You will see the person who introduced the idea, the reason, the daily chart and the lifetime chart. He is developing the idea in a live, fast and furious way and taking input. It’s pretty awesome.
If you want to participate in the conversation you can just go the blog and leave comments. If you want to share your ideas real time, sign up on Twitter and follow StockTweets .
CHINA – Nobody is more optimistic than me for this China not to be ‘the bubble of bubbles’ but don’t be stupid. IT IS. All things will follow China this century. It’s just math and population. The only thing preventing China from imploding everyday is all the day traders short the Chinese ‘inverted double inverse upside down flint rubble double’ ETF (FXP). Read Michael Parekh’s quick review of the situation. He has been there done that . You can’t stop people from being exuberant.
Cramer at NY Magazine . He’s tough to take on his own site but I like reading his pieces outside TheStreet. I don’t follow his stock picks but his handicapping angle is a great touch.
I love this PS from Fred in his 2008 look Ahead Post
I posted this from my blackberry to this blog, facebook, and tumblr with one click while sitting on a beach in the great barrier reef off the coast of australia. If you want to see the new world, you have to live it.
Everyone on this blog is living it so we are ahead of the game. Travelling tomorrow and excited to get busy again Thursday.
What an interesting year it has been . I am not going to do a major recap. Only a few things really happened…China owns us and US Financial and Housing CEO’s are punk ass momentum bitches.
It’s true. Prices are all that matter. Fred seems very concerned. I am not. Japan owned us 20 years ago, so did the Germans for a few hours. We bought the stuff back from them for pennies.
Most of America is fat and lazy, but our cream of the crop blows everyone elses’s away. We are like Trump in the 80’s. We owe sooooo much money that nobody can afford to collect. It’s better for our creditors to keep us afloat. my bet is we come through this once again.
If we don’t, what good is all the money you make shorting anyways. You will be dead or a slave or here .
As his father told Navin R. Johnson in the great comedy ‘The Jerk’…”Don’t Trust Whitey !”
All kidding aside, it is a profound statement. If you trust ‘Whitey’ with your money or a home appraiser to value you home, I don’t think you are entitled to a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. Like every rule, I believe there are times to break or bend them, but not often here. Last week I was driving by homes for sale signs in Phoenix that had a new hanging tag line ‘Below Appraisal’. That’s comedy.
Something is wrong when an entire industry teeters on the brink of destruction because of – what? – a change in credit rating. Consider the anxiety in and around the monoline insurers. The recent MBIA situation simply brought the point home: investors have given rating agencies too much power. Way, way too much power. Somehow, someway, large swaths of the investor landscape has effectively abrogated responsibility for conducting proper due diligence because an entity which, by the way, is paid for by the issuer, has said “this instrument is ok for investment if your risk tolerance is (choose your letter).
We are fat and lazy as individuals and corporations full of ’smart’ people are no different. Don’t be like everybody else buying ’sell side’ research and outsourcing your hard earned and/or stolen capital ( ) to ‘Whitey’.
You need to have a plan, but you can do this shit yourself. I think I am proving it on this blog everyday. Lindsay is proving it with her stock portfolio. She does not have a broker. Never has. She understands about commission costs (USAA at $3 a trade). She never heard of a stock before Wallstrip, let alone buy one. You will call her lucky, but I think she’s smart. She reads this blog and is finding ideas that are in tune with her thinking and stocks that are trending. I saw her today and we talked abut her stocks for 30 minutes. She knows I will kick her ass if she buys ‘rumors’ and stocks that are not my favorites mentioned here. I reminded her that stocks go down. It’s not always this easy.
Rose in my office has been patient, not traded and bought the best stocks she could understand in positive trends. She has been printing money.
Here is what I think Rose and Lindsay have done right. They found someone ‘me’ that they know they can reach (through my blog) or direct contact whose interests are aligned with theirs. They have taken baby steps, they have been very selective and they have been diligent about their stocks that they decide to own.
They are beating the pants out of me and every other mutual fund that they could have chosen. They will make mistakes. They will occasionally get lazy. If they don’t get too lazy, they should build their net worth and enjoy the stock market…the best part of capitalism that America has to offer (despite it’s many flaws).
As Roger concludes:
It all really comes back to the same issue: caveat emptor and for gosh sakes, do your job. Especially if you are a fiduciary. You simply can’t outsource responsibility for making decisions that are core to your mission. If you are going to invest in complex instruments, do the homework or don’t invest. And by all means, do not rely on the opinion of others whose motivations might not be aligned with your own. Because as we’ve seen, this can result in some very ugly outcomes.
Flying home finally and will be trying to stay away from the blog until Monday. It has been an amazing week of gains for the leaders. It may feel wrong to sell something, but you should.
The shorts are such amateurs. They are too smart for their own good. While they brag at ‘cocktail parties’, their profits disappear.
Sure – we throw them bones …GM, Dell, Ford, Homebuilders, semiconductors and even some big financials this year, but the rest still belongs to the bulls.
They bears focus too much on charts and price and levels…NOT TIME.
They don’t realize the amount of people focused on keeping the sytem moving forward and possibly even ‘rigged’ (I hope it’s rigged for all our sakes).
They don’t realize the power of the bullish system of America. They have their little toy of the ‘no uptick rule’ which definitely helps them during meltdowns, but creates this mess for them when sentiment turns for just a few days.
This has been one of my better trading weeks of the year again…thanks to the bears. I remember the pain of being early at $81 on VMWare just a few days ago, so I WILL SELL some more today at $94. I remember being scared of a crash while buying lot’s of SPYders at $142. I will book profits on a bunch today at $149 a few days later. Yes we could go higher, but this is indeed a meaty move in a short time and I have no opinion on the market itself.
Take a look at these spikes. If you are a shortseller remember them.
Disclosure – Long VMW, SPY and as you know alot more.
I added some Solar today with CSIQ. I will be pestering their Phoenix sales office over the holiday weekend.
I also added a few shares of NEOG to my existing position.
I am adding Waste Connections tomorrow (WCN) and a few tech stocks at least for a trade. Probably RIMM, VMW/EMC, Baidu and GOOG. I am hoping for some panic at the open, but with a 5 percent bounce intra-day in Japan, I may just be paying up on a few stocks.
The crashed financials weigh heavily on the S&P index as financials are the biggest weighting in the index. I think the moves in the index are therfore a little misleading as to the overall market damage which is not that bad.
I am sure ‘The Donald’ is smart. I mean he has his own freaking University . He is even on CNBC all the time now. Or maybe:
It helps to be born rich.
It helps to be shameless.
It also helps to owe the banks so much money that your demise hurts too much. Like I said he is smart…or smarter than the bankers.
Add it all up and you get Donald Trump. Master author, and now offering Master’s degrees in real estate.
He is a busy guy. Busy destroying shareholder value. He pisses on the same people who praise him. Today, comic Jeff Kreisler penned our first all-time low show. Jeff writes a daily ‘Funny Money ‘ column over at TheStreet.com.
I have been badmouthing Trump, the CEO and author, and Trump (TRMP) the stock forever . Rightly so. He shat on shareholders in the past as well with his last casino/real estate public fiasco DJT. The Fly is with me on this one as well . Trump defines the term ‘asshat’. If you own the stock, consider yourself an ‘asshat’ follower. If you are short the stock, you are on to something ….the anti ‘asshat’.
Brian piles on the Trump is done train:
I suspect this will be a reorganization soon. I am hoping he reorgs his forehead and hair as well.
Years of basic survival, blocking and tackling paid off for LMI Aerospace (LMIA) in late 2004.
The stock has since been a 30 bagger. It would not have been a Wallstrip worthy stock until late 2005 after a 1,000 percent gain. If we had covered it in 2005 at the all-time high breakout, the typical comment would have been…thanks, why not cover this one before the run. Yet, since that breakout, the stock is still up well over 100 percent. I guess you will say the same thing tomorrow.
I have no aersopace exposure at the moment. I have owned LMT in the past. I have no excuse, just personal comfort. I hate the fact that the government can make or break you. That said, LMIA looks pretty diversified . Brian takes a deeper look at the technical picture here (volume is light despite the great price action):
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