for an easy chart:

http://makemoneyathomeadnetwork.com/link/fanniemae

(an easy way to cut a 120 character url to fit)

do we see it?

would friday have been an intersting day to trade into accumulaton?

http://makemoneyathomeadnetwork.com/link/fanniemaefriday

is 5/8 gone? maybe… i’d be keeping some limit orders in place there.

Several limitorders. and if any filled i would set them as limitsells @ 13/16.

and reload.

the numbers i offered here a few days ago still stand, even if they have generically moved up 1/16 already.

Some years ago, an associate from Philly msg’d me in a yhoo stock chat room…how can you make any money buying stocks where a 1/16 is a big move? my answer? u buy lottttssa it.

negative notes: kuwait cancelling deal with dow. israel/hamas. life in general.

Sir John Templeton: “I buy when there’s blood on the streets.”

positive notes: fnm taking possession of rent houses and maintaining good renters in place, thereby giving itself a little “real” cash flow, which will probably become value add to potential seculative housing buyers.

who wouldn;t pay a little more for a distressed property if there was a solid record of rents rec’d?

the 20% decline for Christmas sales (excluding food purchases, which were used to create a 4% drop) in retail etc indicate debt reduction and cash accumulation, since 20% is (so far) above the drop in payroll $.

t/a people of my trianing would be getting warm feelings over those 2 charts.

Marl Mobius (successor to Sir John) :”I cum when i see blood on the streets.”

ok. thank you for sharing…using limits and pullouts for a condom, fannie mae appear to be evver so worth buying a drink..and some money in the juke box.

Posted under business

One of those real market stories the current mess tends to overlook, alon with other kinds of fraud, is a strategy best described as “doing whore stocks”. i got the term from a former associate, whi went by Tokyo Mex, and speculators who have been around will recall him..or not.

there’s the girls you take home, and the the girls you don’t. it’s not a philosophy for me in re dating, but it has advantages for speculators.

Currently, one of the better ladies of the decade is just out of rehab for her crank habit, fanie mae, fnm.

And today, her rehab center sent her a solid prescription for her methadone… about $10 billion worth.

And it;s late at niht, and she’s sitting down there at the end of the bar, and all the good girls are home woth broken hearts. Do you buy her a drink? She’s shown a heckuva good tme to the first guys wo gave her a cance.. a double off the bottom.

in the middle of the idiocy that is passing for an auto bailout…housing…we remember housing don;t we? that thing nobody is gonna have if somebody doesn;t get some real jobs made??

here’s a hypothetical strategy  for prident speculators with ethics for leaving something to their children and grandchildren w/o too much burden, and a chance to “do the right thing”.
Take a few dollars of speculator money that would otherise go to some “hot tip” about stem cells or solar cells or prison cells, and buy some fnm here around the 5/8 –3/4 mark.
If without any screaming on cnbc it took a sudden hard drip, possibly grab another chunk, because it would be a sign that some major smart money was trying to shakeout human beings and be a lion to eat the whole elephant (see the last article).
if the indicated trend line holds, in a while there will be shares to sell at over $1–where fund managers with ethics will be able to nibble, and more at the $2 mark, if it happens.
A speculator who took loose cash and threw it directly into a bet on housing health is contributing to that health.
a prudent speculator who bought (and these are utterly hypothetical numbers) 10k shares
at 5/8 or so, and sold 4 k shares at 1, and 2 k at 1 1/2, and 2k at 2 over a 3 year hold would have??
hmmm.. $6250 at risk. 4k + 3k + 4k back over 3 years. 11k back. 11k- 6250 = $4750 cap gain, long term..apx a 20% annual ror…which is major league for real houses,
>and< would still be holding 2,000 shares for the grandkids…
(disclaimer: this is neither investment advice, nor an offer to buy/sell. this is an idicator of how serious money got to be serious. i hold no fnm and do ot plan to purchase any over the next 3 years…because i never buy a stock where i dnl;t know the whle story…and “housing in america” is too big a story to understand).
Truly nimble traders can of course beat these numbers usihg the “trade into acumulation” model with more compression…or lose their tails…
but, there’ a story about prudet speculation, and a beat up whore at the end of the bar.

Posted under business

So, here is today’s amusing headline:

Investors scrambled to assess potential losses from an alleged $50 billion fraud by Bernard Madoff, a day after the arrest of the prominent Wall Street trader.

Prosecutors and regulators accused the 70-year-old former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market of masterminding a Ponzi scheme of epic proportions through a hedge fund he ran.
Why does “nasdaq” and “fraud” seem to fit so well together nto a sentence?
This one personally disappoints me, because it means the “salad oil swindle” and ira haupt, one of whose executors was my mentor in things about the nyse, amex, et al is no longer the all-time winner for securities fraud.
Some analysts noted that it was obvious for a ong time that something as badly wrong with the funds madoff ran, by dint of consistently high returns. They bragged abut how they were too prudet to be sucked in.
How many of them honoured their professional ethics well enough to put pressure onto anyone to run the numbers?
None. Why? Becuase there is no basic regulation of transparency for hedge funds.
This derives from their relationship to “selling long for later delivery”–short selling. The existence of shorts and hedge funds depends on the ethical stance that th herd needs culled, and those who are skilled at it must be the lions, and therefore cool.
If you are a lion, this is logical. In fact, i find it the highest ethical stance.
This theme is iterated by eli wallach n the maginificent seven: “if God did not want them shorn, why did he make them sheep?” REaders may wish to recall that wallach was not the hero of that tale. the heroes were the peasants who worked the land, brought in the crops and kept going. They got some help from 7 losers needing redemption.
In nature, lions are balanced by elephants, rhincoceros, crocodiles, etc when they get too eager to etend their range. In fact, they get gored, tossed, then stomped.
In the traditional pure capitalist–not oligarchical elitist game called laissez faire–but pure adam smith capitalism, government exists as the elephant with the tusks and the feet to make sure the lion behaves.
This is something the sec, the fed res, conngress, etc might wish to recall, when not busy pretending to be lion kings themselves. The last 16 years has produced more than enough losers needing redemption.
Prompt reporting of short interest, sec filings for hedge funds handling more than $1 mil, and elimination of inter-locking directorships are things a transparent liquid liquid market needs, in the face of a liquidity crisis.

Posted under business

Can a transparent and choice driven market place prevent Washington from adding to the “czar syndrome”??
the AP reports: “A government “car czar” would oversee any bailout of U.S. automakers under proposed terms being negotiated by the White House and Congress for extending up to $17 billion in emergency loans that mainly aim to spare General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC from bankruptcy.”
Adam Smith noted centuries ago that the job of government was protecting the process of markets, not markets; not the expansion of its own power, but the use of its power to protect the process of discovery, transport, utilisation.
the “bail out” in the auto indistry needs to be driven from the bottom up. There isno question that the indistry needs help. What is being forgotten is that “industry” is not a corporate flag, but the process of people connecting.
Currently, the “end receptors” are blocked by 2 real facts: at least 18 million households need  as part of the social contracct to replace cars, and those same households cannot afford to do so.
In addition, the neighborhoods and towns where those peole live are suffereing from the systm being clogged with underwater mortgages, job loss, and declining tax base.
While there is definitely a need for rigid oversite in dispensing any federal funds into the vehicle industry, it is a fact that most of the oversite needed is already in place if the right solution is invoked.
Mecnaisms exist for tracking and destroying titles for crushed cars. Mechanisms exist for moving the paper of delivered credits from the receiver of the dead car to a car lot, to a bank, to the corporate accounts back to the treasury. Mechanism exists for collecting an ongoing 10 cent federal fuel tax. All of this can be done
with the least possible additional “Beltway bureaucracy.”
And given when this idea was first laid out here, some of its innate power could have been in time for Christmas.

Posted under business

reuters, commenting on the "bailout" needs of the auto industry offer to america an interesting factoid:

"The companies say 1-in-10 U.S. jobs are directly or indirectly related to their businesses."

does this pass the "too big to fail" test?
probably. more importantly, what is the relationship between assembly line workers, r&d teams and distribution channels to things like the mortage industry, that are outside in "indirect" relationship?
  if the auto industry collapses, what does that do to the mortgage servicing of tertiary beneficiaries like the school districts where those mortages are platted? the rents and mortgages for commerial properties servicing those communities? the environmental and health industries level of burden if cars and trucks continue to turn to smog and rust for inability to replace them?

 reuters goes on to say,"Menendez and other lawmakers have said Alan Mulally of Ford, Rick Wagoner of GM and Bob Nardelli of Chrysler will have to deliver a convincing case about their distress and their prospects for recovery."
 to which i calmly reply, the heck with their distress. this is not about the suits, the corporate logos and brands. this is about the community where high school graduates can earn a reasonable living polishing cam shaft bearings for a toyota factory 100 miles away.

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said on Tuesday the mood "candidly isn’t supportive" of a bailout.

"There’s a skepticism about their ability to formulate plans to survive."
 and that is more than fair enough, and needs be off the table. the companies that can properly service a market will endure.
 the issue is creation of that market.
 that’s why the "10 cent solution" needs to be a major part of the auto industry recovery: it creates the market, allowing properly transparet and accountible free market principles to go back to work.

"GM said in its appeal for $18 billion in cash and credit that it was prepared to cut jobs, dealers and brands."
  i would offer the american people are not preapred for that. they are prepared for a future with some promise to the coming generations, honest, unbloated pay for execs, and jobs remaining in the cities and towns that depend on that cash flow for survival.

 Want Christmas for 300 or so million americans without rewarding laziness and pride; arrogance and corporate "entitlement"? ten cents a gallon— $18 billion a year with an added primer of $10 -15 billion that will return to the treasury through taxes, to get a few million cars off the road that eed to be off the road, and replaced with a few million cars that geerate meaningful revenue throughout the economy by the act of being made.
  

Posted under business

Posted under Videos From Youtube

"The group’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, the semi-official arbiter of these things, defines a recession as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income, and other indicators."

While analysts have been all but certain that a recession has been underway for months, there has been some debate over exactly when it began. Last winter, employers started cutting jobs and growth slowed significantly,"
 says the washington post, just 2 month after blaming all the troubles on bankers.
if we date "last winter" as strting around halloween, which is what  iwas seeing, then 3 mortgage payments later an accelerating process of failure to service derivatives begins to make the sytem weak. and by summer, with key end-payers in increasing trouble, the insurers of the derivatove packages get into serious trouble, and 3 months later things begin to be undeniable, and lehman bros, and aig "take the fall" for the fact that american industry was losing jobs while the number of people needing them stayed constant, a wave front briefly stabilised by migrant workers leaving–sometimes with "help"–but nonetheless, fewer and fewer ways for the end payer to make a payment, leading the banking industry to diog deeper and deeper into the risk pool to find cash flow, thereby making the collapse all th larger.
    This left the "media" free to blame banks for predatory lending, when the systemic culprit was merely an avbsence of need for goods and services, caused in part by improvements in qulaity in goods, extending their life cycle.
  (Most readers here wll not be able to recall cars needing a "valve job" or (if ur a brit) a "de-coking" every 10-20 thousand miles, then onto 50,000 miles, and onto the unibody rysting away without the head ever coming off on many cars. they will not recall 100,000 miles being the "life" of a reliable car, which then fell into a spiral of changing ownership faster ad faster as those who could choose nothing but the risk/reward profile of a "$50 roller".)
    Change these odds? Undertake a way to create "meaningful" jobs, ad let the results filter up into mortgage derivativs stability, bank profits, investment safety? Get 4.5 million cars off the road–fast–and >>replace them<< and add another 2.5 million cars a year to the "tuna can" part of the cycle. At the sae time, repair bridges, overpasses, bottlenecks and safety hazards that cuase fuel to be wasted. This gives reduced oil dependece as pure profit. Improved air qualuty gives lower health care costs, and quality of life as pure profit. It makes taking risk in "green" vehicles worth taking both by the end consumer and the angel investor.
   Inother words: let’s stop placing blame and begin finding solutions. 

Posted under finance