Charting Stocks

The Morgan Stanley Smith Barney deal is now official.  The new wealth management firm officially launched this week and has more than 20,000 financial advisors with $1.7 trillion in client assets. The firm has been formed through a joint venture between Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. Morgan paid $2.7 billion for a 51% stake in the [...]

A recent IRS ruling will cause the dividend on REIT’s to disappear this year while costing the investor in taxes.
The December ruling allows REIT’s to skip on the longstanding requirement to pay 90% of pretax income to shareholders in cash. The companies will be allowed to keep the money instead of paying investors.
REIT’s can now [...]

One of the ways market technicians try to predict sector out performance is by conducting a relative strength analysis. In a bear market the price charts of most sectors and stocks are moving down with the market. Some sectors are moving down more than the market, and so they are relatively weaker, and some are [...]

Credit default swaps on treasuries hit another record. It now costs 66 basis points (0.66%) to buy protection against a US Government default on its treasury bonds. The cost has risen over 100 times the  January 2007 level of .06 basis points (0.006%) .
Credit default swaps (CDS) are a kind of insurance contract that can [...]

Larry Summers’ company, D.E. Shaw, announced this week that it has frozen client withdrawals.
Summers, who was tapped to lead President Obama’s White House National Economic Council, served as a managing director to the hedge fund up until the announcement of his cabinet appointment.
D.E. Shaw Co, is a New York based hedge fund with a [...]

“This is a man (Ben Bernanke) who knows nothing about markets..Who knows nothing about economics”

Today’s treasury auction outlined the panic that still dominates the financial markets. $36 Billion in T-Bills were auctioned off today which gave a 0% yield. Why would anyone be willing to make an investment in which they are guaranteed to make nothing? The one word answer is “Fear.”

Because treasury bills are direct obligations of the [...]

Harvard and Yale endowments are known for their stellar long term performance, though even the “smartest guys in the room” are not immune to this collapse.
Harvard endowment recently reported a 22% drop in the funds value from a year ago. The 22% drop does not include the drop in assets which are managed by external [...]

The heavily indebted Spanish construction group Sacyr Vallehermoso announced the sale of the highway operator Itinere Infraestructuras to Citigroup for $10 Billion (7.88 Billion Euro’s).

Citigroup is buying a toll road (Highway) in Spain.
You can’t make this stuff up!
Citigroup? The bank that was on the verge of failing last week. The bank that was on [...]

As of 01/02/2008 the the year price target on the S&P 500 set by the Chief Investment Strategists at the major investment banks are as follows:
Strategist Year End Price Target
Citigroup                                   1675
HSBC                                          1700
Credit Suisse                              1650
Bank of America                         1625
UBS                                             1700
Morgan Stanley                           1525
Bear Stearns                                1700
Goldman Sachs                           1675
JP Morgan                                    1590
Lehman Brothers                         1630
Wachovia                                     1590
Merrill Lynch                                1525
Average 1632
Average [...]