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Then they jam the "semi's"
yet intc sure looks like its carrying a heavy load here.
onishka's reading of the dax was off today. so who knows about his nasdaq forecast. although, the dollar is up. so if we rally with a rising dollar, that'll be a first for quite a while. although perhaps that's just because the dollar hasn't rallied for so long
here's onieshka translated via google into something resembling english. (resembling like the title a few weeks ago: "sour pickle time for the nasdaq.")
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wallstreet-online.de%2Fws%2Fnews%2Fnews%2Fm...
> I just may see 1479.
hmm. so i would think that you'd expect that, right, with something like gdp numbers in the morning ... do nq's typically speculate on a direction following econ numbers? i would have thought they tend to flat going in ...
Number of Mass Layoffs Rose Sharply in January
2,400 Employers Let Go 50 or More
By Kirstin Downey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 26, 2004; Page E02
More than 2,400 employers across the country reported laying off 50 or more workers in January, the third-highest number of so-called mass layoffs since the government became tracking them a decade ago.
Only in December 2000 and December 2002 were the number of large layoffs higher. A total of 239,454 workers lost their jobs in the January layoffs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday, based on unemployment insurance claims filed with state employment agencies. Among them were 17,544 temporary workers.
The total jobs lost in January was the most since November 2002, when 240,171 workers were let go in groups of 50 or more. Manufacturing workers, particularly in transportation, food processing and retail jobs, were hardest hit. The large layoffs also included 10,876 government workers, most at the state and local levels.
January often brings pink slips for workers because many employers staff up for the holidays and lay people off after Christmas. It's also the end of the fiscal year for many employers, making Dec. 31 a convenient last day for terminated workers.
The report, which helps states direct retraining funds to troubled industries, comes as continued job losses have sparked debate in the presidential campaign. President Bush's Democratic opponents cite the administration's poor job-growth performance as a reason he should be unseated. Administration officials counter that the positive stock market performance, the uptick in manufacturing orders and improved consumer confidence should soon translate into employment growth.
The administration tried in late 2002 to cease publication of the mass layoff report, citing its cost. But Congress restored funding after state officials complained.
California, the most populous state, had the most mass layoffs, 576, according to the BLS data. This was followed by 194 in New York, 171 in Michigan and 167 in Pennsylvania. In Virginia, 24 employers laid off 50 or more workers, affecting 3,061 jobs. In Maryland, 19 employers did so, with 2,009 jobs lost. No mass layoffs occurred in the District.
"California has continued to lose jobs in recent months," including food-processing, film production and education jobs lost to budget cuts, said Howard Roth, chief economist for the California Department of Finance. "Our labor market is not showing any signs of improving."
"Amazon's 10-K SEC filing discloses that the e-tailer has been sued for infringing on Soverain Software patents for Network Sales Systems (5,715,314 & 5,909,492) and Internet Server Access Control and Monitoring Systems (5,708,780), aka the Open Market patents, aka the Divine cashectomy patents, which Soverain obtained in the wake of Divine's bankruptcy sale."
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/27/0154212&mode=nested
"5 months when given intravenously"
at $4400/mo
"What the heck is going on in California! I thought things were so bad in California the government was going broke."
nah, we're gonna pay it all off with property taxes, once they reassess.
c'mon over! its a party!
jeez. gas prices up 0.03 since yesterday.
whoa. new highs on investors intelligence. they're getting even more bullish!
2/25 bullish 60.2%, bearish 17.4%
http://www.schaeffersresearch.com/streetools/inv_intel.aspx
more greenspan gems:
"A large portion of our economy is becoming conceptual rather than physical".
Looks like this should impact SYMC (Symantec)
Microsoft Beta Includes Built-in Virus Scanner
Posted by michael on 02-24-04 14:36
from the goodbye-norton-and-mcafee dept.
Ethereal writes "InternetNews.com reports that Microsoft has begun beta-testing a built-in virus scanner for its Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) that will be included in the final product in mid-2004. The tool is among the operating system enhancements the Redmond, Wash., company is developing as part of its Security Center initiative to rebuff viruses, worms, trojans and crackers. Microsoft will also provide free online training to help developers make the most of SP2's security features, Chairman Bill Gates said at today's RSA Security conference. It's the first time the company has offered training with a Windows service pack release."
http://slashdot.org
MS May Be Forced To Sell Stripped-Down OS In EU
An anonymous reader submits "According to this article at Infoworld, Microsoft may be forced to sell a stripped-down version of Windows in the EU as a result of antitrust rulings, unless a settlement is reached during the next month to six weeks." (See this post from last week for more background on the EU's antitrust proceedings.)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/25/0238210&mode=nested
on a weekly chart, the hui looks like a bull flag to me. although it looks less clear on xau ...
The Passion getting great reviews I plan on being at the first show tomorrow.
well, ebert gave 'the cell' 4 stars ... general rating among all critics seems to be running at 55% which currently puts it in the 'rotten' category at 'rotten tomatoes'.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ThePassionoftheChrist-1129941/
> If $2 summer gas heads towards $3 watch Consumer Confidence
well, up 10 cents from this weekend already. premium here in cali is now at 2.33 ..
KLIC looking severely damaged here ...
lee, u make it look so easy
LOL
i can't wait to see what the new classification scheme, that caused the ppi delay, looks like.
It's good to know that we can count on some buying from you if you do no more than turn neutral......
This bull has a long way to go in the years ahead.
heh. well you can count on me buying to cover and then buying to reestablish my position. although i'm no way as short as i was long in the past. actually, virtually all of my short positions are tech, or qqq ...
i think i'd be a big buyer at hui 185 ... if it gets there. at least i can do that with a bit more confidence than i can buy intel at its "bottom".
So there'll be some pressure on the $ Gold price for a while as well. To $392 support ? To $385 support? To $372 ? Until mid- March or April? Could be. US Gold shares can come off quite intensely.
this would be nice. what would be really nice would be to see gold stop moving in lockstep with the euro and hold steady or rise ... i'd get bullish then. right now, though, i have some shorts in miners. (blush. i'm sorry.)
by the way, i'd like to thank whoever it was on friday who gave the heads-up on beas, not usually on my watch list. the brought it right up to the descending upper resistance line at 14 ... pretty relentlessly too ...
fwiw i'm short glg @ 16
fascinating ...
------
12:21am 02/23/04
New vehicle sales in Japan seen flat in '04 By Anne Stanley
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW)
[...]
Merrill Lynch
Merrill Lynch, the world's largest securities firms by capital, told investors to increase holdings in Japanese equities, saying higher capital spending was helping boost the economy and that companies were making efforts to improve shareholder returns.
The global strategy team at Merrill, the world's largest securities firm by capital, on Friday raised its recommendation on Japanese stocks to 'overweight' from 'neutral,' meaning that they should hold more Japanese equities than are in their benchmarks, Masatoshi Kikuchi, a strategist at Merrill's brokerage unit in Japan, said in a note to clients dated today.
------
Foreign brokers place net sell Japan stock orders
2/22/2004 6:37:26 PM
TOKYO, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Orders for Japanese stocks placed through 12 foreign securities houses before the start of trading on Monday showed an intention to sell a net 6.0 million shares, market sources said.
There were sell orders for 27.1 million shares and buy orders for 21.1 million, the sources said.
drudge on msft
the full story isn't up yet, but here's what it involves:
---------------
Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, won praise in January when he trumpeted a company agreement to give $1 billion in software and cash to the United Nations as part of a job-training program for the developing world.
But Microsoft did not seek any attention for a much smaller contribution earlier that paid some travel expenses for a UN business-standards group. That payment, critics say, had a more opportunistic motive than the donation.
A number of software industry executives and technologists contend that Microsoft has been vigorously moving behind the scenes to undercut support for a set of standards for business-to-business electronic transactions that were jointly developed by the United Nations and an industry-backed group.
Microsoft and senior UN officials reply that the accusation is false, saying that the company's contributions were relatively modest, complied with UN guidelines and did not unduly influence decision-making within the body.
Microsoft and International Business Machines have been attempting to gain backing for a competing approach to writing Internet software, which the two companies argue would be a better, more general solution for business-to-business computer communications than the original UN-developed standard, known as ebXML. The previously hidden dispute may seem arcane, but it revolves around computing standards that are likely to help determine control over a new generation of software designed to automate buying and selling through networks of computer connections. Many industry executives say they believe the new software, which falls under a category known in the industry as Web services, will supplant computer operating systems as the linchpin of the industry.
[...]
http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=130732
jim sinclair:
"If the US bond market falls, the US equity market will be tested. You cannot remove a $72 billion dollar January 04 buyer from the bond market without removing the bull from both the bond and equity markets.
You remove the bull from the US equity market and President Bush would lose the upcoming presidential election to Mickey Mouse if the fury little rodent was the opposing Democratic candidate.
So Friday's yen market is a total disaster for the Republican presidential candidate. If the yen moves higher in US dollar terms, then there will be no need for Bank of Japan intervention and therefore no US dollar funds flowing to the New York Fed to be invested in US Treasury instruments.
An appreciation of the yen is the worst possible scenario for the bond market bulls. There is no question whatsoever concerning what has bulled both the US bond and equity markets. Kudlow and Cramer may be gleeful over the rise in the US dollar on Friday but it is the one singular item that will kill off the equity and bond bull markets deader than a door nail within fifteen trading days from the time the yen first rises.
The powers behind the throne of President Bush are not stupid. They might take a few days to wake up but wake up they will. This dollar rally and the yen over 109 is temporary or the Bush Administration is even more temporary. Just like his dad, President Bush might be the successful warrior but he will be as unemployed as his dad was after Kuwait or Churchill after World War II beginning December 1st of 2004.
That being said, Friday's dollar rally is temporary because President Bush intends to be elected or go down in flames, having tried every possible means both traditional and non-traditional including the military option. After November, the bill will be so high as to be beyond the means of anyone or anything to pay.
I do not see any chance of the dollar rally surviving the ides of March - if that. We are simply too close to November 04 to endanger the gains for the incumbent."
Rumor has it IBM Business Consulting Services employees were just informed that the division missed its pre-tax income by 30%+, so 3,600 senior consultants and associate partners will not receive their expected bonus.
When: 2/19/2004
Company: IBM
Severity: 40
Points: 131
http://www.fuckedcompany.com
a bit of comedy from the gov ... npr was broadcasting this on friday:
Marketplace: Friday, February 20, 2004
Newscast
Sure, a Big Mac does require a certain amount of assembly…Bush administration economic advisors are posing the question of whether jobs in the fast-food industry, currently classified as "service jobs," ought to be reclassified as manufacturing jobs.
http://www.marketplace.org/shows/2004/02/20_mpp.html
i suppose its deep questions like this kind of reclassification that caused the delay of the ppi.
How do they get away w/this chit
not just brcm, but how the news was used to drive other stocks. ... pmcs may have just been nervous shorts, there are plenty of 'em and it already gave up all those gains ... but swks, for example, had serious volume come into it on thursday, to drive it up 10% (and then falling back to earth on friday).
"[...] buying interest in gold; is it normal to see such a selloff on news like this?"
like everything about gold this year, i think u can still say that much of these moves are currency related. the dollar rose from 84.75 to about 87.25, which is more than +3%. over the ame time, gold (in dollars) was down a little over 3%.
* Japan, the second largest world economy, is still wallowing in a 20-year deflationary spiral with no monetary maneuvering room available, except to sell U.S. dollars and force down its value, causing even higher domestic interest rates and collapsing bond prices in the U.S.
sell dollars?? this must be sell yen ... that or they've spent hundreds of billions to hide their real motives
"there is a classic double whammy underway, ramping the $USD with gold being crushed. Those two almost always indicate that a major effort to rescue the market is coming."
while that was true last year - especially the overnight ramps - the correlation seems to fail more recently: ramps in the dollar seem to correspond more to falling markets, rather than rising ones. (in fact, big drops in the dollar are coincident with similar rises in the dow.)
in retrospect, those "ramp the dollar" events might have been japanese intervention, with dollars being put to work in u.s. securities.
cool. though - i guess i should have added a smiley - my reason for posting it was more modest: because the general claimed that the missile travels at 5x the speed of light. which would make it about as fast as the enterprise in the latest star trek series. (i'm pretty sure he meant '5 times the speed of sound', rather than 'warp 5').
nope. my mom and dad do
hmm. looking at silver ... its seems rather expensive (price above spot, that is) unless i buy in 1000oz bars ... where the heck would i store that? sigh ...
does anywhere here invest in physical silver? what's the solution?
hehe. but now it all sounds like i should have some physical silver and copper ... hmm. not sure i could store copper anywhere. heck, i don't even think i could store any meaningful amount of silver anywhere ...
whoa! russia tests warp technology!
Colonel Baluyevsky gave few details of the new missile which was tested on Wednesday, but said it was one that moved five times the speed of light.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3504989.stm
hey dan, is it true that gartman is saying sell gold/stocks/euro now? (move up in dollar.) i get this from prudentbear site ...
(apparently also ian mcAvity, though i don't know who he is. sounds like a t.s. eliot cat
for what its worth: i had a 1/3 position left in gold in my gold fund today, which i bailed on at the 1pm exit point. similar for my last bit of natural gas fund (the rest of that i dumped in dec ...).
so i'm in cash now. oh, and shorts which they're not making easy. (i've followed intel, pmcs, swks, kopn, etc up and down and up and down in a range for weeks now, i'm getting dizzy. swks was unreal today
dan, here it is, i didn't think i dreamed it. 1/8/2004. maybe there just weren't any speculators to shake out, and all of the interest is real? ... :-P
From http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1054265/posts (via google)
From lemetropolecafe:
Did you see where Nymex/Comex already hiked margins on Silver and copper this afternoon? They did not waste any time trying to cool off silver. I hate to read too much into this but it seems awfully early in the game to be hiking silver margins. The contract just closed over $6.00 after how many years? We get a couple of closes up here and "wham, bam, thank you maam" let's kick up the margin requirements about $700 bucks a piece for the specs. Maybe they realize that a squeeze is possible as your sources have been saying. That is the only reason I can see for a margin hike this stinking early.
Here's the new figures:
Margins on the silver futures contract will increase to
$1,500 from $1,000 for clearing members, to $1,650 from $1,100
for members, and to $2,025 from $1,350 for customers.
Margins on the copper futures contract will increase to
$1,500 from $1,000 for clearing members and members, and to
$2,025 from $1,350 for customers.
8 posted on 01/08/2004 6:19:21 PM PST by Soren
[ Post Reply / Private Reply / To 1 / View Replies ]
odd. dan, weren't the silver and copper margin increased already, just about a month ago? didn't have much effect then ... maybe that's the reason for further increases ...
hmm. looks like swks is going to make a beautiful evening star ...
----
hmm. nevermind. looks like its gonna fill that gap this afternoon ...