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I thought he buried gold coins in pvc pipe in the yard! LOL
Very interesting article that has me thinking I have been duped. Still not sure yet, but maybe I can go on a spending spree this weekend! LOL
You Are Being Tricked Into Saving Too Much for Retirement
by Paul B. Farrell
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Start living for today, stop wasting all those management fees
Yes, you're saving too much for retirement. But isn't that counterintuitive in today's uncertain world, where more is never enough? No, because there's some powerful new research to prove it.
Yeah, I know, you're going to insist on telling me why you really need a million bucks invested at 6% to generate $60,000 annual cash flow in retirement. But I already know why: Because that's what all those fancy online financial calculators tell you, right? Oh, wake up, a sixth grader could calculate that number without breaking a sweat.
And Charles Schwab has an even simpler version: In "You're Fifty -- Now What?" he offered this formula: "It's pretty easy to get a ballpark idea of how much you'll need. To get a rough estimate, you can use what I call my guideline of 230K, which says for every $1,000 you'll need each month, you should have at least $230,000 invested when you stop working."
Get it? You'd need five times $230,000 or $1.15 million to retire on $60,000 annually. And that's real bad news folks, because the average American has a net worth less than $50,000, exclusive of home equity.
Warning, you're being hypnotized: Wall Street insiders, bankers, brokers, advisers and their buddies want you to pile up assets. Why? Not for your own good, but because the more securities you own, the more money they make in fees! Get it?
This ingenious game caught fire in the mid-1990s when Wall Street began a historic revolution:
• First: business model. The 1995-96 SEC's Tully Commission articulated an industrywide strategic shift from cyclical commission income to a more stable fee-based business model. Shortly afterwards Goldman-Sachs released its famous report on financial industry mergers and consolidations. Tully was also Merrill's CEO. In 1998 I interviewed one of Merrill's top lieutenants who said the company's business plan called for a doubling of assets under management within five years.
• Second: ethics and image. Simultaneously, Wall Street was under pressure to clean up its act. Studies revealed "brokers" had the ethics of used-car-salesmen. So Wall Street's gave "brokers" new name tags, as "advisers" managing assets.
As a result, Main Street is now in a no-win situation. Jack Bogle's famous "Iron Law of the Markets" puts this assets-based monster in context with his new "Little Book of Common Sense Investing:" "Trying to beat the stock market is theoretically a zero-sum game (for every winner, there must be a loser), but after the substantial costs of investing are deducted, it becomes a loser's game."
Bogle has had a consistent solution to the "Iron Law" dilemma for three decades: "The simplest and most efficient investment strategy is to buy and hold all of the nation's publicly held businesses at very low cost. The classic index fund that owns this market portfolio is the only investment that guarantees you with your fair share of stock market returns." We've put this strategy into action with our lazy indexed portfolios.
Unfortunately, Wall Street understands the "Iron Law" better than Bogle! Wall Street knows it cannot charge big management fees off low-cost index funds. So Wall Street is relentlessly hypnotizing investors into believing that actively managed funds beat the indexes even though about 80% fail to do so, largely because their average expense ratios are 10 to 15 times the fees charged by index funds.
New research challenges online calculators
In other words, Wall Street and friends have a substantial unstated self-interest in encouraging you to invest more than you need for retirement. I've been making this argument for years and finally it's being documented in research by economists who also aren't buying into Wall Street's hype.
The leader of this counterintuitive challenge is Larry Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor and co-author of "The Coming Generational Storm," an analysis of dire solutions necessary to cover future unfunded Social Security and Medicare benefits. His co-author is financial columnist Scott Burns of the Dallas Morning News. Kotlikoff's research says investors should focus on income while working to figure out retirement needs.
Saving too much? You bet. A New York Times review of Kotlikoff's numbers "showed that Fidelity's online calculators typically set the target of assets needed to cover spending in retirement 36.4% too high. Vanguard's was 53.1% too high. A calculator offered by TIAA-CREF, one of the largest managers of retirement savings, was 78%" higher than the calculations generated by Kotlikoff's ESPlanner.
As expected, they were quite defensive about this challenge. The Times says: "The financial-planning industry prefers to characterize itself as cautious. William Ebsworth, chief investment officer of Fidelity Investments' Strategic Advisers division, which runs retirement programs, said, 'We take a very conservative approach,' preferring to err on the side of having money left over at death rather than risk running out before then."
While their reaction is understandable, it's a diversion: They fail to deal with their own conflict of interest and motives in overstating assets needed in retirement.
So let's repeat it again: You are unnecessarily investing too much of your hard-earned money into too many assets for retirement. As a result, you're sacrificing too much of the present, under the highly questionable and misleading assumptions about piling up excessive savings for an uncertain future.
In planning, forget assets, focus on income
Conversely, Burns tells me that "most people are actually better off than they think because they've never lived at the 70% to 85% of preretirement income living standard that conventional financial planning espouses. And the reason is simple: if you have a family, having children is a long-term suppressant on your adult standard of living."
The fallacy with Wall Street's logic is also simple: They focus on assets, the exact same strategy Goldman-Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Wall Street's insiders have been focusing on since the mid-1990s. Why? Because it's making billions. Between 1995 and 2005 this strategy has roughly tripled assets under management for Wall Street and mutual fund firms, according to the Bogle Research Institute, with annual revenues also tripling to over $350 billion by 2005, while returns to Main Street investors have actually declined in the past decade.
So please, forget assets. Here's another example to prove our point: Suppose you retire from government or corporate life, with a pension generating $60,000 annually, with no assets! Ergo, those silly asset-based calculators are misleading. I encourage you to go back and review our earlier, detailed example of the elements included in an income-based formula.
Focus on income: Pensions, Social Security, IRAs, and a new career, business or some part-time work. And remember, savvy families also quietly build wealth in home equity. Pay off the mortgage, live debt-free. Downsize. Maybe cut costs moving to a cheaper region. Go for a reverse mortgage. Be creative. Add up these pieces of income and you'll see how to reach whatever you need to live comfortably in retirement.
nelson: "UltraShort QQQ ProShares seek daily investment results that correspond to twice (200%)the inverse (opposite) of the daily performance of the NASDAQ-100 Index. The Fund employs leveraged investment techniques to achieve its investment objective, which may expose the Fund to potentially dramatic changes (losses) in the value of its portfolio holdings and imperfect correlation to the index underlying the Fund's benchmark. "
Len: ETF's are shortable. You could short the QID, although I would not.
DPDW: Anyone looked at Deep Down Inc. Seems like a good fit for this board. A small oil service company that is profitable. They just announced an acquistion and we are waiting to see if the target is profitable. Could have a multi bagger potential. The DPDW board will drive you nuts if you read it for more than a few posts but the story seems plausible.
currently .231 bid, .28 ask .. OTCBB with a decent amount of MM's.
echos, I am mostly cash and some fixed income. I hold a few stocks and a QID position. 5% in a treasury money market fund is ok for me at the moment. I can't expect to catch the top.
For our little OT group... I enjoy Dr. Elder's trading commentary. Sorry the charts are not in the post. Over my head on how to link them up here.
Dear Trader,
I usually write to you about once a month, but this time decided to write sooner than usual, in view of the tremendous activity in the stock market.
Those who participated in my webinars this year, came to our January Camp, or attended my talk at the Traders' Expo in February know that I have become extremely bearish on the stock market since the start of the year.
There has been a broad range of bearish signs, including this severe bearish divergence on the weekly chart of the Dow. You can see the great power of bulls at point A in October, followed by the breaking of their back when MACD-H fell below zero at point B. A great sign of weakness emerged at point C, when the Dow rallied to its lifetime high, while MACD-H, measuring the power of the bulls, managed only a little pipsqueak of a rally. When the decline did come, it was fast and furious. I believe the yellow dotted line on this chart indicates a reasonable target for the downmove.
With so many traders and investors bloodied and hurting, many are asking, whether this is the bottom. Is the bounce coming? Will I get a second chance to sell? Is now the time to start bargain-hunting?
To find answers to these questions, I turn to the New High - New Low Index, described in detail in Trading for a Living. I believe it is the best leading indicator of the stock market.
The chart above reflects the behavior of weekly NH-NL during the 2003-2007 bull market. One of its striking features is that every bottom of any importance saw NH-NL decline below -1,000 (minus one thousand). Please keep in mind that the - 1,000 level does not automatically give a buy signal - this indicator had spiked as low as -7,000 in the preceding bear market. It is simply a minimum requirement for any bottom, a place to look for good buying opportunities. Last Friday, the weekly NH-NL closed at +337. It has still quite a distance to fall before it might begin to signal a bottom.
Let us now turn to the daily charts and see how the daily NH-NL has behaved at recent bottoms. It turns out that every stock market bottom since the bull market began in 2003 was marked by a period of between one and three months during which the New Lows exceeded the New Highs. You can see how many New Lows there were in June, fewer in July, even fewer in August - and then the bull took off. So, where does this indicator stand now?
This chart, updated last Friday, shows that New Lows exceeded New Highs for only four days and by a very slim margin. This is not how serious bottoms are made!
By now you can see why I keep an eye on NH-NL every day, to help me decide whether to trade with the bulls or the bears. NH-NL is very easy to track by hand, since the raw data is published in all major newspapers. Amazingly, none of the major software vendors supply this data! Kerry Lovvorn, my co-manager of the Spike group, has spent a great deal of time and energy to develop a proprietary method of locating this data and transferring it into TradeStation. He sends out a NH-NL update to all members of our Spike and Spike Spectator groups (see www.elder.com/spike.html). Most days I don't even generate my own charts, but simply glance at Kerry’s emails.
To return to our question, is this the bottom? You can easily deduce the answer from what you have just read!
Is the bounce coming? Will I get a second chance to sell? We may well get what is called 'a dead cat bounce,' but the market is neither nice nor helpful to those who sit on losses. Generally, the first loss is the best loss, and the sooner one cuts his or her losses, the less they hurt.
KIK: I don't think his post is overdone in the least. The SEC should educate the public. How you might ask, maybe by teaching high school students some financial course work so they won't become the next generation of money morons. The pink sheets to their credit do warn people when going for a quote on many scam stocks that no information is available or that they seem to be promoted without any real info behind them.
In general most of the public is completely unaware of the scams going on. Back in my days of retail OTC action I can tell you for sure that RR's made a fine living ripping off "Rubes/grandma's, etc." That is why I gave it up!!!
There really is no way to know who is who on these anonymous boards. However anyone who recently became a poster is always suspect. Anyone who pumps, quick to deflect criticism, etc. ... Basically trusting anyone on these boards is a fools game. Due your own DD indep. of postings and limit your risk by keeping within dollar amounts that you can afford to lose.
WAG time: I am just guessing here but I see a big revelation coming down the road when the "Mortgage Giants" decide to write off all the bad loans that we don't know about so they can slim down and do as Bernanke wants. If that ever comes to pass, watch out!
Bernanke: Toughen Up on Mortgage Giants
Tuesday March 6, 6:10 pm ET
By Jeannine Aversa, AP Economics Writer
Bernanke Calls for Stronger Regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urged Congress on Tuesday to bolster regulation of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and suggested limiting their massive holdings to guard against any danger their debt poses to the overall economy.
Bernanke has previously supported efforts to pare the two mortgage companies' huge portfolios. This time, however, he was a bit more specific and recommended that their holdings might be linked to a "measurable public purpose, such as the promotion of affordable housing."
The Fed chief's suggestion was contained in remarks delivered via satellite to a bankers meeting in Hawaii.
His remarks come as worries about risky mortgages are making investors jittery. Those fears contributed to last week's worldwide stock meltdown, where the Dow Jones industrials suffered a gut-wrenching 416-point plunge. Wall Street on Tuesday staged a rebound, gaining more than 150 points.
Lenders to subprime borrowers -- people with blemished credit histories -- have been battered. Rising interest rates and weak home prices have made it increasingly difficult for these borrowers -- especially those with adjustable-rate mortgages -- to keep up with their mortgage payments. Delinquencies and foreclosures in the subprime mortgage market are spiking.
Against this backdrop, Bernanke said he wanted to be clear that by suggesting the change in Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio holdings, he was not advocating a change in the exposure of the mortgage giants' subprime loans.
Last week, Freddie Mac announced that it would no longer buy certain risky, subprime mortgages.
Fannie Mae is the No. 1 U.S. buyer of home mortgages; its rival, Freddie Mac, ranks as the second-largest buyer.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- also referred to as government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, -- were created by Congress to inject money into the mortgage market by buying home loans from banks and other lenders. They bundle the mortgages into securities for sale on Wall Street. Both companies have been scarred by accounting scandals.
On Capitol Hill, various efforts over the past several years to tighten the government's reins on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have ultimately languished. With Democrats in control of Congress, renewed efforts are expected to be forged.
"Legislation to strengthen the regulation and supervision of GSEs is highly desirable, both to ensure that these companies pose fewer risks to the financial system and to direct them toward activities that provide important social benefits," Bernanke told the banking gathering.
He said the Fed would like to see legislation passed this year.
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is proposing legislation that would give the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the discretion to limit or reduce the two mortgage companies' holdings.
Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, said he shares many of Bernanke's concerns. "We should pay close attention to the issues he has identified," Shelby said.
Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's combined portfolios from the end of 1990 until the end of 2003 have grown more than tenfold -- to $1.56 trillion, Bernanke said. Besides buying mortgage-backed securities, the mortgage giants purchase other types of assets for their own investment portfolios, Bernanke said.
Yet, less than 30 percent of their current portfolio holdings are oriented toward affordable housing, Bernanke said.
"A straightforward means of anchoring the GSE portfolios to a clear public mission would be to require Fannie and Freddie to focus their portfolios almost exclusively on holdings of mortgages or mortgage-backed securities that support affordable housing," he said.
Bernanke did not provide any fresh insights on the turmoil seen in worldwide financial markets over the past week in his speech or in a brief question-and-answer session afterward.
He also did not talk about the future course of interest rates in the United States. Many economists predict the Fed will hold rates steady when it meets later this month.
Federal Reserve: http://www.federalreserve.gov/
QID: "double the daily opposite return of the Nasdaq 100" - not the entire NASDAQ
echos: Any day he resigns would be a day for American celebration. Maybe he can book a room next door to Britney Spears for a long deserved rest.
However he is like a vampire and will hang in upside down in the closet. Hope you are right however!
Great article, I remember these guys very well:
What 2 crooks told me over lunch
Monday March 5, 12:01 am ET
By Herb Greenberg
Commentary: "You cannot accept information at face value"
This column first appeared in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend.
SAN DIEGO (MarketWatch) -- My lunch with two crooks: "Hi Sammy, it's great to see you." Barry Minkow gave Sam E. Antar a hug as we walked to our table at a fish restaurant overlooking San Diego Bay. It was a Friday, and Antar made the trek to San Diego from Los Angeles, where he was visiting his son; a few days earlier, this convicted felon had lectured students and faculty at the Stanford Law School on how not to get taken by a crook like him.
Antar was chief financial officer of Crazy Eddie, a New York electronics retailer that in the 1970s and 1980s claimed "our prices are inSANE" as it bilked investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. He stayed out of jail by turning on several others, including his cousin, Eddie Antar, who was Crazy Eddie's co-founder. Minkow, on the other hand, spent seven years behind bars after stealing more than $20 million from investors in the 1980s as founder and chief executive of ZZZZ Best, a once-hot rug-cleaning company whose books could've used a good scrubbing.
"He's an orthodox Jew and I'm a Jew who is a pastor," cracks Minkow, who like Antar now spends time lecturing and working with cops to bust white-collar financial frauds. Minkow has reverence for Antar, who looks like Carla's husband from the sitcom "Cheers" and who claims to suffer from a bipolar disorder and serious insomnia. (I can vouch for the latter because his e-mails and postings on blogs come at all hours, mostly in the middle of the night.) "Criminals don't sleep," he explains.
A former CPA, Antar makes no excuses for his criminal past, referring to himself in e-mails, casual discussion and his Web site -- whitecollarfraud.com1 -- as a "low life" and "convicted felon." Even the normally loquacious Minkow appears to enjoy leaving the talking to Antar, who takes no money for his speeches. "I don't want to be held up on the pedestal of redemption," he says. "I would rather people learn from my vile, ugly and vicious crimes. It is most important that they understand the ugly nature of criminality. My life is a mistake of history."
A mistake, maybe, but one other people can learn from. "Do not trust verify," was his mantra as the meal began.
Verify what? "Everything."
Even whether Antar and Minkow aren't still scamming?
"Everything."
And so it went, with Antar continuing with e-mails over several weeks.
"Watch how management handles bad quarters, earnings disappointments, criticism, skepticism and cynicism," he says. "Do they start by saying, 'We take full responsibility and make no excuses' only to follow by carefully worded innuendos, excuses and deflection? Do they question the integrity of those who ask questions?"
He continues: "Just because a CEO takes a $1 salary doesn't make that person immune to criminality. Just because I travel the country and teach the government, colleges and universities, and professional groups about white-collar crime and never collect a fee and pay out of my own pocket all travel costs, doesn't mean I am not a criminal today. Remember that many crimes are committed without economic gain for reasons of ego, status and sheer arrogance."
Antar says investors should do a better job "studying" financial reports, especially the footnotes and "risk factor" sections. "Notice that I used the word 'study' and not 'read' since all information is not meant to be read like a novel, but meant to be analyzed like a project."
He adds: "Criminals are scared of skeptics and cynics," he says. "We are petrified when you verify our representations."
Did he ever have remorse? "Never ... We simply did not care about any one of our victims. We simply committed crime because we could.
"As criminals we built false walls of integrity around us," he adds. "We walked old ladies across the street. We built wings to hospitals. We gave huge amounts of money to charity. We wanted you to trust us.
"Simply said ... if you want to be an investor, you cannot accept information at face value. 'Unexamined acceptance' is the greatest cause of investor losses."
As for Minkow? He defers to Antar.
"He's the best," he says.
Lunch wasn't bad, either.
"What are regular Ameritrade people getting?" A headache!
Seriously 5.10% @ Vanguard and 4.92% @ Schwab Value Advantage Fund, also Fidelity is high 4's as well. I am down to about $2K in positions at Ameritrade and just transferred the last of my cash from them to Schwab. Since Streetsmart Pro is not web based, I never see the slowdowns that Ameritrade regular users seem to have.
Someone was interested in buying today. In a bad market that could be a sign of good things to come.
NRLS: Anyone familar with this stock? Looks strong in a bad market. Checking on the story, not sure what they have beyond $37 million in negative retained earnings.
OTC, you come across in your posts as a bitter guy. hopefully that is not the case and you really love life. start looking at the positive stuff because you can't change the real bs that is going on. and stop sniffing all those texas cow farts. obviously you and GWB have had to much methane!
linuspop: For the record I am 100% veggie. I just went to a wedding and the server looked at me and asked "are you the veg"? LOL I had to eat six raviolis while everyone else sucked down a filet mignon and shrimp.
As for your lifestyle that is commendable, but I assume if you wrote a book or did a film, not many would read or see it. Visibility is the key. The more they trash Gore, the greater his power to influence becomes. I wish him well in his quest to educate the world. However so much of the world is trying to catch up with our over the top way that they will not be paying attention to conservation for a long time.
Some would say that your use of a computer is wasteful. Why not just spend your life dealing with your neighbors and not a bunch of electronic friends. You could go nuts trying to live in a bubble. I sure don't know where to draw the line. However why not pick on Bill Gates for his estate and laud Warren Buffett for his meager surroundings.
If everyone was like "Henry David Thoreau" then you would not need an "Emerson/Gore". Like it or not leaders need to have some flash to get the message out.
I am no Gore supporter, but what would you have him do? Go live in a cardboard box on the street. You criticize his energy usage but how much energy do you waste on a given day. Could you or I downsize? Besides Lentinman who lives in an icebox, how much do the rest of us waste?
Did Gore just go out and buy this grand sized house? I could cut the size of my house by 75% and still be ok, of course the kids would drive me to kill myself... but that is the price I would pay.
Most people in the USA waste tons of energy, food, water, etc. The Gore film is getting a generation of people thinking about the problem. These are people who did not pay attention before. Maybe he is a modern "Rachel Carson".
Every time I hear his name I think how much better off we might be if he had won in 2000.
lentinman: Gold/Silver: If disaster strikes, good luck with the gold/silver method of buying your food. I suspect that those with the handguns/rifles will be eating before you get your chance to barter with the metals. Copper & Lead will rule.
Although I don't own any bullet firing weapons, if I did I would keep half of them in my house and bury the other half in the backyard.
The barter system would rely on an orderly non hysterical public... good luck on that!
MM's are like the rest of the population: Greedy... despite any deals of collusion amongst themselves, they will backdoor the deal and look to profit as, when and if possible. The more MM's in a stock the better for the sake of the average investor as it becomes increasingly harder for the manipulator to control all of them.
been there, seen it...
a good mm plays the market from the short side but has a call on so many sources of retail inventory that he/she can can pull stock when needed. most OTCBB mm's realize that what goes up usually comes down. notice how they will fill 5,000 share buys on the way up when they only have to do 500 shares. On the way down they will buy 500 maybe or duck.
quack
U.S. January New-Home Sales Plunge 16.6%, Most Since 1994
By Courtney Schlisserman
Feb. 28 (Bloomberg) -- New-home sales in the U.S. fell last month by the most in 13 years, pointing to more weakness in the real-estate market that limited economic growth last year.
The 16.6 percent decrease to an annual rate of 937,000 in January, less than any economist had forecast in a Bloomberg News survey, Commerce Department figures showed today. The pace of sales was the slowest since February 2003. A measure of housing inventory rose to the highest in three months.
The figures show home construction will remain a drag on the economy even with lower borrowing costs and more incentives from builders. More cuts in home prices may be needed to stir buyer interest as builders keep reporting increased rates of canceled orders.
``It's consistent with more housing-related weakness through the first half of this year at least,'' Jim O'Sullivan, senior economist at UBS Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut, said before the report. ``Inventories of vacant homes have surged so much that construction is going to be weak for a while.''
The January decrease in sales was the largest since a 23.8 percent plunge in January 1994. Economists forecast new home sales would fall 3.6 percent to a 1.08 million rate, from a previously reported 1.12 million for December, according to the median of 69 projections in a Bloomberg News survey. Estimates ranged from a 1 million pace to 1.16 million.
Earlier today, the government reported the economy expanded at a 2.2 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, revised down from the 3.5 percent pace estimated in its advance report last month. Home construction subtracted 1.16 percentage points from gross domestic product.
Median Home Price
The median price of a new home fell 2.1 percent in January, to $239,800 from $244,900 a year earlier. A report yesterday from S&P/Case-Shiller showed U.S. home prices rose 0.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2006 compared with the same three months a year earlier, the smallest gain since the second quarter of 1993.
Today's report showed the number of homes for sale at the end of the month fell to 536,000, from 537,000 in December. That left the supply of homes at the current sales rate at 6.8 months' worth, the highest since October, compared with 5.7 months.
While builders are offering more incentives to unload homes already built, the actual number of homes in inventory may be more than the government reports because it doesn't include cancellations, economists said.
``The inventory situation is undoubtedly worse than reported,'' Stephen Stanley, chief economist at RBS Greenwich Capital in Greenwich, Connecticut, said in a note to clients. ``Builders will probably have to continue to work off bloated stocks of finished homes for most of 2007.''
Contract Cancellations
Hovnanian Enterprises Inc., based in Red Bank, New Jersey, said yesterday that home contracts fell 23 percent and its order cancellation rate was 36 percent during its fiscal first quarter.
Residential construction fell at an annual rate of 19.1 percent in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department said earlier today. Homebuilding probably will subtract from growth this year as builders continue to limit construction this year to avoid another swell in inventories, economists said.
Compared with a year earlier, new-home sales for January were 20 percent, the government said.
Sales fell in all regions in January, led by a 37.4 percent slump in the West to an annual rate of 166,000, the lowest since March 1995. Purchases declined 18.7 percent in the Northeast to an annual rate of 61,000; fell 9.7 percent in the South to 529,000; and dropped 8.1 percent in the Midwest to 181,000.
The National Association of Realtors reported yesterday sales of existing homes, which make up 85 percent of the housing market, rose 3 percent last month, more than economists forecast. Compared with a year earlier, sales were down 4.3 percent.
Timely Barometer
New-home sales are considered a more timely barometer of the housing market because they are recorded when a contract is signed. Most sales of existing homes are counted when a contract closes, usually a month or two later.
Warmer-than-average weather in December helped to boost sales that month and may have had a similar effect on some regions of the country the beginning of last month, economists said. Builders are indicating it's too soon to say the housing market is completely out of the woods.
``There are too many soft markets at this stage of the selling season to call a general upturn in the new home market,'' Toll Brothers Inc. Chief Executive Officer Robert Toll said in a statement on Feb. 22. ``Demand varies greatly from week to week in individual markets.''
Toll Brothers
Toll, the largest U.S. luxury-home builder, said profit fell 67 percent in the first quarter because of a drop in the value of the company's land. It also reduced its forecast for the number of homes it will sell this year.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and other central bank policy makers have forecast that the worst of the housing market slump is over, even as builders express caution.
``The U.S. economy seems likely to expand at a moderate pace this year and next, with growth strengthening somewhat as the drag from housing diminishes,'' Bernanke told lawmakers Feb. 14 during his semi-annual monetary policy testimony.
To contact the reporter on this story: Courtney Schlisserman in Washington at cschlisserma@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: February 28, 2007 10:00 EST
http://www.nyse.com/press/circuit_breakers.html
in case you are wondering
msgi: One cent! If the gods allow the trade, you owe me a penny.
msgi: what would you bid for one of my trades? LOL
MSGI, if you were unlucky they would have done it on your head.
LOL
Len: Do you have a mental brlock on CFSG? LOL .. seems to be MIA.
Stock swindlers prefer pinksheet companies (not OTCBB). They like high share o/s and no continuing reporting requirements. The cost to buy a pinksheet shell is minimal compared with a OTCBB shell. Scams tend to promote heavily from day one.
Don't see any of that from DPDW.
What most new public company executives don't realize from the start is that running a public company requires skills and knowledge that they don't have yet. They need to interface with a new set of Accountants, Lawyers, IR & PR types, as well as shareholders. It can sink your company quickly if you don't pay attention. Some companies clam up from the start for fear of saying something that will come back at them.
Also keep in mind that putting out PR's does not instantly equate to a high stock price. The real grease to the wheel in these kinds of companies is retail brokers selling the shares to customers. Once you have established a real following for the company and it is widely held, then it can move with real news and better financial results.
If you can't deal with the above, you should sell and move on. Otherwise get on the phone/email and talk with the company executives and mention some of what I said or come up some other critical points that you can offer them. It is afterall a company that you own part of.
OT: Roth Conference: Listened to the presentation for CFSG and was bored to tears. Good information but very dry. Was going to listen to several others but could not take the mental abuse. Why do they bother if all they can do is read the PowerPoint slides to you.
In the old days we would go to Harrys or some other watering hole and listen to the dog & pony show, at least we got free drinks and mini hot dogs! Bring back the old days!
If it were not so sad, it would be funny. The administration says it is good that the British are pulling troops as we are sending in fresh bodies. They are nuts!
White House says British plan good news
2/21/2007, 11:36 a.m. ET
By JENNIFER LOVEN
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration said Wednesday that Britain's decision to withdraw 1,600 troops from Iraq is a positive sign that fits with the overall strategy for stabilizing the country.
Statements from the White House press secretary, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — all traveling — attempted to put a good face on the decision announced in London by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
"Increasingly our role will be support and training, and our numbers will be able to reduce accordingly," said Blair, who discussed the move with President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Britain intends to drop its force in Iraq — mostly in the southern part of the country — below 5,000 by late summer, and keep British troops in Iraq until at least 2008 for missions to secure the Iraq-Iran border and maintain supply routes in central Iraq, Blair told the House of Commons.
"The British have done what is really the plan for the country as a whole, which is to transfer security responsibility to the Iraqis as the situation permits," Rice said at a press conference in Berlin, where she was in meetings on the Mideast peace process. "The coalition remains intact and, in fact, the British still have thousands of troops deployed in Iraq."
Cheney called it good news.
"I look at it and see it is actually an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well," Cheney told ABC News while in Tokyo.
"In fact, I talked to a friend just the other day who had driven to Baghdad down to Basra, seven hours, found the situation dramatically improved from a year or so ago, sort of validated the British view they had made progress in southern Iraq and that they can therefore reduce their force levels," he added.
Cheney also harshly criticized the approach on Iraq by Democratic leaders in Congress. In the House, Democrats led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who chairs a subcommittee that oversees defense spending, have said they will attempt to place restrictions on Bush's request for an additional $93 billion for the Iraq war to make it difficult or impossible to deploy all 21,500 extra troops to the war.
"I think if we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we will do is validate the al-Qaida strategy," the vice president said in the interview.
Murtha has described a series of provisions, such as requiring the Pentagon to meet certain standards for training and equipping the troops and for making sure they have enough time at home between deployments. Democrats say the provisions would protect the troops, but Republicans argue the effect would be to deny troops what they need to do their job.
Presidential spokesman Tony Snow, on a trip with Bush to Tennessee, said Britain's decision was not made on a timeline of the sort the president has rejected for American troops. "What you had is progress first, and then the removal," Snow said.
"The president's made clear all along, we want to move as rapidly as we can to build capability on the part of the Iraqis so they can in fact assume, first, primary responsibility and then eventually sole responsibility," he said.
And Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said there was no thought that the British was abandoning the United States when it is struggling to send thousands more troops into Iraq. The "British have been steadfast allies in Iraq and they will continue to be," he said.
Interesting stuff, although not always true:
For example: "The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit."
Not all parties are equal in a free market. Some buyers or sellers are more aware/educated then others. One side may benefit, the other side may get screwed. Take a look at our taxation system, designed that the educated can take full advantage of the Tax code while the masses get screwed.
"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem."
Worse!
"Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property."
In theory this makes sense, in practice it is similar to my first comment. Many instances are around that show that people who lack sufficent "money skills" can't handle spending money. They often do better when advised by others. Look at the popularity of shows like "suze orman" or "bob brinker".. Go to Best Buy this weekend and watch the Flat screen tv's fly off the shelves charged to the credit cards by those who are carefully handling their own resources.
Here is something Uncle Miltie did not say: Academics are great spouting quotable theories, however they don't get out enough to see the real world. --- Uncle Death
otc: You are right, none of them own smoke machines. LOL
Watch Derek Trucks play electric guitar, slide or lead without a pick. Rock, blues, jazz, no frills, no lights, no smoke, no mirrors, no makeup. Awesome.
We will not agree on music!
Taco Sauce on ice cream. Never tried it, however Tabasco sauce on vanilla ice cream is excellent. Don't knock it.
As for guitar greats, not many have hidden behind the "heavy metal" genre. I am not the loathing metal hater that Len is but most players who do metal suck.
Try some Derek Trucks/Warren Haynes of the new Allman Brothers. Or Buddy Whitington of John Mayall. The late great Tommy Bolin of Deep Purple and several solo efforts. Blue Oyster Cult is as close to metal as I will venture.
Lost a small part of my youthful hearing to a lousy opening act of Mahogony Rush. It was so friggin loud and we were stuck right in front of a speaker that I can't even remember who the main act was.
"If we cannot protect the nation's supply of peanut butter, one must ask how prepared we are for a terrorist attack on our nation's food supply," Michigan Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak said on Friday.
Food for thought!
CFSG: China Fire Safety will be presenting at ROTH Conf next week. It will be the virginal appearance for them. The presentation is available with an 8K just filed. Looks good!
http://xml.10kwizard.com/filing_raw.php?repo=tenk&ipage=4685837
Looks like the insider sales may be done today. He had only 25K shares left as of 2/14.
echos: I have been reading so much recently that I stopped buying books. The local library which I support via TAXES (LOL - I am not against all taxes) has a great selection of books. I have six on my desk now and I feel a bit overwhelmed. Not sure if all library systems have the ability to order books from anywhere, but if it is in the computer system they will ship it to the local library for pick up.
The last serious book I read was Paul O'Neill's (treasury secretary) tear down of GWB. It was a good book but obviously right on the money!
I found out the other day that anyone with a card can take out 100 books at a time. I was blown away by that number. It seems that many people in the Portland OR area homeschool and 100 books is what they deem appropriate to satisfy them. I have seen these people come back to the library with handtrucks and milk crates filled with books. Not sure that these people are doing more than looking at the jacket covers as they don't seem all that bright!
Anyway, I am squeezing my tax dollars on this!!!
How about some fun for a change: One of my recent favorite authors, Brain Haig (yes, Alexander Haig) is a great read. Just started his latest book, Man in the Middle. It deals with Iraq, fictional of course. Just started it and as usual with his writing style I am sucked into the action.
Check it out, and all of his books.
Also if you are a fan of older seedy style of mystery try Andrew Vachss "Burke" series. Enough with the Ayn Rand. LOL
Interesting article
http://www.schwabinsights.com/2007_02/strategy.html
10Q out. Not as bad as I expected.
noted the following from a quick read:
A sub-contract from Hyundai (the “Subcontract”) to the Company to provide, commencing during the first calendar quarter of 2007, at least twenty five million dollars ($25,000,000) of purchase orders for security worthy assets (including video surveillance systems) on terms beneficial to both parties on or prior to June 30, 2008. In February 2007, the Company received under the Subcontract a purchase order for surveillance products in the approximate amount of $6.0 million. The Company is in the process of clarifying the details of the purchase order.