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I did the unthinkable. I bought a ton of a leveraged fund, and some stocks during pre-market. Within 30 seconds I made $5K, and I immediately sold. Now I am watching to see wht happens, because I don't trust the market just because of one jobs report that was a little better than expected. Too much other stuff going on, but it was a good sign, of course.
Now, things are even MORE mixed up.
EDIT: Yes, I posted that correctly... not a slam dunk as the steam is letting out... problem here is that we really don't have ANY idea where the bottom is, making this a VERY tricky day.
TM
I think you are right about the roller coaster ride. It is up on shaky payroll news.
Today could be a trap. Be VERY careful! Things might reverse in a BIG way.
TM
I just shorted the market by buying and then flipping a ton of QID shares... I just made another $4K in less than two minutes.!!
This time I clicked on the RIGHT symbol!
EDIT: JUST did it AGAIN! The Elite Software is giving me all the indicators. I just picked up another $2K in 30 seconds! I think I'm going to be VERY careful moving forward, I don't want to lose it back. I'm up $12K in the first 30 minutes of the day.
EDIT 2: Now, I noticed that AAPL is trading like a yo-yo, so I am buying shares when it reaches a low, and then flipping them when it reaches a little higher. Not getting greedy, but was able to pick up a few hundred bucks every few minutes.
TM
Here is the rest of the story on the Jobs and payroll. This could explain the Roller Coaster ride we are watching.
The jobless rate declined as 193,000 people left the labor force and the number of unemployed dropped by 156,000. The share of the eligible population holding a job declined to 58.1 percent, the lowest since July 1983.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-05/u-s-payrolls-rose-more-than-estimated-1- 17-000-in-july-jobless-rate-9-1-.html
You and I are supporting the other 42% of the population. And I don't like it.
I haven't made any moves today because when I analyze each stock that I own I end up wanting to keep all of them, because long term, they are going to be winners IMO.
Good luck to everyone !!
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
All true.
TM
I haven't made any moves today because when I analyze each stock that I own I end up wanting to keep all of them, because long term, they are going to be winners IMO.
I would venture to guess that between my broker accounts and the E-Trade accounts I likely lost at least $40K (on paper) the past week. But you know what? I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I know deep down that I will get all this back and then some at some point down the road.
But, if you sold it at the top and then bought it again at the bottom, you would MAKE and ADDITIONAL $40K. If you weren't that exact in your timing, which is more realistic... and let's say you only hit it halfway, you would then be ahead $20K.
I'm just saying... Not disagreeing with you at all.
TM
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
EDIT: The way the market has acted the past few hours, it acts like we may have reached a bottom. Evidently, there is some kind of agreement between the ECB and Italy. Market is now soaring. But just wait a few seconds and it will be on its [non-permissible content removed] again
Edit2: just bought some AAPL on the dip into the low $370's. Could not resist. I'm pulling a TM
... But just wait a few seconds and it will be on its [non-permissible content removed] again...
I agree with both of those statements.
Don't expect the volatility to end for a while.
just bought some AAPL on the dip into the low $370's. Could not resist. I'm pulling a TM
Yes, you did pull a TM, because I did the same thing.
TM
All's he can do is continue to blame Bush? Leadership finds no excuses and no complaints. Just lead to the objective and take your hits as long as it is reached. Where is the goal? When will Obummer get us there?
Regards,
OW
I can read your mind!
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
And the loss of jobs
Now that several nations who directly benefit from American military involvement now have a better credit rating than the US, maybe it's time to start billing them for the influence, and if they balk, we can pull out and let them face Stalputin and the Islamic hordes themselves.
Gotta join in:
I can imagine the extreme left that really believed Obama would pull US out of our wars are totally disillusioned.
Obama's inability to stop war, and really, his willingness to advance it, shows how much of a puppet his role really is.
That cartoon is priceless.
I'm out to dinner and just saw it on my phone. I showed everyone... Got a huge laugh. Thanks!
TM
The debt ceiling negotiations and debates over government spending have transfixed the nation for the last few weeks. President Obama’s call for a “clean” debt limit increase—one without spending reductions attached—was bound to fail from the beginning, as many House Republicans were elected on promises to bring the growth of government under control. To Democrats’ chagrin, opposition to greater government spending was a winning issue in 2010.
However, taxing and spending tell only part of the story. Much of the growth of government occurs off-budget, through regulations that often go largely unnoticed. As Wayne Crews, Vice President for Policy here at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, notes in his annual report, “Ten Thousand Commandments,” hidden regulatory costs approach $1.7 trillion this year. Those costs slow innovation, hampering the economy and job growth.
That estimate is frighteningly huge, yet it is still just an estimate. That is indicative of another significant problem that regulation creates. As Crews in “Ten Thousand Commandments” also points out, “[P]recise regulatory costs can never be fully known, because, unlike taxes, they are unbudgeted and often indirect.” It is this level of indirectness inherent in regulation that perpetrates the ambiguity that paralyzes the business community.
The costs of regulations are not just about dollars and cents. The vast expansion of the regulatory state also imposes costs in the form of uncertainty. Many laws delegate rule making to agencies under broad, vague mandates. This creates uncertain implications for the costs of doing business and makes it almost impossible for businesses to plan, invest, or hire new people. Businesses are unsure of what they face until rules are final—and all the legal challenges to them are resolved.
Regulatory costs can no longer be ignored. Hospitality and casino mogul Steve Wynn said recently in a speech to shareholders that the current administration’s policies are acting as a “wet blanket to business and progress and job creation.” He went on to say that businesses are “frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right, a President that keeps using that word ‘redistribution.’”
Wynn is right. The Dodd-Frank financial regulation law, Obamacare, and EPA energy efficiency mandates are regulatory boulders that block the economic growh plans of American businesses, both in terms of current profits and forgone opportunities. Economic growth and job creation have suffered as a result. Bad enough, yet making things much worse is the Obama administration’s refusal to lessen the regulatory burden in any significant way. In fact, it has been adding to it.
Some examples: The National Labor Relations Board has made it more difficult for employers to counter union organizing. The Department of Interior is setting up further roadblocks to energy production and resource extraction. The Federal Communications Commission is working to impose net neutrality rules. EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are pushing unrealistic auto fuel economy standards. The Agriculture Department is sticking its nose into railroad regulation. The Labor Department seeks to broaden the definition of fiduciary duty, thus increasing pension fund risk.
And in what may be the most absurd expansion of regulatory power, new Food and Drug Administration appointees began a crackdown on food producers, including Kellogg’s and Diamond Foods, for noting on their package labels that eating whole oat cereals or the omega 3 fatty acids in walnuts could lower cholesterol and provide other heart health benefits. Linking dietary nutrients with relevant and important health claims, Obama’s FDA argues, requires that the products be regulated as drugs rather than foods.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The burden is already great, yet still threatens to grow by leaps and bounds.
Regulations not only impact businesses, they also scare consumers by focusing on the risks, never on the benefits, of new products, services, and technologies. Consumers pay higher prices and have fewer choices. With all these costs and uncertainties, with fewer sales and less investment, is it any wonder that the recovery has stalled?
Fred Smith
Fred L. Smith, Jr. is President and Founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market public policy group established in 1984.
But Obama and the Dems still have the media on their team. The media is reporting the unemployment rate as good news, despite there being fewer people working in July than in June due to people dropping out of the jobs market.
>Yep, the Dems are going to get eaten for lunch! 3 years and apossible 2nd recession?
The MSM will keep this looking like a republican caused problem rather than a Dem- and Obama-caused problem with the quadrupling of spending along with much of the spending being useless at effecting jobs increase, to wit the stimulus $1,000,000,000 package that was mostly pork for congressfolk to take home.
Based on my feelings, I see lots of up and down movement for the market. The winners will be the supertraders with their computerized trades within seconds.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
Sounds like Tag to me, on all counts.
The administration was not able to bully S&P into not downgrading the U.S debt rating. This has to be a stinging rebuke for Obama and his gang and now they are lashing out at S&P and saying it was the Republicans fault. Unbelievable.
We deserved to be downgraded. Hopefully some good will come out of it and it will help end Obama's re-election bid.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
The difference between me and those guys that are really in the game is like night and day. I'm just a guy that uses a home PC or a mobile device that goes through an application supported by an online broker. Those other guys are truly wired in and operate on genuine real-time, not the phony real time that the rest of us get which actually has a very slight time lag. They can trade in decimals, and their powerful hardware and sophisticated software trades in massive volumes back and forth throughout the market in real-time split-second intervals.
Compared to them, I am lucky when I catch a crumb. I would love to have the huge advantages they have.
TM
Ditto...
We're lucky we didn't get a bigger downgrade, considering the mess we are in.
I pray that Obama isn't re-elected... unless, of course, someone even worse ends up running against him, but that seems nearly impossible.
TM
The real issue here is whether the consumer thinks of this as psychologically bad and gets scared by media talk and slows spending. That will be bad for both the economy and stocks. If I were S&P I'd have left things as is given the rush into treasuries on Friday, and the week as a whole. It's almost like a critic that rates a movie as bad after it had great audiences and excitement about the movie by those who saw it. To me it's almost meaningless but I worry about the consumer psychological reaction.
I'd just hate to be the innocent sucker and victim that decided in 2007 to invest in the stock market on a long-term basis. Seems like that should have been a reasonable decision. The market, specifically the S&P, reached a nice healthy high of 1,565.15 on October 9, 2007.
Many, many people throughout the world were OPTIMISTIC. They were under the FALSE impression that the stock market is a good place for making a LONG-TERM investment. But, they have LOST a FOURTH of their money. They now only have 75% of it left. They NEVER saw their investment increase in value, and perhaps they NEVER WILL. They waited four years to end up up losing soooo much.
Now, to be clear, I am NOT, NOT, NOT suggesting day-trading to anyone at all. I am talking about what can happen when someone forks over their money to a broker that puts their money into the stock market and simply leaves it there, or those folks that open up a Fidelity (or similar) account and purchase some equities and simply wait for the gains to come in perhaps several years down the road. Depending upon the date they make that fateful investment decision, they will either make some gains or lose a lot of money. And, many of them have paid ridiculous fees just to have the privilege of losing their money.
The stock market is a better place to trade, and not invest. Sure, the stock market MIGHT provide great gains, but that is IN FACT a long-term GAMBLE that depends upon the time span during which the money is invested. The POTENTIAL for large gains is the attraction, but it all-too-often never happens.
Losing money by gambling can be accomplished without waiting all those years... simply by going to Las Vegas.
The only genuine guaranteed way to make gains on a long-term basis is to invest in fixed securities.
TM
No disrespect of course, but your movie analogy is flawed.
In real life, it was more like the movie theater that was featuring the preferred movie (stock market) caught on fire, forcing the audience to rush to a safer and less desireable theater (treasuries). That's the REAL reason we saw a rush to treasuries.
TM
I know my IRA has not made it back to the peak in October 2007. It was getting close earlier this year. Mostly on the gains I made with Ford stock. I agree that buying stock and sitting on it can be costly. It has been for me.
Give me a happy medium somewhere between "don't touch" and "day trading". If you feel like you should sell a stock, sell it. If you think something is a good buy, buy it. If something has been good to you, keep it.
If you don't have any interest and/or expertise, let a professional do it for you.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
That's very smart and makes great sense... but unfortunately most Americans do not have the investment savvy that you, and others here, have. Even many brokers can't overcome the large declines that occur during some spans of time.
If the investors that are unlucky enough to be caught in a time span that undergoes a significant market decline, then they will lose money through no fault of their own, and even brokers can be challenged during such time spans.
The risk of long-term investing is much greater than people realize.
Shorter-term, hands-on investing is indeed smarter.
TM
Sometimes I think that the "experts" try to confuse the average investor by some of the terms they use. For example, they never say things like "Muni bonds went up nicely in value last week". Instead they say, "The yield on muni bonds plunged last week". Those two statement mean exactly the same thing...but saying the yields plunged instead of prices increased, makes it seem that something bad happened, if you don't know how the bond market works.
It's probably just a coincidence, but financial advisers make a lot more in fees in the equity market than they do in the bond market !
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
I also wonder if any politics played in S&P's move - how did they rate toxic mortgage backed items 5 years ago? How is S&P given such cred?
The re-election bid will only be thwarted by a viable and credible opponent.
Do you really think that the average consumer knows about or cares about the S & P downgrade? I very much doubt it. The average consumer will spend what is in his pocket, no questions asked.
I actually do see some good that has transpired the past week or so. Crude and Rbob have been plummeting. This will gradually be making its way to the pump. The average consumer will love this. Additionally, people are underestimating the fact that Japan is now making great strides after the disaster. We will start to see this in our economy a couple months down the road if not sooner.
Btw, what about this $2 trillion error the S & P admitted in making? If you count the $2 trillion+ with the debt ceiling deal plus the $2 trillion error, that equals at least $4 trillion to me. Isn't that what they wanted to see? Also, who are these S & P "geniuses" in the first place? What gives these dudes the power or the expertise to make these decisions? What other country in the world is better off than the U.S.? What am I missing here?
Terrific point. I know very little about bonds and I totally agree. They make it sound bad by saying "yields plunged". I know that I was getting confused.
You are absolutely correct about the gains in their value... which is opposite the latest rates... and I agree the media does a horrible job of reporting this properly.
So... with the downgrade to the US credit rating, what do you think will happen to interest rates on fixed securities? If they rise, then their values will reverse and DECLINE.
TM
There was a program on TV months ago about the trades being done by computers within a second. Doing huge numbers of those trades with small profits on each one gives huge amounts of profit.
I figured out decades ago that the big guys in the business made money. They didn't make their money from losing to each other; they made money from all the little people losing a bit here and a bit there against the powers of the big stock houses. And occasionally publicity would come out about various techniques used to "cheat" the little buyer out of some money here and there, such as by selling them stocks from the company's accounts but pricing as though it came out of the market, e.g.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
I do not think that interest rates will go up much at all, at least for the short term. Also there are other market forces at work, other than interest rates, that affect the bond market. Things like banks charging you interest to hold your money and 1% CD rates, etc., somewhat limit your choices. You just have to weigh everything.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
That is correct, and the tip of the iceberg.
TM
TM
By TagMan
(Written as political satire ONLY, and no disrespect intended. I hope you like it.)
The bartenders that tend the bar in what had at one time been known as the very best place on earth, have had themselves quite a problem with a particular drunken alcoholic. He wasn't by any means the first alcoholic to frequent the establishment, as there were others before him.
But this particular gentleman had an unusual capacity to drink, and drink, and drink.
He had run up quite a large bar tab, beyond any prior tab in history, and eventually the bartenders told him that perhaps he had enough to drink and it was time to pay down some of the tab. They pointed out that it was putting quite a strain on the business. But because the drunk was an alcoholic, he had absolutely no interest or desire in cutting back, and he became a bit hostile to the bartenders and told them to give him more drinks and put them on his tab.
He insisted that the hard workers and businessmen in the establishment should contribute some of their money and thereby provide some revenues to pay down the huge tab, which had gotten out of control. As a result, it wasn't long before a fight broke out in the bar, and the bartenders and the drunken alcoholic were having a brawl and they were insulting one another and making complete fools of themselves. The fight was so bad that the bar’s investors were getting jittery and threatened to pull their money and sell off their investments.
Some tea-drinkers suggested that excessive drinking was unhealthy, and that the drunken alcoholic be banned from ever getting another drink at all, and some tea-drinkers expressed no concern if the bar went completely out of business... and the bartenders gave serious and surprising consideration to the tea-drinkers... and that made the drunk absolutely furious, so he requested a little help from a couple of his drinking buddies, but finally he compromised enough and agreed to stop asking to take money from the hard workers and businessmen, but only for a little while, in exchange for more drinks in the future, with the additional provision that he also agreed to get therapy from a super therapist committee of twelve shrinks (aptly named to shrink the bar tab?), some of whom were also known alcoholics, and tea-drinkers.
Unfortunately, the fighting had been so bad and the agreement between the drunken alcoholic and the bartenders seemed so pathetic that the investors did indeed let their jitters get the best of them and many of them bailed out and sold their investments, causing a huge decline in valuation. And, to make matters worse, the bar's reputation had been seriously tarnished, and its rating was downgraded, making it more expensive for the bar, and everyone in it, to conduct business.
When the drunken alcoholic learned of this downgrade, he was attempting to get ready to go on another weekend getaway, and he became furious and immediately blamed the bartenders and everyone else. He made a special point that the plans to pay down his tab had been miscalculated, and that the bar's reputation should never have been downgraded, and that if he had been allowed in the first place to take money from the hard workers and businessmen as he wanted to, he would have been able to pay down the largest bar tab in history, and none of this would have ever happened.
The drunken alcoholic said it wasn't fair that the bar's reputation was smeared and insisted that he should be allowed to continue to drink as much as he wants... He then proclaimed to buy drinks for everyone that's entitled, and that there was no need for them to pay for their own drinks, because he would put it on the bar's tab. And with that, the drunken alcoholic asked them (in exchange for the free handouts) to support him in all his efforts to drink more than ever before and create an even bigger bar tab... bigger than even the previous record and of course, he continued on a regular basis to blame everyone else for everything that had gone wrong at the bar, and the bar's declining business.
It's been reported, and verified, that on several nights when the drunken alcoholic had been particularly out of his mind... he was overheard mumbling something about how those fat cats flying around in corporate jets killed his mother by denying her medical insurance coverage.
Poor misguided soul... if he had only realized that he had once been given the chance to make everyone happy... not by giving handouts at the expense of the hard workers and big businessmen... but by cutting back on that excessive drinking and by paying off that bar tab, and most importantly by making that special place the most compelling place on earth to conduct business, by rewarding business growth and by rewarding the creation of jobs. In other words, giving money to folks that don't have jobs doesn't create jobs, but instead if money was given to businesses as a reward for creating jobs... that would create jobs. And those workers would then pay their taxes and generate revenues, and they would spend money which stimulates and grows the entire economy... and everyone would be happy. But the drunk can't see this, even though almost the entire world has been desperately trying to point it out... with the exception of his drinking buddies, of course, because they love to drink too much and help run up that bar tab.
The drunken alcoholic always talks about "change"... but he can't see the errors of his ways and he won't "change". He, and therefore everyone else, is stuck in a worsening dilemma. Maybe the super committee of twelve shrinks will help... but it seems unlikely. Unfortunately, it seems the bar's reputation will be evaluated again in the very near future, and it may be even further downgraded in about 6 more months. If that happens, and if the drunken alcoholic hasn't changed his ways... what will become of the drunken alcoholic? Or the bartenders? Or the bar? Or the investors? Or the businessmen and the hard workers? Or the folks that need jobs?
... Or the kids that have a dream?
To be continued...
TM
C copyright August 6, 2011 by username TagMan, whose real-life identity is a matter of record with Edmunds, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission for use must be made by submitting a request through this website.
In all seriousness though, your "silly little story is quite clever.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
If the political motivations of S&P devalue the dollar, my diecast collection will be worth more in raw fiat, anyway.