Global Market Comments for February 26, 2009 Featured Trades: (GM), (YEN),(YCS) 1) Weekly first time jobless claims soared from 631,000 to 677,000, taking total claims to 5.1 million, a new all time high. General Motors (GM) announced a Q4 loss, and a 6.2 billion cash burn, leaving them with a scant $14 billion left. The
Global Market Comments for February 25, 2009 Featured Trades: (C), (BAC) 1) So nationalize the banks already! Get it over with! Call it whatever you want: partial nationalization, temporary nationalization, socialization, liverwurst, or rutabaga. Just get it over with! This tortuous slow drip of on again, off again, stop gap measures is going to cost
Global Market Comments for February 24, 2009 Featured Trades: (GOLD), (GLD), (SPG) 1) The Senate Banking Committee holds hearings while Rome burns. The S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index showed a Q4 fall of -18.2%, the sharpest decline in its 21 year history. Prices in San Francisco fell by 31.2%. We got within 100 points of
Global Market Comments for February 23, 2009 Featured Trades: (C), (XOM), (GM), ($NIKK)1) The Treasury moved to raise its stake in Citigroup (C) by up to 40% by converting preferred into common, yet another step down the road to creeping nationalism. With C trading as low as $1.20 on Friday, taking its market cap down
Global Market Comments for February 20, 2009 Featured Trades: (POT), (PBR), ($COPPER), (SCHW)1) Gold blasts through $1,000 to a new high for the year. Need I say more?2) Here is another thought about Obama's mortgage bailout plan. It is so small, and helps so few, it isn't really a bail out at all. It doesn't
Global Market Comments for February 19, 2009 Featured Trades: ($GOLD), (DGP), (GLD), (WFC), (EPD)1) GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! This is the cry being heard worldwide by investors in the Great Gold rush of 2009, looking for a generic 'short America' trade. Where in the past gold seekers used sluices, shovels, and jackhammers to extract the glittery
Global Market Comments for February 18, 2009 Featured Trades: (NAT)1) Obama's mortgage bailout package is out, and the market didn't care, hitting new six year lows. After wading through pages of arcane, mind scrambling detail, it appears that $75 billion will be made available to distressed homeowners to cut mortgage payments to 31% of their
Global Market Comments for February 17, 2009 Featured Trades: (TM), ($GOLD), ($SSEC)1) In three short weeks we have gone from an administration that had a political interest in portraying the economy as not as bad as it really was, to one that paints the economy as worse than it really is. The markets don't like
Global Market Comments for February 13, 2009 Featured Trades: (ABX), FCX), (GOLD)1) We learned yesterday that not only does the Obama administration watch the stock market carefully, it also has a technical analyst on board. We were exactly at a crucial support point on the charts when the Treasury leaked the home mortgage subsidy plan,
Global Market Comments for February 12, 2009 Featured Trades: (DEO)1) Those who believe that the wine and spirits business is recession proof should take a look at UK based Diageo (DEO). Its shares just hit a new low for the year of $50, down 42%. Although the giant purveyor of alcoholic beverages posted profits up