
He notes that his office has 158 agents to police more than $5 trillion worth of financial contracts per year.
In contrast, the more well-known Securities and Exchange Commission has more than 100 agents assigned to its investigation of baseball pitcher Roger Clemens.
Until the powers that be make levelling the playing field a priority, the system is likely to remain skewed. And the people doing the rigging getting caught will be the exception, not the rule.
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05-16-2014, 07:03 AM #1933
dont know if the best decision or not, but i got out of all stock etfs yesterday.. still have some $ in a couple bond etfs... if rally from here you can thank me for it 4matic
what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?
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05-16-2014, 08:45 AM #1934
Nah..
I been selling stock in blocks since last June. It's cost me about 6% of Alpha. I'm less than 5% equity right now. I've been wrong on equity for almost a year but don't need that much risk either. I done good and currently preserving capital.. I have a huge overweight treasury debt position this year that is working well. It was a contrary play. With TY Bund at 1.4% I think TYN can go back to a 1% handle.
I don't think it is over for equity. As long as the dividend to treasury yield spread is this narrow a crash is an outlier. EEM near a three year high is also supportive. I do think IWM can have a 25-30% stealth decline this year. I'll be looking to reallocate growth if we get a chance (IWM around 90 might be a gift.)
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05-16-2014, 01:59 PM #1935
Everytime you talk like this I feel really dumb trying to manage my money.
I mostly keep the advice of sticking to etfs of a few indexs (S&P 500, etc.), but not totally. As a Yahoo employee for the past 8 years I have a disproportionate amount of that stock in my portfolio that I've been whittling down with the highs of the past 8 months. That fucked me hard on taxes, but at least I hung around long enough to get the bigger gains many co-workers missed.
With each block I sell I've been adding to positions in KMI, AAPL and a couple other dividend stocks that I think are less likely to get smashed in a sell off. I expect the market to take a big shit at some undetermined time in the not too distant future and hope this is a hedge against the drop I'll see in the index etfs. If you think this plan is sub-optimal for a guy with limited sophistication and time to manage my portfolio, I'm all ears for advice or feedback. I try to keep things simple.another Handsome Boy graduate
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05-16-2014, 02:40 PM #1936
I like that KMI play. Dividend stocks for dividends sake are a waste- utilities and telecomm. Little room for capital appreciation but if market dynamics change they can fall pretty quickly. KMI has some real growth opportunities to expand on that payout from the GP, which are based on a backlog of projects looking out the next few years. I also like WIlliams companies just based on the idea that they control the major pipeline in the Marcellus and this will need help getting to ports that could be set up on the east coast or additional capacity to the north east
Decisions Decisions
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05-16-2014, 07:53 PM #1937
You're on it and accept risk well. Anytime you are allocated to individual issues you have more risk but that has always been how the biggest gains are made (eg: Warren Buffett). Never use taxes as an excuse not to sell and be thankful to pay the gains tax vs the alternative. Having an opinion is usually not a good thing for asset allocation but after sitting through three crashes from the front row 1987, 2000-01, and 2008 I'm trigger happy and skeptical so I have opinions.
I spend far too much time studying charts, checking correlations, and comparing returns. Shit has always fascinated me and I enjoy it. For example, The IWM made a low yesterday prior to the low on SPY. Boom! Market bottom in SPY when SPY was making new low. I didn't trade it but I rang a bell. Recent observations:
1. Volume continues to bewilder. Overnight futures volume is the lightest I have seen in and day trade reminds me of the mid eighties with direction determined largely after the NYSE opening. For decades opening gaps in price largely determined daily direction. I have no explanation for this other than volume and trading is deferred to ETF's and Options which don't trade off hours.
2. Imo, algorithmic trading controls the market and I have no opinion whether good or bad. Just look at a chart of the SP500. The Symmetry of 20 point support levels and ramps is not a coincidence. With public trading sentiment so poor the path of least resistance is higher as weak hands are underinvested or selling.
3. The canary in the coal mine is corporate and corporate junk debt. I could write many words on that topic. Using traditional business valuations it is a good investment for companies to borrow money to pay dividends and buy back stock yielding higher returns on capital (financial engineering. Apple is doing it for no good reason really). This is the unintended consequence of fed policy. The more corporate debt issued the more illiquid that market becomes and with junk debt rates at historic low spread to Treasury the more dangerous it becomes. Watch junk debt closely for signs of trouble. Junk debt is not worth the risk at less than 5% yields for me. Look at what Verizon did today. I'd much rather own Verizon yielding 4.5% than a junk bond as the capital risk on the bond is greater than the equity.
4. The allocation to value stocks. This started in February and was led by Exxon and Berkshire, the most conservative of all stocks. Berkshire and Exxon topped out recently. This will mean one of two things. Growth stocks will lead the market higher or market rolls over and IWM tests the mid $90's. A move below
5. The economic numbers at this time do not support optimistic earnings growth not that it matters.(see #2).
I hate weekends. Markets closed.. lol. Dollar opens at Noon Pacific on Sunday.
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05-16-2014, 09:50 PM #1938
"3. The canary in the coal mine is corporate and corporate junk debt."
So what? Money is cheap and getting cheaper. There's so much cash sloshing around the world, and yet, they borrow for almost free. (Thanks, Mr. Putin http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/up...ef=upshot&_r=0 ) I read today that they are finding huge, huge Scarface and Breaking Bad blocks of cash in homes of the poor corrupt officials in China who are getting caught http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/...gs®ion=Body , and maybe it's the same at the headquarters of Apple and Ford and Pfizer. It's getting kind of ridiculous. The two co CEOs of Chipolte (co CEOs!) paid themselves 25 million dollars apeice last year. Two guys! Fucking Chipolte! For fucks sake. There's just so much money floating around, with no direction to productivity or any kind of sensible investment. It's just being hoarded and played with like monopoly money by a few.
I don't know, I see deflation in the developed world now that China is imploding for a while. Equities look good because labor costs are nil, and get cheaper every day as new national labor forces come on line and technology just annihilates thousands of middle class jobs a month, worldwide. The dystopia of truly stateless corporations that was predicted seems to be happening with a vengeance after this last great credit crunch. The Pfizer deal is disturbing. Apple already is beyond the pale, and that is one of our most "admired" corporations. It's as though all of our titans are just saying fuck you to the rest of us and leaving town if they can, leaving us to rot. Sad times, but, it's making them money, and therefore equities follow. I'll stick with index funds and dividends. Where else.
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10-06-2014, 08:37 AM #1939
Why I've become more cynical. Public companies create nothing anymore:
S&P 500 Companies Spend Almost All Profits on Buybacks:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-1...s-payouts.html
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10-06-2014, 10:32 AM #1940Banned
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10-06-2014, 10:43 AM #1941observing free range rude
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The S&P 500 co I've been with the last 6 years has steadily reduced benefits amid a tripling of its stock price. Our gift for FY14 was the removal of a 4-7% profit sharing bonus that used to go directly into 401ks of employees with >2yrs of tenure.
Profits go through a filtering process: Shareholders first, directors second, clients third, employees under sr mgmt last.
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10-06-2014, 10:48 AM #1942Registered User
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The metrics we use and the assumptions we harbor no longer capture the economy and economic activity in a meaningful way. When Netscape was given away for free, how was that captured in a GDP statistic?
This New Yorker article captures it pretty well:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...mestic-freebie
Making advertising more efficient doesn't necessarily create more wealth. Since IT and computers have been working their way into the economy it has been morphing, and the nature of wealth creation has been changing. But it is happening at a pace that makes it hard to notice.
React to it? Ha! Fuhgeddabouhtit.
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10-06-2014, 11:39 PM #1943
I'm not someone with the expertise nor time to manage my investments and retirement plan in a very sophisticated manner. Reading this thread is fascinating and at times intimidating. To help me get a better handle on things I've been researching and dabbling with the so-called Robo-Advisiors: Wealthfront, Future Advisor, Personal Capital, Learnvest, and Betterment. I'd love to hear the thoughts, considerations, and experiences with these services. Here's my take so far:
Wealthfront & Betterment - basically the same thing, which is an index investment platform that does tax loss harvesting and re-distributions programmatically based on your goals. Betterment is a little cheaper if you have more money. Wealthfront has a better blog (really awesome stuff, must read for tech employee types) and services for those working for a company having a major liquidity event (they help diversify you out in a smart way).
Learnvest - high cost for what you get, but could be really valuable for folks needing to get a handle on the basics of setting up their financial life with activities like paying down debts and creating budgets. Not right for where I'm at, but they also have a lot of financial education resources that seem great.
Personal Capital - Mix together a service like Mint for financial tracking across all accounts ranging from savings/checking to creditcards to investment accounts and 401ks. They offer that stuff for free and look to help you out with the investing side by giving you tiers of access to financial advisors for a percentage fee. Lighter on the educational focus than the above, but seems like they are trying to add to their blog.
Future Advisor - instead of investing through them, they manage your money where it is (as long as that's TD Ameritrade or Fidelity at current) using algorithms, switching you to lower cost investments, ensuring diversification & rebalancing, plus tax loss harvesting. They can work with your whole financial life, not just the parts you invest in with them. They get paid a half percent of the money under management.
All the tools work hard to make it easy for you to work with their solution and can create pretty graphs and other perspectives on your money life and what's going on.
Anybody else working with or following these companies? Would love to get a better handle on the trade offs and what I ought to consider with these kinds of tools.another Handsome Boy graduate
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10-07-2014, 05:17 AM #1944Hugh Conway Guest
it's all about social investing now pete. just find someone good to copy trade.
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10-07-2014, 10:20 AM #1945
just a quick read:
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/201...s-course-.html
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10-07-2014, 10:38 AM #1946
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10-07-2014, 01:52 PM #1947
HPQ splitting to enhance shareholder value is another warning strike. Like buybacks, inversions, and debt issuance, public companies will be lining up to spinoff pieces of businesses.
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10-07-2014, 02:20 PM #1948
Deflation, baby.
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10-07-2014, 02:29 PM #1949
Enhancing shareholder value while laying off 55,000 employees:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014...-of-employees/
Amazing how many companies refuse to focus on their products (thus bringing in new business) instead of constantly trying to display unsustainable, so-called "growth"? Well, some do I suppose and those are the ones who are going to make it in the end. Unless something changes in their upper management, I predict we'll see the end of HP by the end of the decade.
The last company I recently worked for (and just quit) was constantly trying to drive down costs to absurd levels, while enjoying record quarter after record quarter and year. Profits grew over 200% from the year before. I did the unthinkable as a lowest level employee and read the investors' quarterly report which was just glowing about how awesome the company was doing. The VP of Operations kept telling us we couldn't afford to keep operating the way we were and kept cutting more and more. including slashing all lower level employee and managers pay by around 30%. We were struggling just to MAINTAIN our site with the bare minimum of resources they were giving us yet they told we needed to cut more.
I did get some satisfaction upon my way out by calling the VP out in a letter telling him that he was either lying to the shareholder or lying to us, and made clear the struggles we were having due to his inane budget cuts, which were voiced many times before but always blatantly ignored. I made sure to CC the CEO this time, and lo and behold, some changes were finally made, although I never did get so much as "so long" from the VP. Funny how that works. Now my goal is to become a shareholder of that company and really have fun screwing with that douchenozzle (the VP). Dude was/is single-handedly ruining that company and its formerly great product and service, all in the name of "organic growth" and sucking up to shareholders. At least I got him in a little bit of hot water upon exiting. It might not make any difference in the end, but it felt great anyway. Time to buy some stock!
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10-07-2014, 02:47 PM #1950
i realize that any listed firm is as much a finance company as anything, but it's ridiculous how much effort goes into short term stock manipulation rather than long term success - that is one thing i like about Bezos and AMZN.
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