Thanks :) You have shaped my Sunday.

OK so I watch maybe 1-2 football games a year. I could free up time Sunday. Is one of those the REAL superbowl?

The banks aren't lending (among other reasons) because they know that even after the govt money they're still insolvent. All that $600B of excess reserves parked at the Fed is basically a huge loss reserve which they KNOW they'll need.

<<The early release has to be a positive.>>

The theory I like best was posted on Clusterstock this morning... that the govt has "asked" them to tell everyone how bad it is ahead of Bush sending his TARP request to Congress. I haven't researched the exact timing of that request, but if it is scheduled for the next few days, that seems plausible.

http://clusterstock.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/why-are-citi-c-and-jp-morgan-jpm-moving-up-their-earnings-announcements

<<better accomplished by shorting the long equivalent rather than the actual levered short ETF.>>

Yeah wonderful advice, did the author ever actually try to get a borrow on a double-long ETF?

They're impossible to find.

Yes, for all tendon injuries the only real cure is several weeks of completely resting that joint. At least that's been my experience with the shoulder and ankle problems I've had.

If the last hour of today was (as people are speculating) a bizarre event related to the Nov 15 deadline for hedge fund redemptions, then it's possible we'll see a rebound Monday.

<<I see no news to explain it.>>

Apparently the Nov 15th deadline for hedge fund redemptions had a last-moment impact that nobody expected.

<<[Sun's] software business model is fundamentally broken. It thinks it can survive by giving software away.>>

Yeah, that (as well as the other response about DEC not treating the software guys well) was what I meant by a cultural issue. To make money from software you have to nail your company to the wall that it stands or falls by making a profit from the stuff. If you have a freeware mentality, that comes from a hardware management culture that software is just a giveaway to sell hardware.

<<DEC actually had a ton of good software groups. But they didn't treat them particularly well.>>

That was kinda my point.

LOL, they've tried software repeatedly over the past 10 years and fallen flat on their faces every time.

It's a culture issue. Hardware companies just don't turn into software companies that easily.

Sun = DEC. All she wrote.

<<Democrats in the U.S. House have been conducting hearings on proposals to confiscate workers’ personal retirement accounts>>

I heard they're also going to make abortion compulsory for registered republican women, and make possession of any gun a felony retroactive for the past 10 years.

In other words, take that cr*p to some political board.

<<the dems/liberals will see to it that they never win a majority again, by hook or by crook>>

No. Eventually a Dem dominance will lead to abuse of power and they'll get dumped. The pedulum eventually swings because the American people are basically well-meaning. They're just easily fooled, which is NOT the same thing.

But right now, the pendulum has swung in the right direction. The past 8 years of right-wing radical government have almost turned the USA, the greatest country in world history, into a banana republic. That isn't acceptable to the American public because, see above, they aren't stupid.

[Note to FootQuarters: I believe in a strong 2-party system and I sincerely hope that the Republican party recovers quickly from this low point.]

<enthusiast_mode> Damn I love those things. Have 2 of the 80GB ones waiting in a drawer for my Nehalem PC. </enthusiast_mode>

If you take a look at HSGFX the past 4 weeks, you'll see he's paying for it. I think he's had his worst month ever. (That's the worst month of a totally stellar record, though).

The correlation with 2001 may be breaking down. If this was 2001 over again, this bounce would have continued and not died.

I'm wondering, if this action continues for a while, maybe we really will see THE bottom in fall of 2008, rather than in late Spring 2009 as I had been expecting.

General question for the board, is technical analysis particularly hepful at a time like this? My perception is that it isn't because the market participants are no longer paying attention to fancy stuff like EMA's and support levels.

That's based on my view of TA, that it works because of mass psychology... everyone wants a roadmap that makes sense out of things, and if enough people agree on one, that makes it come true.

(Apologies to Foot, but I assume it's OK to post if I stay non-political and on-topic).

I think they may be about to diverge.

Yeah, I'm eying an investment in TBT myself.

OK you got me interested, so I did the math for a double positive fund.

Consider investing $1000 in fund QLD, the double long of an index QQQ that starts at 1000. Assume the index goes up and down by 100 points over and over.

 
 Day   QQQ    %change   2x%change   QLD 
 0     1000   -         -          1000.00 
 1     900    -10.0%    -20.0%      800.00 
 2     1000   +11.1%    +22.2%      977.60 
 3     900    -10.0%    -20.0%      782.08 
 4     1000   +11.1%    +22.2%      955.70 
 

<<Do ETF's like QLD or QID leak like Rydex or Profunds?>>

The double inverse funds leak, and the higher the volatility the worse they leak. SKF is pretty bad, SDS is tolerable over a few months.

Not sure about the double long funds, I've never had any interest. But you can repeat the exercise below and find out for yourself.

The funds generally do an excellent job of meeting their objective, i.e. to double the percentage move in the underlying. The problem with double inverse is that the math of this works badly in a sideways volatile market.

As an extreme example to demonstrate the problem:

Consider investing $1000 in fund QID, the double inverse of an index QQQ that starts at 1000. Assume the index goes up and down by 100 points over and over.

 
 Day   QQQ    %change  -2x%change   QID 
 0     1000   -         -          1000.00 
 1     900    -10.0%    +20.0%     1200.00 
 2     1000   +11.1%    -22.2%      933.60 
 3     900    -10.0%    +20.0%     1120.32 
 4     1000   +11.1%    -22.2%      871.61 
 

The earlier reports were probably wrong. Either Barney Frank misunderstood the briefing he got, or the Bloomberg reporters just screwed up.

Later news now says the subordinate debt will be protected. The preferred stock is allegedly not protected, but the devil may be in the details... they may well find a way to back-door compensate all those poor dumb regional banks.

OK so if it's a kinder, gentler bailout... my guess, most likely scenario is a gap-up on Monday morning (that's been the response to every govt bail-out so far).

But it's less clear if there will be follow-thru.

Intel said a couple months ago they have no plans internally to migrate any PC's to Vista. XP only.

Yeah, I think XP will be good as far as supporting new things until Vista's sucessor comes out in 2010 or so.

Just bought a new HP laptop for wife, "down"graded it to XP immediately. The laptops are getting a bit tricky because of finding drivers for the non-standard HW that HP or Dell use. But there are very strong online communities sharing tips and tricks. A lot of corporate IT people need to convert laptops to XP for work reasons. So it went fine after some work.

Also building 2 new home desktops with XP. That's trivial, XP drivers are fully available for all open-market components.

All of that should take my own personal computing thru the end of the Windows ME 2, er Vista, era.

<<Folks can legally naked short using off-shore accounts from anecdotes I've read.>>

Offshore naked shorting (at least in Vancouver) basically uses the same trick as the one Cox prohibited here. In the US, you had 3 days grace from when you short until when you have to secure a firm borrow, and theoretically people could abuse that to do naked short-term trading.

In Vancouver, the corresponding period is 2-4 weeks, so it's possible to maintain a long-term naked short by just re-shorting every time you're bought in.

<<Stay off the board, this is for smart informed people.>>

Polite ones too, I see.

OK, so you're a Republican. Congratulations.

Almost all of the economic and company news so far this week is still consistent with a short, shallow recession (if you suspend disbelief about housing, which the bulls do). Therefore, it is reasonable that we're heading back to the top of the trading range. I'm guessing that the next data point that may re-introduce some fear is the April employment numbers.

Stopped out of my trading shorts again today, for the umpteenth time. At least I'm getting pretty slick about it now, I don't take losses on the churning.

I believe I only have one edge: I expect a much nastier recession than the consensus. So I keep my long-term SDS position on at all times, with a fairly comfortable cushion of paper profits to keep me from worrying at night.

I have no edge trading the random ups and downs within the range. So I just mechanically put on the trading shorts when we start falling from the top of the range, and take them off when we go back there on the upswing. The idea is that I'll have them in place for the big drop which is coming, but not let them cause me emotional stress by going into paper losses.

So far it's working OK, but it's getting old and tedious.

Maybe people are actually being rational and realizing that Intel's reasonable results are the counterpoint to AMD's awful results.

Nah, rationality is too unlikely <G>

None of that is breaking news, it's just a roundup of what's widely expected. I've read several stories this week with similar numbers. So probably the story is a non-event.

The next couple of weeks may be a little, um, event-driven. Chart analysis may not be very useful for a short while.

Looks like I got lucky on that entry. Thank you GE.

Put my trading shorts back on this afternoon. I'm being very aggressive, and maybe I'll get whipsawed. But right now this smells to me like the end of the bear bounce.

Hi, I just found this board recently. I've enjoyed reading it.

Is it now going private? If so, I guess I'll un-bookmark it.

Hmm. I would make an adjustment at 1360.

http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=24418422

we've probably seen about 1/2 the move up out of the lows in about 6-1/2 hours of trading.

Or perhaps all of it. 1331 is overhead resistance.

"Some of the "comparable sales" in the last few years were mortgage frauds"

I am the HOA treasurer for my townhouse complex. I see the for-sale notices, I see the realtor traffic, I see the escrow statements, I see who actually writes the HOA checks and shows up to maintain the property.

And people ask me why I keep saying the Zestimates for the complex are about 15% too high.

for what its worth, even hussman thinks a bottom could be coming soon

He speculates mildly about possibly some buying interest coming in when the market hits the 20% down level and the bear graduates from training wheels. If that's predicting a bottom, it's quite lukewarm.

Last week he said he expected the bear to end at around 30% down on the SPX, which translates to around 1100. I'm pretty sure that's still his longer-term expectation.

I think the short ETF's are periodically adjusted down in value to reflect dividend payouts which are charged to the underlying short positions. I'd guess this happens quarterly. Certainly SDS took a little dive at the close on Wednesday which was never recovered.

There may also be some slippage associated with using options to create synthetic double-short positions. I looked at SDS over about 6 months and it tracked pretty well. So at least for that one, the slippage is acceptable.

Or of course Bernanke may be sitting watching CNBC, saying "oh sh*t, what did I do? All I said was inflation looked a bit high".

Nah, the Inquirer is a solid online news site for PC's and related tech.