It's like Pamplona!

long, tall, purty drop fer the Gaggler

rate of over a hunnert pernts a month!

jickiss RCA'29 price target of 40 hit by this summer?

Here's an email a friend of mine forwarded to me from his company's 401(k) plan administrator. Tons of people are bound to be disappointed.

Suggests a good number of people in his company have jumped ship to time the market. The rest are following the plan administrator into oblivion.

Not good.

=================

TO: USA Colleagues

I am sure most of you are feeling motion sickness from the volatility in the stock market and this may continue for a while. For those of you who have jumped out of the market, or are planning to do so, let’s revisit the concept of “timing the market”. Although past performance is never a guarantee of future, the market has shown that for long-term investments staying the course may produce rewards.

We recently received an illustration of this from the Principal Financial Group. The following is a summary of their communication:

You had $1,000,000 (one million) invested in the S&P 500 Index on January 1, 1973.

The bear mauled the market for 21 months, and the value of your one million dollar investment dropped by 43%.

Therefore, on October 1, 1974, your investment was worth $573,780.

You decided to throw in the towel and decide to invest your nest egg in a CD.

You removed $573,780 from the market and deposited the money in an interest-bearing CD account at 5%.

Ten years later, on October 1, 1984, your CD account was worth $934,620 (still below the initial one million).

Had you remained in the market, on October 1, 1984, your account in the S&P 500 Index would have been worth $2,444,340. By staying the course in this scenario, you would have had $1,509,720 more.


This does not mean that it will always be like this, but it is a good reminder that you can never time the market, and not being in the market could hurt a long-term investor. This is just an illustration of what has occurred in the past and is not an investment advice.

Thank you.

did somebody say Pampita?

Of course you can time the market. And Principal Financial certainly can pick the time-frame for its hypothetical to most strongly support buy and hold.

What about the part where I ended up unemployed in 1979 and need to cash in. And maybe he could have tossed in a few more mights maybes and no guarentees. Price is what ya pay. Value is what ya get.

http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/01/03/the...is-for-suckers/

Shirley there a lotta value right here.

Not.

Them shysters gonna screw up a lotta folks.

Note where the Shlock mark-it went laSSt time we had StagFlation.

Nowhere.

Fer twenty years!

...

I guess i gonna stay awake this night and trade the Nikkei

It's a great time to invest in stocks!

[attachmentid=95993]

Someone invested since '99 is now losing around 70% in real money terms.

Today's winter watch has some nice reading and links in it, including the comments section.

NY NY. In a stunning announcement today Dr. SN Poor, the famous Doctor of Wall Street, revealed that after examination he has found JP Morgan the titan of finance thought to be dead since 1913 is in fact alive and well. "He is in fine form actually" said Dr Poor, "triple A".

Reached for comment James Dimon the current CEO of JP Morgan Chase the company founded by JP said he was excited and pleased by the turn of events. "Admittedly he looks a bit weak but who am I to argue with the good Dr. Poor.

Here is a photo of taken yesterday of Mr. Morgan.

JUST SECONDS AGO EUR/USD RAMPED THRU 1.50

dogsie said: Is PCE replacing CPI?

You can have PCE directly in chained dollars. December was fugly, January may hit hard:

http://www.bea.gov/bea/dn/nipaweb/TableVie...2008&Freq=Month

EUR/JPY jumped up almost a whole point in just a few minutes. The carry trade seems to be back in full force.

Today it really looks like that there is inflation simply everywhere: Stocks, Gold, Oil, other Commodities, Dollar......

If we crack that brickwall res in Dow in the 12700-12750 area i think we go several hundred points higher and also the EMA 200 daily wont stop the upmove.

Time to stock up on canned foods.

Do we officially have a new low on the dollar?

EUR/USD

we had/have also a total sell off in USD/CAD yest and today (means Loonie goes up)

Do energy stocks always go up in stagflation, inflation or falling dollar environment?

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Do energy stocks always go up in stagflation, inflation or falling dollar environment?

Chart 2

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Do energy stocks always go up in stagflation, inflation or falling dollar environment?

Chart 3

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How about gold. I don't think HMY likes inflation.

[attachmentid=96000]

Do the Limbo! 'till the chinese float the yuan.

How about metals during periods of high inflation, stagflation, deflation and falling dollar. No! AA like the rest of shown companies seem to prefer low inflation and stable or rising dollar environment.

My conclusion is that once China's demand falls off the cliff when US enters full blown recession, all these commodities will fall the cliff right along with China.


[attachmentid=96001]

oil busted out today ... proving me wrong i guess.... OH WELL

Did I hear something about a cliff and china?

Everything seems to be busting out - against the dollar.

Question is - is this just the blow-off/crack up boom final phase before the dollar rallies or are we looking at something more serious. For now, the inflationists are winning.

Sure, the sell off in the commods will be brutal but right now it loos like 1999 in Nasdaq, means, nobody can say where it ends. I think we are in a blow off phase, the final one maybe, but thats the most wild one. Looks at stuff like Soybeans.

I beleive, there is not even ONE commodity anymore yet which trades on fundamentals. You must realize that ALL hedge funds of the world, ALL short term speculators of this world, ALL daytraders of this word are ALL playing commodities. Just a few years ago they didnt even know how to spell the word commodity.

They are ALL in. And they will get their ass shaved. This year. Only question is: From which levels?

http://release.theplatform.com/content.sel...amugUKjhmTW0%3D

Recent Faber interview I have been watching him for at least 5 years. He has been in the inflation camp all along. Its going his way so far.

Old Richard Russell thinks the bottom maybe in.

Shhhh? Home Prices Rising in Half of U.S. (An encouraging story from MoneyNews.com -- Russell).

If you live in Florida, Las Vegas or California, you probably see a meltdown in your local real estate market. But in nearly half of the country’s 150 metropolitan markets, the median home price rose in the fourth quarter last year, the National Association of Realtors reports. The exact count was 73 rising markets and 77 falling ones.

The biggest gains came in small cities. The Cumberland area of Maryland and West Virginia topped the list with a 19 percent jump from a year ago, to a median price of $116,600. Next was Yakima, Wash., up 18 percent to $170,600, followed by the Binghamton, N.Y. area, up 14.8 percent to $110,000. "I would call them back-country cities," Robert Shiller, the Yale University professor who made himself famous predicting the bursting of the 1990s stock bubble and the 2002-2005 real estate bubble, tells The New York Times.

"They are just going through normal growth, and they are out of the bubble picture.” Some big cities have been able to withstand the real estate crunch as well: Manhattan, San Francisco and San Jose, for example.

"This proves what my friend, Alan Greenspan, always said: real estate is a regional, not a national business,” David Jones, a veteran Wall Street economist who is now chairman of Investors’ Security Trust Bank in Fort Myers, FL, tells MoneyNews.com.

"You see so often the S&P/Case-Shiller Index, which measures the 20 biggest markets, and you think that home prices are falling everywhere in the country,” Jones says. "This National Association of Realtors report proves otherwise.”

The Case-Shiller index fell almost 8 percent in November from a year earlier, according to the latest data available. The positive real estate picture in much of the country lends credence to the view that any recession will be mild and brief.

Jones, for instance, thinks the economy entered recession in December and will rebound in August, with only one quarter of negative GDP growth during that period (the current quarter). "To the extent that in almost half of the country’s regions, home prices aren’t falling, that means housing will bottom in the third quarter and be much less of a drag going forward,” Jones says.

"That could lead us to a milder and shorter recession than would otherwise have been the case.”

Some analysts argue that with the volume of home sales declining, especially at the low end of the market, the rising prices in some regions are deceptive, because they only measure the sales of expensive homes.

But real estate bulls point out that jumbo mortgages, those larger than $417,000, have essentially been frozen by banks. So they think home sales volume at the high end of the market is lower than it would normally be.

Thus, the realtors’ survey masks strength rather than weakness, the bulls argue. In the Spokane, Wash. Area, the median home price increased 2.6 percent last year, of example. "Call me back next year, and we’ll probably have a 3 to 5 percent increase in 2008,” Rob Higgins, executive vice president of the Spokane Association of Realtors, told The New York Times.

...............................................................

http://ww2.dowtheoryletters.com/MembersOnl...st?OpenDocument subscription required

Tell that to homemoaners....

I noted on IDS the PTBs are going to use the metric that gives them the lowest inflation reading.

All of the above I would guess.

Don't we have a liquidity issue in this market? How can everything be busting out?
Sometime it's best to just trade the charts.

You are talking about a SA miner with all the attending problems.

Is that supposed to be evidence? Support for the idea?

Quoting a frigging realtor?! And one who is a VeePee in his local realtor outfit?



Whatever, Russell....

Let's see if Russell revisits the performance of Spokane real estate in 2008, as if it even mattered.....

thats the thing i really dont get too. I mean "they" simply buy everything. Where is the money comming from?

Agree, I'm puzzled by some of the stuff i read. Between 'the fed is not pumping' analysis available and what we are hearing about hedge fund issues such as the below, I dont know where the liquidity driver for these melt ups is coming from.

From Barbera,

http://financialsense.com/Market/wrapup.htm

Across Wall Street and the Financial community, hedge funds are starting to crumble like DB Zwirn & Co., where investors have pulled out 2 billion in the last few weeks, and which on Thursday night sent out a letter to investors outlining plans to liquidate remaining assets, 60% of which were not easily tradable. Of concern here is not the fate of one particular fund, but the downside risk to all markets should the hedge fund industry begin to delever. In our view, aside from the bursting of the bond market bubble, 2008 has an excellent chance of witnessing the bursting of the hedge fund bubble, which in the last decade has seen the industry grown from a small sub-section of speculative capital to perhaps THE dominant force in global finance. While many believe that hedge fund forced liquidations will be orderly as last year's saw several punctuated declines followed by quick recoveries, the odds of that pattern repeating in the weeks ahead seem very distant at this juncture with the kind of damage which has been sustained throughout the credit system. It would seem likely that 2008 will ring down the curtain on leveraged finance for some time to come, perhaps decades.

If one is interested in the mechanics of the market, I would suggest that one read about methods used before the crash leading up to the Great Depression and the reason for the securities laws passed during the Great Depression.

With a rollback of many of these laws/regulations and the reduction in activity of the SEC, there are many ways for certain entities to moves the market higher that requires very little money.

Do not forget that the Fed's Tradings Desk has the ability (and legal exemptions) to coordinate action among a very few major players.

And don't forget Doc's point from the past that the stock market is marked to market based on a comparatively small percentage of shares that traded a particular day regarding the total shares outstanding.

The stock market is not a fair game.

Thus the mechanics/tools are there. We can argue whether these techniques are in use now, but that is a different issue.

Aluminum may not be the best example, but it certainly went up A LOT from the bottom in 75 and on. Oil and oil service did better. So did precious metals. I was in the business in the 70s and I can tell you that metals and energy were the only game in town, along with with gambling stocks when the opened up Atlantic City. All you hear about was Resorts and Bally, but the smart money was making a fortune in Energy and Metals.

The party ended in 1980. Like most bubbles it had lasted about 5-6 years.

And drawing parallels between the current bubble and that one is misleading because the magnitude of this one is so much bigger. It doesn't mean that the stocks like this environment better. It's just that the dynamics of the two markets are so different.

I think there is about two Tril in SWFs as a starter looking for a more permenant home.

Those moves of 100% dwarfs what we get today of 1,000-2,000% increases.

I just went through Housingtracker.net.

9 out of the 55 largest US metros had price increases over the past 3 months. That's a lot less than 50%. Those are listing prices. Much more accurate representation of market direction because it represents seller expectations. The NARs median price figures are meaningless, considering that inventory is up a lot in most markets over the period. The prices of the stuff that is selling is nowhere near an equilibrium level. The markets with the biggest positive price changes are the ones with the biggest buildup in inventory. These markets are behind the curve, not ahead of it.

I think they do this every morning at 5 am according to NY FED website.

That's my point. It was a wholly different environment then. I remember when an 8 million share day was the norm. For the whose NYSE.

This is a program trading and hedging driven bubble the likes of which the world has never witnessed. And once it collapses, we will never witness anything like it again.

Doc, the NAR wouldn't BS us, would they?

Thank God & Amen.

Soon, paper pushers everywhere will have to get a job that creates real value for others.

That is the BIG one. What do we do to insure we have something after the big melt down?

[attachmentid=96002]

Maybe. Wavvy Gravvy says the 99.29 top was a truncated 5th of 5 up and price entered an expanded flat abcde correction. That would require one more trip to test the bottom of the range of the broadening top. With a broadening top each successive high will be a bit higher and stops must take that into consideration me thinks.