Archief voor Mei, 2009

Mei
18

effectenbeurs uit redenen heeft gelopen om nu te verzamelen, op zijn minst voor.

Na een schommeling van twee maand die zag Industrials van Jones van Dow average soar 31 percent and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index shoot up 37 percent, investors gave up some of those gains last week. As the new week begins, there doesn’t seem to be any catalysts that could restart the rally.

The market barreled higher as investors realized that worst-case scenarios in the banking industry weren’t going to happen. Indications that the recession was slowing also gave investors reason to buy at a pace not seen in decades. Read more…

May
12

The winner of Berlin short film festival. Chicken a-la-Carte.
Truly heart breaking….may we always count our blessings and also remember to be a blessing to others. This six minutes short film will change your outlook in life. Must watch!!

Please be sure your family and children watch it together.
Put on the speakers.

May
11

Banking Stocks – Is It Too Late to Buy?

I wrote a posting on May 3rd, 2009 title “Will Stocks Market Rebound Soon?” And the answer surely it did for the past one week where Dow Jones rose more than 200 points, Citigroup rose to $4.02 from $3.14 (28% higher) and Bank of America rose to $14.17 from $8.68 (63% higher). This is a solid rise as the market seems to be bottoming up thus start to reverse for the past few weeks. The trend seems confirming as the positive financial news released were adding investors’ confident. Read more…

May
07

Being a forex trader is an exhilarating profession where you bounded your daily 24-hour a day life with forex news alert from around the globe five and a half days a week. The forex/currency trading market starts from the East where Tokyo will start trading around 9am Monday their time which is Sunday 7pm in New York and it ends about 4 pm (EST) Friday in New York.

I was once a forex trader expert in the four major currencies operational in a small boutique currency trading company in San Francisco. I still remember the working hours was almost 16 hours per days where you only got few hours of sleep each day. We specialized in private investors’ funds and managing those funds were high in pressure and stress; the reasons are that the private investors will call you anytime to check their forex trading positions and forex account balances. The payout was high but the working hour was dreadful. Read more…

May
06

Hedge fund manager Jeff Matthews, who wrote “A Pilgrimage to Warren Buffett’s Omaha,” actually made the pilgrimage last weekend, along with 35,000 other Berkshire Hathaway investors.

In Matthews’ opinion, the most disconcerting news from the weekend was that the external managers Buffett has hired to manage Berkshire’s money are doing a lousy job. Specifically, Matthews says, they all lost more than 37% on the year — worse than the stock-market average.

The only reason to hire a money manager is to try to beat the market, because otherwise you should just buy an index fund. The fact that Berkshire’s external managers lost money isn’t surprising — everyone got hammered last year. The amount they lost, however, is. Read more…

May
06

by Ben Stein

Recently I found myself on the top floor of One Chase Manhattan Plaza, a huge skyscraper near Wall Street. I was there to hear a panel on financial planning and to receive an award for my writings, including my writing in this space. As I waited and listened to the panel, I was overcome by feelings.

The men and women on the panel were extremely optimistic about the economy. By and large, they were convinced that recovery would start toward the end of this year, that employment would top out at around 10 per cent in 2010 and then slowly move to better levels, that the stock market had a lot of rallying left, and that even housing would soon start to recover. One panelist in particular thought banks and insurers were wildly oversold and believed subprime-backed bonds would soon correct to the upside sharply. Read more…

May
05

Warren Buffett and Munger Play the Main Stage: Views on Newspapers, Triple-A Ratings, Complex Math and More

Here are some highlights of Warren Buffett’s and Charles Munger’s remarks at the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholder meeting this past weekend.

Mr. Buffett on Newspapers

Warren Buffett has long held himself out as a newspaper man. As a child, one of his first jobs was delivering newspapers. An Omaha newspaper Berkshire owned, Sun Newspapers, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 based in part on a tip Mr. Buffett provided. One of Berkshire’s biggest investments in the 1970s was the Buffalo News, which it still owns. Read more…

May
03

For the past seven months since the collapsed of Lehman Brothers, the banking and financial industries have taken a beat. Almost all of the financial and banking stocks in the world financial market were hitting the low point during month of February and rebounded few folds from the lows. Citigroup fall to the lowest of $0.97 (March 5th, 2009) and rebounded to $3.12 (April 29th, 2009) and Bank of America dipped to the lowest of $3.14 (March 6th, 2009) and rebounded to $8.68 (April 29th, 2009).

 

Now the question is when is the best time to get into the equity market? Any stock broker will answer NOW; even they already tell you to get in few months back and wait for the correction of the drop. Unfortunately you can almost impossible to get into the market at the lowest point and sell and take profit at the highest point. Most banking stocks now is almost 80% discount and I would enter the market with confidence that it will rebound at least 50% higher than the current market price. The suggestion holding period would be at least one year. The way to minimize risk is to enter slowly and acquire the shares whenever the market drops (mostly Friday because speculators are taking profit). This trend has been forming for the past few weeks. Read more…

May
01

*Still too early to gauge the severity of swine flu
*As traumatic as SARS was in terms of its human impact, the markets scarcely reacted to it
*This time, the global economy and asset markets are more vulnerable than in 2003
*However, if this appears to be containable in a few months as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was, banks’ balance sheets are likely to dominate -market sentiment, rather than the flu
 
Much depends on the severity of this episode – and that is a great unknown. Both economic and market impacts are almost impossible to quantify at this stage because of the many unknowns about the magnitude/severity of the swine flu. It depends on how easily the virus is spread human-to-human, the ability to detect the virus early, the effectiveness of border controls, and the mortality rate. Read more…