Commodities

wrote an interesting post today on
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At least they’ve noticed there is a problem . . .
Over and over, the news shows on every station at every hour including cable news sources show “experts” projecting economic forecasts. Every time I hear them, I wonder why they are getting paid for being wrong much of the time.
Are they not using real numbers based in real-time or are they using only the variables that they favor or what? It is hard to understand.
I found this article on Reuters -
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4BM4Z320081223
It is called Factbox - consumer credit delinquencies - and I didn’t check the validity of its numbers nor its sources, however, it certainly indicates that there is an iceberg we are hitting as an economy.
If all the layoffs, firings, bankrupt business closings, and underemployment numbers were added together, it would show a truer picture of the reality we are facing.
Perhaps the “elite” of our country believed a credit based […]

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wrote an interesting post today on
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Crude oil rose, capping the biggest weekly gain since 1986, as the conflict in Gaza increased concern that Middle East supplies would be cut and Russia curbed natural- gas shipments to Ukraine.
Israeli warplanes conducted fresh attacks against Hamas on the seventh day of a bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip, raising the prospect of violence in the region, source of one-third of the world’s oil. Russia’s dispute with Ukraine over natural-gas prices deepened after no new talks were scheduled. Oil futures have traded in a range of more than $5 a barrel today.
“A lot of the volatility we are seeing is a result of the wild geopolitical news,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research, in Winchester, Massachusetts. “The news from Gaza and Ukraine scares some people and not others.”
Crude oil for February delivery rose $1.74, or 3.9 percent, to $46.34 a barrel at 2:52 p.m. on […]

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wrote an interesting post today on
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TRADING UPDATE
Well that was a heck of a jump out of the starting gate.  The portfolio is already 2.7% up on the year (2009) in one day, when I had to work a whole year last year to lose 5%.  That thanks to a big jump in oil and getting my year-end portfolio re-positioning mostly right.  For a day at least, anyway.  I’m also .3% ahead of the S&P500, but that’s solely at the pleasure of the Canadian dollar, which chose to rally a little and work in my favour instead of falling and supporting the benchmark.

REAP TRADES

#
Trade
Qty
Stock
Symbol

Price

Grp

207
Sold
34%
HBP Cr Oil Bull+ ETF
HOU
@
$13.96
 
1

207
Bought
110%
HBP SP500 Bear+ ETF
HSD
@
$28.27
 
1

REAP methodology detailed in the blogroll under “My Portfolio”
 
 

Qty % are amount by which shares counts are decreased/increased
 
 

Both my Horizons BetaPro crude oil bull+ (HOU) and gold shares bear+ (HGD) ETFs went through 1:5 reverse splits effective today.  That, and not a 500% two-day gain, […]

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wrote an interesting post today on
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We got home this morning from our trip to Bimini. What a great trip it was. We did a little fishing, a little sunning, and a lot of drinking. I found out that my son can handle his booze….Yale must teach their students well:)
Anyways, I came home and checked out the markets. I took a lot of money off the table in my accidental bonds and notes position. I left the grains alone, playing with some options to protect some great profits, and I let my gold/platinum spread alone. I’ll revisit that position next week and decide what to do about it. I need to do some serious number crunching this weekend, and also need to tweak my book, which I’ve sadly neglected for the past week or so. I’m so anal about this book, and I hope it turns out well. […]

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wrote an interesting post today on
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A BETTER YEAR THAN YOU WOULD THINK
Being down only 5% in a year where the S&P500 was down 36.6% is not that bad at all.  The reason I didn’t beat the S&P500 by 31.6%, is that the Canadian dollar was down 19.2% over the same period.  So in Canadian dollar terms, the S&P500 was down only 17.4%.   Another way of putting it is, instead of using REAP, had I invested in an S&P500 index fund at the beginning of January with a much stronger Canadian dollar at the time, I would have lost only 17.4% instead of 36.6% because of the strong rally in the US dollar.
SETTING THE TABLE FOR 2009
On the last trading day of 2008, I made some changes to position the portfolio closer to the following themes:

more commodity exposure in general,
eventual inflation,
shortage-based rises in commodity prices (especially grains and energy), and
higher overall portfolio internal volatility.

I like commodities […]

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wrote an interesting post today on
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And so ends one of the most brutal market years in history - for some markets the worst ever, others the 2nd or 3rd worst ever.  At the end of November, the portofolio was down 5.4% for 2008, and during December flirted with an 11% loss at the low point.  However, commodities began to firm up towards the end of the month, and the portfolio’s relatively high commodity weighting was enough for it to eke out a tiny .4% monthly gain as the market rallied in the final weeks.  In fact, the difference was essentially the large December distributions paid out by the various investment trusts and high-yielding ETFs - especially the  i-Shares Australia fund (EWA) which paid all of its annual distribution in a lump sum on Dec 31st, about 7% or so.  So the loss on the year amounted to “only” 5% after the final tally.   I’ll take it.
More significantly, […]

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wrote an interesting post today on
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SELL NIFTY
MARKET TO BE CORRECTED HEAVILY UPTO 2600
……….BSE TRADING RING

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wrote an interesting post today on
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Hopefully the markets fair better in 2009! Best of luck in the new year and as always, happy investing!
 
Cheers,

Sean M. Vrbica
The Young Raging Bull
 
 

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youngragingbull wrote an interesting post today on
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Other posts in this occasional series.
As you might imagine, I read (or skim) a lot of economics blogs. One of my favorites is Econbrowser, written by James Hamilton and Menzie Chinn. Whereas many blogs tell me good ideas that I didn’t think of but that theoretically I might have come up with (given infinite time and mental alertness), Econbrowser almost invariably teaches me something I absolutely couldn’t have known beforehand.
In the last week, both Hamilton and Chinn have written about the causes of the current economic crisis.
Menzie Chinn
For Chinn, the current situation was created by a “toxic mixture” of:

Monetary policy
Deregulation
Criminal activity and regulatory disarmament
Tax cuts and fiscal profligacy
Tax policy

He thinks that lax monetary policy was not particularly significant (or, more specifically, the policy was not lax given the information available at the time). He says that some examples of deregulation were more significant than others (repealing Glass-Steagall OK, the Commodity […]

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wrote an interesting post today on
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Ano histórico.
O ano foi de mudanças radicais do ambiente econômico e de aflições terminais. O PIB do Brasil foi 6% no terceiro trimestre e será negativo no último trimestre. A frase “o pior da crise passou” foi repetida várias vezes, por vários equivocados, e ela, a crise, agravou-se constantemente. Todas as frases do presidente Lula na linha marítima — da “marolinha” à “a crise não vai atravessar o Atlântico” — estavam erradas. Lula não errou sozinho. O mercado financeiro no começo de 2008 andava, ao ritmo de manada, apostando no “descolamento” dos emergentes. Não colou: houve uma reversão em todos os emergentes.
Se existe um dia marcante do ano é o dia 15 de setembro. Era segunda-feira e o fim de semana tinha sido de tensão no governo americano. Em Wall Street, na rua do mercado financeiro de Nova York, o secretário do Tesouro americano, Henry Paulson, e o presidente do […]

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