Baltbear on Finance markets are like marshmallows

someone suggested that his “buy and hold” strategy..which he says has been getting hit the last 2 quarters is much more intelligent than channeling, rolling,…whatever somebody wants to call “buy relatively cheap, sell relatively high”
this issue is always what is “relative” …
buffet (the one with dairy queen..not krispy kreme) has opined that it’s better to pay a lot for a well run company than get a sheap buy on a badly run one..or words to that effect.
thus, i offer, as a simple corollary to some law of a baltbear, if a puppy has a record of book not converting to sales, then sales multiples cannot be tooo far above reality check time.
when looking at a story stock, xyz.pk, that has $15mm in book, and has turned the last $10mm in cash into <$1mm in gross sales, the valid multiplier for p/s = 0.
if xyz.pk was expected to be getting $10mm in gov’t paid deals, and the gov’t changes its mind, the p/s is now <8.
etcetcetcydydydyydaaa… so if xyz.pk has been rolling 4 - 6 based on people’s expectations of that gov’t welfare, then the changed policy changes the rolling range. if the book val converts to >>actual i/p $$<< like a patent lease for $1mm a year, instead  of an imagined $12mm for the possible maybe o please future value of patents, then book multiplier can be moved up, and xyz.pk will possibly roll in a higher channel.
without a firm grasp on such realities, puppys will become mangy flea carriers in the port.
somebody who complains about other people makiing $$ rolling and channeling, but who refuses to place limit orders more than 10 minutes away from one he expects a fill said,
:”. It is not easy and many times they will skip your order.”
yeah… and???
if it was easy it wouldn;t pay. the idea that anybody can learn charting, and charting is always meaningful, and yhoo gives it for free…yeah. a sucker’s game to suck money to yhoo…
some amateurs think (ok, william james would call them paranoid delusionals) that if they wait til 11:06 to place a limit order for 1k @ 5 1/16, it will get filled, because the specialist is waiting for their order and wants to mess with them, but will be distracted by the sudden order and….. yeah….

more often, the specialist fills orders in an orderly fashion, good ones for him, ok ones for his friends, the rest in order of entry…and when u decide to try for a fill @ 5 1/16, the guy who decided yesterday gets filled, and ur told to wait ur turn…which may never come,,especiallly when the speciualist went naked on 1k @ 7, and covers by buying that 1k @ 5 1/16 himself.

:”Think about it, if someone could pull that off, they would be trading a large Fund somewhere and would not be on yahoo”
one of a few metricks i use in provenancing the cred of random posters. actuallly, it gets pulled off every day, in part by those guys hiring people to cover yhoo boards–and others–with garbage posts,
because those guys >>>are the swings<<<<.

:”A sale at 6 could end up proving very dumb if the stock gets to 7,8,10 etc.”
nope. listening to people who have already turned down 4 baggers because they want 20 is dumb. why? becuase they are, in reality, only trying to infect you with 4 bagger fever.

an entry for the purpose of getting 20% apr is an exit @ 20% apr. anybody who enters the mkt saying “i’m gonna get rich buying this expotic puppy of a story” will get killed. disciplined speculators seek returns..not fortunes… u wanna fortune??? goto vegas. tell elvis i said hi, how’s the diet working out for ya…  fortunes are made by clear-headed use of previously unavailable resources. that’s why the word derives from the latin word for “luck”…not “betting.”

“coulda woulda shoulda” is a child’s game.. the prudent speculator who asks, “how can i make 18%, year after year, thereby doubling my $$ every 4 years..without losing it all??” notices that if he makes 18% in one month, he can be in cds the rest of the year.

of course this attitude is anathema to the promoters who need to find buyers. they will continually preach the idea of never leaving a dime on the table for the next guy–so they can sell you theirs when they know its past time to go. a historical example: what brought leh down?? not being able to find any suckers for their bad paper except themselves until their “profits” consisted of feeds from buying and selling to themselves. the “buy and hold” market –including the otherwise great ben stein–missed that one totallly. laws of a baltbear “always leave money on the table for the next guy.”

:”some who are not even in the stock, telling people what to do????????”
anyone telling anyone what to do without a loaded gun stuck in their mouth is a poser playing one or another sociallly acceptible sand box games.

those who like this puppy and want to trust management will trade for a basis like that of management.

there are dozens of varieties of stating that fact. but most of them are disguised to sound righteous, and noble…and lulling….into a deadly sleep . a variant is to declare a holding “an investment for the future” and thus..not something to be watched, cared for, bought and sold..that works for actual “investments”–that is, castings of bronze or gold. but since the book of Daniel, it has been notably stupid to over-value such investments.

let’s get specific: are “stem cells” the new “beanie babies” ????

if one does not run a continual check of that problem, yes.

is information emerging so that “stem cells” as source material can be bypassed??
yup.
steadily.
the question is..with what economic utility??

those who want to roll over for the posers and the self-righteous will pay attention to garbage of future predictions like “50″  for some dog and keep making donations to insiders, their running buddies and the cult members.

to a specific puppy, btim.amex …
the buy and hold types are saying:”I think smart money added anywhere in the 4’s and is holding this particular stock for much higher prices.

Trading BTIM will likely lead someone to a major opportunity cost down the road and they will miss more gains then any short term profits they banked. Short term profits are taxed more aggressively and incur commission expenses as well.”

to which i reply, consistently…
ok…lol..u keep telling ur clients that.

and i’ll tell mine what i tell them…and offering a few freebies about how to do the dd on the story, and how to avoid the sharks.

and  “10″   and “4 - 6 with spikes” will continue to define the space, with “8″ as a measuring rod.

fd: i have been both paid and thanked for keeping people out of btim.
fd: clients in a related puppy, isco.ob.

Posted under business

somebody asked “what is a whore stock?” and offered that they had never heard the term…
“back in the day” (not the day when in order to “reform equities trading” by inventing the sec, the deal required the worst abuser, black jack kennedy, to be the sec chief) (not back in the day when tino deangelis cornered the world supply of soy bean oil–only it was water–and created warren buffet’s empire’s starting growth) (not back in the day when somebody noticed it took six bits to process an exchange, so charging $39 instead of $100 was still a monster ripoff) (not back in the day when somebody else said, if we make a mkt inhouse we can fill for $9.95, and clip 1/64 off both sides of every trade–or not fill) when aol im and yhoo i-chat plugin and mirc and icq were used to create cartels and data pools–an idea i keep seeing people thinking they can invent >>now<< in their hubris and self-proclaimed “investor” status–there was a guy styled “tokyo mex.”
a courteous enuff review of tokyo, leaving out evvver so much of amusement value, may be found here:
http://www.angelfire.com/ca5/SonyinCANADA/webpicker.htm

:”JANUARY 6, 2000

NEWS FLASH
Is It Sayonara for Web Stock-Picker “Tokyo Joe”? The SEC says the influential day trader used his site as a front for various illegal activities

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After months of fretting about the subculture of investment chat rooms, the Securities & Exchange Commission on Jan. 5 sued one of the Web’s best-known stock-picking gurus, “Tokyo Joe.” The SEC is asking a federal judge in Chicago to shut down “Tokyo Joe’s” Societe Anonyme, a Web- and e-mail stock-alert network run by Yun Soo Oh Park of New York. The securities cops say Park defrauded his subscribers and misrepresented his own performance as a day trader. Park’s attorney says he will fight the charges.

Park took on the noms de Web “Tokyo Mex” and “Tokyo Joe” in 1997, when he was one of the most active stock-tip posters on such investment bulletin boards as Silicon Investor and Raging Bull. Stories in the press featured him as a spokesman and symbol of the Net’s adrenaline-charged world of rumor-driven chat rooms, day trading, and stock tips. By mid-1998, Park had set up his own Web site, TokyoJoe’s, and launched Societe Anonyme. Last September, Time magazine’s Time Digital online edition cited him as “one of the country’s most influential stock-pickers.”

“SCALPING.”   Although he hiked his membership fees from $29 to $200 a month, Park eventually enrolled 3,800 subscribers, according to the SEC. From July, 1998, through June, 1999, the SEC says, Park collected $1.1 million in fees for e-mailed stock picks and access to his members-only Web pages and chat rooms. One mark of Park’s influence: Web sites where he didn’t post his picks set up windows where their subscribers could follow the TokyoJoe chat on Silicon Investor.”

in reality about 7 a.m. manhattan time, mex would be in multiple mirc equities rooms gathering and disseminating data, creating the early vol that he would later use as part of his technical analysis.

in on some bedraggled shell company fraud chasing immortality or instant communication, or lifestyle premiums, in @ maybe 1/64 as part of fees for helping the wheeling-dealing, so that selling @ 1/16 was a home run, tokyo would announce privately that he was “analysing” dogg.ob. the mirc guys would buy, @1/16 on the open from mm’s seeing it coming, moving the shares they got @ 1/128 for the 1502c.  the mirc traders then sold to those getting the “sa” alerts, who would (in theory) sell to the si or raging bull readers….who would get slaughtered.

it was tokyo who coined the term “whore stock”–a ticker u might spend 15 minutes with if things were going that way, but never invite back to ur portfolio, and totalllly never introduce to ur retirement.

since one of laws of a baltbear–viking’d from peter lynch–is “if u wouldn’t own it for 10 years, don’t own it for 10 minutes” when i use the term i am shifting the valuations.

the corollary is this: if you wouldn’t pay to own it for 10 years, then pay 0.
there are 2 ways to pay 0: don’t touch it,  or …trade to a 0 basis.
if ur trading, make the nut.
if ur a prudent speculator, make the nut, make ur necessary apr, and/or have shares @ 0 left over.

something so-called “investors” almost alllways fail to realise is that there is no inherent relationship
between risk&reward.
just as they fail to realise there is no inherent relationship between goods&services and the attributible earnings to common.
just as trhere is no relationship between potential “social value” of i/p, and the desire of mgt to send $$ out to those who bought from the investors.

once that is understood, then, there can be quite a few pretty girls at the bar, and the night may be young.
to goto the concrete, adls.ob put out a press release today indicating that if a proposed fed solution to a federally perceived problem evver creates another tranche of corporate welfare, adls already has its medicaid card in hand, and is going to go stand in line.

is that an “event”??? nope. and given adls.ob behaviour over the past couple months, it’s not even news.
it’s an oddly dressed chick trying to flag down cars to “borrow a cigarette.”

fd: clients in adls.ob.

Posted under business

here is the most laffable piffle of the week, allegedly coming from a “Roger SchultzThe Nail In Wallstreets Coffin” posted to numerous yhoo msg boards, along with my commentary:

As the Obama administration helps our largest banks tread water in an ocean they themselves created, a tidal wave has been spotted just over the horizon.
(actually a combination of factors ranging from crazed congress people, to irrationallly greedy retail borrowers to annnybody trying to figure out a way to create jobs while losing jobs combined with an absurdity of math logic –delta delta, when either delta is not factored–collapsed the system)

A new, stock clearing house will open in the U.S. in March that will right many of the wrongs perpetrated by the market makers, brokers, and hedge funds conducting business on the NASDAQ and OTC markets. The NASDAQ OMX has been approved to start the clearing of stocks next month. Currently, 92% of all stocks in the U.S. markets are cleared by the DTC, which is an arm of the Federal Reserve.
(approved by who??? and since nasdaqomx.com says it has been around a lonnng while….what;s the play here?)
The problem for the market makers, brokers, and hedge funds, is all of their NSS (naked short selling) will have to be covered when companies jump to the No Nonsense NASDAQ OMX from the DTC, that for years looked the other way when this practice occurred.
(The SEC is the one who, since 1934 has mandated naked short selling when “necessary.” there are often arguments about when “necessary” but a naked short is not illegal…depending…)

A naked short sell is perpetrated when a buy order is placed by an individual for a stock and a market maker pulls those stocks out of thin air and puts the imaginary stocks into the individuals broker account. (that’s not the only time, but it is the most legal time) This practice has bankrupted countless marginal companies in the last 8 years. Many, if not most market makers are owned by the large banks and brokers on Wall street. (most mkt makers have relationships with banks and clearing houses. dtcc is the cap for clearing houses, and likewise clears.)

This practice of naked short selling artificially deluded the outstanding shares, making each share worth less causing a death spiral. At this point the brokers and hedge funds sell short, betting that the stock would further decline, which was a no brainer of course. (shares don’t really get deluded. shareholders do.)

Almost all of these affected companies did not survive, at least in their original form. However, the companies that did survive this savage market manipulation will soon leave the DTC and join the new clearing house of the NASDAQ OMX. I know of one CEO that spent over 750K of his own money to save his shell OTC company from this type of manipulation and will most likely have a very healthy profit for his troubles.
(>>>>shell<<<<< company??????????? shell phreaking company??? in other words somebody did a 1502c on zilch, and when the mms saw it weas zilch sent the pig into the ground before he could use it to suck $$ up from innicent retail buyers to gain something workable??? ooooo poor baby.

When this transpires in March, ALL OF THOSE AIR SHARES MUST BE COVERED by the brokers or market makers AND all those hedge fund short sells MUST BE COVERED AS WELL.

(reallly?? who says??  i mean, like….who says???? last time i looked there were share of chrysler (the one that went bankrupt) that hadn;t cleared yet…)
This will put the nail in the coffin of dozens of hedge funds, markets makers, and brokers throughout the U.S. The chickens are finally coming home to roost and they’ve grown to the size of an Emu.
(this will allow tonnes and tonnes of naked shorting when corrupt whore stock ceos announce such a change in clearting agency as a way to pump another tranche of treasury stock.)

(and now you know why some anonymous yhoo poster would be disseminating this piffle all over the boards of stocks trading <1… cause the way to stop naked shorting is to stop buying. shorts need retail buyers more than corporate treasuries do….see the last posting about “what is an investor?”

The greed imbeded in our stock market will be proved to have been unprecedented in human history.
odd…i had thought the greed was in the human heart, where it can act.

Posted under business

the U.S. is expected to import 9.11 million barrels per day this year. How much is that, really?
will some of it (libya to texaco) become lubricant?  yup. thus, i’m gonna round this number down to 9 mm bbl a day and a 360 day year, just to tidy up the numbers.
so, 9mm x 42 gpb x 360 d =136,080,000,000 gals. seems like a huge number.

but, it’s even better than that: “a refinery produces 19.15 gallons of gasoline, 9.21 gallons of diesel, and 16.32 gallons of various other products” from each bbl of oil. whether that “other” is paving asphalt, soda bottles, laptop cases, propane, ethane, etc etc depends on the oil source.

so that number, 136bb gals is in reality, 62,046,000,000 of gasoline.
in reality, americans peaked their car use in 2004 at 250,000,000,000 miles, and the number is declining at well over 1 billion miles a month of late, given the sucky economy.

simple arithmetic, (carry the 9, count the zeros, double the dangling participle and split the infinitive) shows that, on gasoline alone, an extra 4mpg real world cafe gets rid of importing oil, while allowing driving rates to increase steadily.

us consumption has averaged 700gal a year…since 1980. oddly, that comes to 9mm bbl a day.
whack job human haters will argue this means that cars need to be outlawed, yaydyyda… nutznberries.

how can the treehuggers argue this? by forgetting about domestic production.

how can the 10 cent solution come into play on this?

once again–real world cafe sux. real world gas taxes have not adjusted with inflation in oil prices, or cost of providing services. a 10 cent a gal gasoline tax, with all proceeds going to finance vehicle destrruction and replacement, without the gaming imposed by the clunker program of last year–which lacked financing, and left inefficiency in place (when air quality is a metric) will have a net effect of reducing dependance on importing oil–from either opec or from deep in the gulf.

once again, the air being breathed plays an enormous role in health care costs. bush i showed conclusively that $19bb a year in new regulatory burden for air/water gave $22bb in health care savings.  even at 700 gals, 10 cents is $70 a year. a 1.62 multiplier (wildly conservative) for stimulus to veh production gives $113 worth of activity yielding an additional $20 or so “free taxes” to be paid by others, for a net burden of $50. (my economic modeller is in my other laptop, so i am just going wildly conservative.) the multiplier for the tax $ is ruffly 1 3/8..knocking the “cost” down to $44.

at less than 1 bit a day –$1/8– everyone has a new effective anti-anxiety med that allows america to function, supporting the 10% of the american econ that is vehicles, slowing ther rate of increase in health care costs, and putting a frictional cap on oil prices.

Posted under business

what’s an investor?

more often than i would like to see there are indignant comments from the self-indulgent owners of one or another laggardly puppy’s common stock talking about “we investors have a right”… blah bllah ad blech.

here’s an amusing company that came to my attention:
http://www.codatherapeutics.com/
notice how their webdesigner went all 2004 with tabs, and gives us
http://www.codatherapeutics.com/investors.html

read those pages. that’s what an investor looks like.
and yup, ceos answer to those investors.
people who buy common stock in dome grey-muzzled puppy like btim.amex,
or some newer little pup like adls.ob or isco.ob are >not< investing in the company.
their purchase goers to a guy who got the stock from a guy who got the stock…(repeat 12x)
who got it from a guy who got it from a broker who got it from a larger broker who got it from the investors.

fd:clients in isco.ob and adls.ob.

when you see a ceo playing to the holders of the common (at the annual meeting, or on some company blog, or press releases) ur seeing a ceo who is not confident that “earnings” will be paying his pay check anytime soon.

he may be thinking about the strike points on his own options, but he is not thinking about bizness.

he may be thinking about helping his “investors” lay off some stock so they can get a 500% return on their investment and still keep stock. but he’s not thinking about either bizness, or the well being of the people who will be taking that common off the hands of the investors.

when i/r takes phone calls as the easy way of administering placebos to the holders of common it is not acting in the interest of holders of common, but only of the investors who will be selling “insider” stock and option grants from time to time.

this is a principal reason for getting a basis below that of insiders.

that can only be done by being one, or by trading.

and once again proving, “buy and hold” is a false god of the drink the koolaid family.

this doesn;t mean hopping in/out of stocks and getting negative about them if they don’t make you rich in a month.
that;s another drug..and the bucket shops love those who eat it.

it does mean that being ticked off that a ceo didn’t make you rich is an indicator of how dumb >>you<< are for thinking that was his job. his job is to make himself rich, make the investors rich, make the investor’s buddies rich. if there’s something left over for you..fine. in order for any of this to work, a fair amount of the time, holders of common can find people to sell to, at some profit. those profits however have nothing to do with the company.

if any part of ur dd comes from others’ opinions about some dog, remember that. the people who justify their viewpoint as that of “investor” are, by definition, invested only in themselves, but will do whatever it takes to keep that from being obvious.

the buyer of common is a vital part of the food chain. like shrimp. but, he’s not anymore an “investor” than the absence of a bony spine makes the shrimp a shark.

Posted under business

Advanced Life Sciences Holdings, Inc., that is to say, adls.ob–cause who really cares
what some puppy is called, the issue is what’s the ticker?–hit yesterday for the “whore stock”
portfolio. Client’s entry points? $0.055. In my voodoo that’s 1/100 of 5 1/2…or, perhaps, 1/10 of 9/16.
why mention that conversion? laws of a baltbear:” how do you make $$ on true “penny” stocks? u buys lottsa it.”

note that this entry price is wellll above the 52 week low…for reasons tba in this post…

here’s the story: pneumonia is still a major killer in the usa, and will be getting more that way as the idiots of the health care industry help more and stronger drug resistent versions of strep to evolve, kind of like the way stem cell ceos create evolutionary pressure favoring due diligence.

adls.ob claims, in a way the fda finds plausible to talk about, to have a 1x a day pill that slams into all these hard-guy germs. it says it has its ducks in a row to the point it can ask for fast track status for the investigation, etc.

the next “vaccine scare” that floats across the usa will loft this puppy like lbj with a beagle…regardless of the realitys involved. thus..a whore stock.

here’s why the story matters: like all these puppies, the books were a disaster; hence the fall from the last vaccine scare being like from 13/16 to 1/16. debt all over the place, no $ in the treasury, etc…
but, like isco.ob, some actual cash finds cred in the story. that includes the ceo/chief scientist. after a d/e swap, and a fair sized tranche, adls.ob is back in the hunt.  thus, never mind  if adls.ob has a cure for the nation’s worst epeidemic–dd failure–if there can never be entrance into the mkt place, and can never be attribution to common.

the target range for the prudent speculator is—as always–20% roi + shares cheaper than insiders to
30% roi, to 20% roi plus share at 0. that’s a narrow range here, because the current meaningful insider price is $0.022. and the puppy is sitting at 0.060…

this is thus a play money whore stock. ..with possible huge upside.

thru it’s own merits in execution of biz plan, combined with the inevitable next “plague stock rally”, 1 is doable. if i were advising adls.ob i’d be looking to move a large tranche @ 5/8ish at such a time…
and that’s a trip to 10bag city arizona for those who ignore whatever pump&bucket house that will work the deal.

i am neither recommending, nor not recommending adls.ob.

if this puppy looks good to you with ur own dd, well…there it is.

and again, fd: clients in adls.ob.

Posted under business