Wow, no PPT in the last hour, WTF is going on? S&P broke 1040:eek: Time to load the shorts. SDS, here I come.
Printable View
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/top...ce=patrick.net
ANNANDALE, Va. (MarketWatch) -- Slow and steady wins the race.
And I mean really slow -- and really steady.
That is the inescapable conclusion that emerges from the Hulbert Financial Digest's three decades of tracking investment advisers' performance. Believe it or not, the adviser at the top of the rankings over those 30 years has been largely in cash for more than a decade.
The adviser in question is Charles Allmon, whose advisory service is called Growth Stock Outlook. As of the close of trading on Wednesday of this week, the Hulbert Financial Digest will have tracked his performance -- along with the industry in general -- for exactly 30 years.
To be sure, we won't know for certain Allmon's final place in those rankings until then. But with just two days remaining of the more than 10,000 since mid 1980, he is in first place for risk-adjusted performance among advisers for whom Hulbert Financial Digest data extend back that far. So the odds in his favor look good.
Which is nothing short of remarkable, since for more than 20 years Allmon has allocated the bulk of his model portfolio to cash. It currently owns just four stocks that collectively amount to 20% of total portfolio value, for example; the other 80% is parked in a money-market fund.
One powerful investment lesson to draw from Allmon's experience has to do with the virtues of discipline and patience. Many counted Allmon out during the 1990s, when his high-cash position looked increasingly anachronistic.
But the last decade changed all that, as advisers that previously ranked more highly than Allmon became casualties -- first to the bursting of the Internet bubble, and then the credit crunch and associated bear market between 2007 and 2009.
The perspective necessary to appreciate Allmon's achievement is foreign to the great bulk of investors whose investment attention span is measured in months, if not weeks or days.
An ancillary investment lesson to be drawn from Allmon's approach is the power of compounding. This has been especially important in recent years, when his cash position has earned virtually no interest whatsoever. But the few stocks he owns have continued to perform well, especially on a total-return basis, since many have tended to pay handsome dividends -- stocks such as Altria Group Inc. (NYSE:MO) , Bristol Myers Squibb Co. (NYSE:BMY) , and Philip Morris International Inc. (NYSE:PM) .
As a result, he's produced returns that -- while not huge in any absolute sense -- are at least decent, and which are impressive relative to the market itself.
Over the last three years, for example, according to the Hulbert Financial Digest, Allmon's model portfolio has produced a 3.0% annualized return, in contrast to minus 8.1% for the overall market.
One thing that Allmon's approach does not offer is lots of excitement, however. So you probably won't be tempted by conservative approaches such as Allmon's.
But it's not fair to say that his approach is completely devoid of excitement, either -- though Allmon's sense of excitement may be different than that of the usual investor. Take the thousand-point mini-Crash which happened on the afternoon of May 6, an otherwise traumatic event that Allmon calmly surveyed from the comfort and safety of an 80%-cash position.
"I can tell you that those 20 minutes of hyper market activity ... were the most exciting of my over 50 years as an investor," Allmon wrote in his most recent issue. "The 22% Dow decline in a day in 1987 was an orderly affair by comparison."
Normally an opponent of government intervention in the marketplace, Allmon apparently is making an exception when it comes to eliminating the likely causes of May's mini-Crash: "Could this be the time to eliminate big-time professional gamblers who obviously believe they operate in a private market casino with computer-driven trading, devoid of human interference? All of Wall Street, and the American public numbering millions of investors, have much to lose should this recent phenomenon become the norm."
this is a good Q&A:
http://www.moneytalks.net/daily-upda...-prechter.html
his analysis to me is bang on, his conclusions are definitly a lot more bearish than myself though.
It's going to be an interesting day in Canada on Friday. We'll see how the US does tomorrow. Then I have to worry about market reaction to job numbers.
Benny, I know what you mean about pricing in the jobs. This market is so irrational though, and completely reactionary b/c no one has any idea where the hell we are going. So I think numbers will make a difference. More to the technical folks i'd guess.
good luck down there.
f*%kin BP and the oil disaster is driving me crazy. sad sad sad.
What's making investing difficult for me right now.
0% interest rates
and
http://www.mackensen.com/images/emotion2.jpg
Mr. Market's grunting hard after the jobless claims #. Dow futures down 50, getting close...........
Moeghoul, your cracking me up with this shit.
In another thread you had commented that there was going to be a "Credit Event" that took the economy down. I think I found that event. Pretty scary reading if it proves to come true. Fucking BP is going to kill the GOM with the oil spill and may kill the worlds economies with it's CSO's if it fails.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/gue...stating-lehman
http://jsmineset.com/2010/06/22/jims-mailbox-470/
Man, I hope this isn't it, but these guys makes a good case to this jong.
i bought some stock today. just following my plan to buy on 5% declines. I'll buy a little more if the news is bad tomorrow.
I added back some beat up miners and gold shares.
TBT because I think bonds are waaaay overbought and are the bubble everyone's been watching out for. Who knows?
Best of luck, all, and have a good weekend.
ho,y cow -BP CDS at 580? That's incredibly high. Too bad Markit doesn't publish numbers anymore
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...WT.mc_ev=click
and it's still puking. Maybe a month it gets stopped. Maybe.
50 day simple MV is about to cross the 200, which is declining.
death cross!
sell in may and go away.
it's summer folks!
lee,
did you see the ZH article about a "major credit event"? in it the BP spreads were inverted. its a pretty involved analysis, so i'd let it stand on its own, benny style:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/gue...stating-lehman
low today...................9614.....have a happy 4th all!
Sweet ride from 9614......McRALLLLLLLYYYY!!!! Any top callers? I think we break thru 11,000 on this run........
PS. Anyone else like BP with the buyout rumors floating around? I picked up a little at 30, added some more today. If they can shut this well off with the cap, that might be an additional boost as well.
I had been waiting for the appropriate article to respond to your post.
"Remember how the market surged last week? One would think this may have been driven by something as fundamental as actual capital instead of HFT channel stuffing, frontrunning, and other no volume gimmicks, and that retail might actually be participating in a rally for once... One would be wrong. According to ICI even as the market was surging, once again - on no volume, it was merely an orchestrated means for mutual funds to sell out of stocks at slightly better prices to cover another week of massive outflows. In the week ended July 7, ICI reports that domestic equity mutual funds saw $4.1 billion in outflows, the largest outflow in the past 2 months, and the third biggest weekly redemption in 2010! This is also the tenth sequential outflow, amounts to $34 billion in total outflows YTD, and represents a losing streak even worse than that of the BDIY.... Yet stocks jumped. One day we hope congress will ask the Fed to explain this particular observation. And yes, in other lack of news, investors no longer trust stocks period: $6 billion in capital was allocated to taxable bond funds. Nobody cares about 10% returns with the possibility of a total wipe out. 4%, capital preservaton, and staying away from the corrupt and broken stock market is more than enough for most Americans nowadays".
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/ici...g-market-surge
The market melt up smells worse than a dead fish. Glad I sold and went away in May. You guys can invest in this Ponzi scheme.
Things I will not ever buy: Financials, Tobacco or B fucking P. Even sales whores have to draw the line somewhere.:rolleyes2
You are putting way too much emphasis on weekly mutual fund flows. $4 billion is a drop in the bucket on more than $10 trillion in the U.S. mutual fund industry and a drop in a swimming pool to the $40 trillion or so U.S. asset management industry as a whole. and ohh yea, Equity mutual fund flows are still positive for the year while the S&P is down 2%......Besides, retail money is going to follow institutional money so by the time you see a real spike in retail mutual fund flows you are probably too late.
No emphasis. Just one more condition to report on the terminal US Economy.
IMO, it is a larger indicator that people are tapped out and likely liquidating their 401k accts to try and keep their heads above water for a little longer.
I mean there is so much bad news out there, I just need to stop parroting bits and pieces of it, as either you already see the bigger picture or you are just happy to float along downstream and drink the Kool Aid they are feeding you.
What bad news isn't already priced into the market?
And the federal reserve flow of funds report indicates that household currency and deposit assets are higher than they were from any point during the '03-'07 bull market so it seems like the retail cash is there.
Euro rally helps.. Capping the well may be a sell the news moment like the JPM earnings. (I'm long JPM...:mad:)
Expiration week pullback today. Next couple days and Monday very important to sustain a rally.
Finreg will be a sell the news moment also.
Technically we rallied to the base of the failure related to Flash Crash. This is an important juncture. A hard failure here is ominous..
I still like BP here, entries at 30 and 35, trading over 37 today.
Finreg....looks like Wall Street likes it, meaning, it's biz as usual for the most part. Volker rule is in name only.
Benny and the Feds are preparing to launch the QE II as the "recovery" sputters. Barry O & Co. will prolly put pressure on the fed to add more supply as elections near, and there's still about 1/2 trillion left to blow from the Stimulus package.
Gold held up well bouncing off ~1190. Further USD weakness should bode well for another strike at its highs. USDX strong support around 81.
Earnings will prolly do better than expectations so with all that in mind, I'm still bullish into Aug/Sept. time frame.
RALLLLLLLYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!! :D
Wow.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=bp
On a side note....
http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/15/news...pt=T1&iref=BN1
RAALLLLLLLLLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!:cool:
sweet they plugged the hole? that only leaves 100-300 million gallons of oil to clean up (exxon was 10-30).. jpmorgan made a bunch of money? well that should take care of deflation, double dip in housing, no jobs, european debt, chinese housing crash, etc.. buy buy buy buy buy buy!
THIS FUCKER'S GOIN' TO 20,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ben just removed his rotorblade covers ...
Checking avionics and hydraulics ...
START button. Ka-BOOM!
—By the Dept. of Redundancy Department as well as France
August 22, 2010
Stock Swing Still Baffles, With an Ominous Tone
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
It sounds like “Wall Street” meets “The X-Files.”
The stock market mysteriously plunges 600 points — and then, more mysteriously, recovers within minutes. Over the next few weeks, analysts at Nanex, an obscure data company in the suburbs of Chicago, examine trading charts from the day and are stunned to find some oddly compelling shapes and patterns in the data.
To the Nanex analysts, these are crop circles of the financial kind, containing clues to the mystery of what happened in the markets on May 6 and what might have caused the still-unexplained flash crash.
The charts — which are visual representations of bid prices, ask prices, order sizes and other trading activity — are inspiring many theories on Wall Street, some of them based on hard-nosed financial analysis and others of the black-helicopter variety.
To some people, like Eric Scott Hunsader, the founder of Nanex, they suggest that the specialized computers responsible for so much of today’s stock trading simply overloaded the exchanges.
He and others are tempted to go further, hypothesizing that the bizarre patterns might have been the result of a Wall Street version of cyberwarfare. They say high-speed traders could have been trying to outwit one another’s computers with blizzards of buy and sell orders that were never meant to be filled. These superfast traders might even have been trying to clog exchanges to outflank other investors.
Jeffrey Donovan, a Nanex developer, first noticed the apparent anomalies. “Something is not right,” he said as he reviewed the charts.
Mr. Donovan, a man with a runaway chuckle who works alone out of the company’s office in Santa Barbara, Calif., poses a theory that a small group of high-frequency traders was trying to introduce delays into the nation’s fractured stock-market trading system to profit at the expense of others. Clogging exchanges or otherwise disrupting markets to gain an advantage may be illegal.
Mr. Donovan indulges Wall Street’s increasing fascination with the charts by christening more of them each day, with names like Continental Crust, Broken Highway and Twilight.
There is also the Bandsaw, a zigzag pattern of prices that appear and then abruptly vanish. There is the Knife, a sharp, narrowing price sequence. There is the Crystal Triangle, the Bar Code, the Mountain Range, each one stranger than the last.
The truth of what happened on May 6 could be hiding somewhere in those mysterious configurations. Or it may lie somewhere else entirely. But 15 weeks later, the authorities are still looking for it. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission plan to issue a final report on their findings in September.
A preliminary report in May blamed a confluence of factors, including worries over rising sovereign debt and a lack of marketwide circuit breakers, but the new report is expected to go further.
For now, this much is known: The markets were already down and on edge that morning as Europe’s debt crisis seemed to be spiraling out of control.
As markets fell, a mutual fund manager in Kansas made a big sale of stock futures. The rout, some say, was worsened by a lack of coordination among the dozens of exchanges that make up the modern-day stock market. As the New York Stock Exchange slowed trading, rival exchanges that were more automated allowed the selling to continue.
“It’s just madness to say we don’t know what caused it. We do,” said Steve Wunsch, a market structure consultant. “The crash was an inevitable consequence of creating multiple market centers.”
That is one explanation. Others have pointed to the high-frequency traders, who use powerful computers to transmit millions of orders at lightning speed. Some of these traders, who now dominate the stock market, appear to have fled the market as prices went haywire.
Then their computer programs might have dragged down exchange-traded funds, popular investment vehicles that fell sharply during the crash, said Thomas Peterffy, chief executive of Interactive Brokers.
“Computerized arbitrage kicked in,” he said.
But if Nanex’s theory is to be believed, computer algorithms might have been at work as well, knowingly or unknowingly wreaking havoc and creating data crop circles.
“There is a credible allegation that there is seriously abusive practices going on,” said James J. Angel, a financial market analyst specialist at Georgetown University, “to the extent that somebody is firing in a very high frequency of orders for no good economic reason, basically because they are trying to slow everybody else down.”
At a Washington hearing on the flash crash last week, Kevin Cronin, director of global equity trading at Invesco, a big fund manager, warned about “improper or manipulative activity” in the stock market.
Traders at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto said they had also identified a “data deluge” a few minutes before the crash. They said people in the markets were poring over Nanex’s colorful charts.
“Whether they are intentional or not, the regulators should be looking into it closely,” said Doug Clark, managing director of BMO Capital Markets.
In an Aug. 5 letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Senator Edward E. Kaufman, Democrat of Delaware, warned about a “micro-arms race that is being waged in our public marketplace by high-frequency traders and others.” He said that the traders were moving so fast that regulators could not keep up.
The idea that shadowy computer masterminds were trying to disrupt the nation’s stock trading struck many people as ridiculous. Wall Street experts generally characterize it as a conspiracy theory with little basis in fact.
But some of the patterns suggested that traders might have been testing their high-speed computers, perhaps to see how rivals would react.
Or it may just be that the computers produced so much data so quickly that exchanges simply could not cope with the onslaught.
“We live in a day when things are measured in milliseconds,” said Sang Lee of the Aite Group, a financial services consulting company. “It is meant to be a level playing field, but if you have better technology you will have the edge.”
Back in Chicago, Mr. Hunsader of Nanex is still not sure what his crop circles mean. But that does not stop him from admiring them.
“The patterns are quite beautiful,” he said. “We can’t see any economic reasons for what they are doing.”
In a recent blog post on SeekingAlpha.com Mark Cuban (yes, that Mark Cuban) provided some advice regarding what you should do with your money:
As I was reading the attached comments, I nearly spit coffee all over my monitor when I saw the following:Quote:
I’m not saying you should get out of the stock market. What I am saying is that it is not a bad thing to accumulate cash right now
Give 'em hell, Benny!Quote:
Originally Posted by Benny Profane
Cash is king?
Ha. Top 100, bitches.
Fucking Mark Cuban giving financial advice. That's funny. What's funnier is people taking it.
Ice, bond funds since May. Very profitable, in a relative way.
"What's the IRS?"
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/...#ixzz0xcaSNfyW
With all this shitty economic news that has been out there for months now, I am still waiting for this huge double dip.
Wait a minute, no Im not, if all this crap news isnt going to sink the market, might be a good place to buy. Littlest positive news and the market shoots like a 16 year old on prom night
Be greedy when people are fearful, and fearful when people are greedy