Stock Market Analysis – 04-29-2010
I guess not everybody heard about the SEC scandal, but apparently there were a bunch of guys who would just go to work and watch porn all day there. One guy filled up boxes of dvds after he filled up his hard drive downloading porn 8 hours a day. These are the guys your tax dollars are paying $200k+ a year to regulate companies like GS.
Anyway, the market bounce followed through today. Hopefully this will be a consolidation phase, but I wouldn’t be opposed to some strong distribution either. Of course, the market doesn’t care about my desires, so we’ll see what it actually does. I’m keeping a cautious stance, so if it’s going to keep going up, hopefully it stays straight up.
Stock Market Analysis – 04-28-2010
The Goldman Sachs smugness is hopefully uniting Democrats and Republicans on financial reform, but I don’t know if giving the SEC more power will help anyone other than the porn industry. With all this other news, the Fed leaving the rate unchanged didn’t even register on a lot of feeds. $1180 held today, but widening channels at the top of runs is usually not a good sign. It may be time to start getting a little more conservative again.
Stock Market Analysis – 04-16-2010
I pointed out some weakness on Thursday, but the GS fraud charges would have probably taken the market down under any circumstances. I’m not surprised that there was shadiness going on, but I am a bit surprised that the SEC is actually trying to do something about it since GS had previously been untouchable. We’re still in the uptrend though, so keep an eye on the volume to determine if the pullback is a healthy correction or not.
Stock Market Analysis – 04-15-2009
Tax day! Okay, that’s not really an excited cheer for taxes, but at least it’s a time that forces investors to check back on their capital gains (or losses) for the year. It’s always good to pay a lot of taxes because that means you made a lot during the year, but of course it’s hard to look at owing money as being a good thing. The stock market has still been fairly quiet lately. The short term uptrend continues, and we’d have to fall an awful lot to break that, so that’s good or bad depending on how you look at things. I’m still waiting for a big break either way before I open up any sizeable positions.
I’m sure most of my readers follow Barry Ritholtz’s blog by now, but in case you don’t, he once again summed up the state of the banks pretty well with a couple of posts about taxpayers funding their profits and how GS hid their losses by shifting their calendar and shoving all the losses into the orphaned month. Barry Bonds’s asterisk is nothing compared to this one. So yeah, take all those big earnings at banks with a barrel of salt…
Stock Market Analysis – 12-31-2008
What a historical year 2008 turned out to be. With nearly a 50% drop from the year’s high to the low, we experienced volatility not seen for over 20 years. With a new president coming in and a single party controlling the government, there will be a lot of changes in the near future. Whether it’s for better or worse will be determined though. Once the volume picks back up after the holidays, look to see if the volatility spikes back up or if the market stays in consolidation mode.
My top thing to watch for 2009 is probably oil right now. The bubble will finish deflating, and at some point OPEC will find the correct supply balance for the shrinking markets. Since oil is less correlated to the general market than other equities, even if the market fails to turn around in 2009 I think it still has some potential to be a good bullish play. If the market does turn around, then all the other usual suspects are in play – AAPL, AMZN, GS, MOS, and whatever else shows up under my bullish stocks.
Goldman Sachs (GS) – 10-01-2008
Goldman wins by default. All of the bulge-bracket investment banks failed, but Warren Buffett believed in GS and stepped in to keep them afloat. As the last man standing in this category, I think this is definitely one to watch when the slide reverses.