Freddie/Fannie Friday – Fat Forclosure Folios Forcasts Further Falls
by Phil - September 17th, 2010 7:56 am
![[FANREO]](http://sg.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MI-BF965_FANREO_NS_20100916200301.gif)
Our zombie GSE’s have now become the Nation’s biggest home sellers.
This could not come at a worse time as winter is always a poor time to sell homes, rates seem to have bottomed and there is no new stimulus (or new jobs, or immigration, or population growth) to spur demand. Yet, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae now own more than 191,000 homes (as of June 30th), which is double where they were last year and they are still taking back homes faster than they can sell them as we move into the peak (we hope!) of the foreclosure cycle.
Once they take homes back, Fannie and Freddie must not only cover the utility bills and property taxes, but they are also relying on thousands of real-estate agents and contractors to rehabilitate homes, mow lawns and clean pools. Fannie took a $13 billion charge during the second quarter just on carrying costs for its properties.
If demand remains weak, Fannie and Freddie could face pressure to take more aggressive steps to hold homes off the market. Fannie, for example, is testing an effort in Chicago where it will rent vacant foreclosures rather than list them for sale. Such a "lease-and-hold" approach could make sense in certain markets where "you believe the supply will take a long time to absorb, but there’s going to be an increase in employment going forward," says Douglas Duncan, chief economist at Fannie Mae.
In yesterday’s post, we discussed the death of the housing market and that brought about a discussion in Member Chat about my February article where I pointed out that the math of home ownership no longer works for many Americans (I also showed 3 different ways you can shave $100,000 in payments off a $200,000 home loan so I do suggest reading it if you haven’t already). Mark McHugh of The Daily Bail has a nice update today where he does the math and contends that "a look behind the numbers shows home ownership to be a poor investment." Barry Rhitholtz found a chart from Reality Bubble Monitor that matches with my contention yesterday (that the US has likely bottomed) but points out that our "boom" economies in Australia and Canada (and China is about the same) have bubbles that are still likely to pop:
As I said yesterday, home prices are all about affordability of mortgages and, should we get into a rising rate environment, we could…
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Jobless Thursday – America’s Infrastructure Crisis
by Phil - September 9th, 2010 8:13 am
What a disaster!
Not only are our students failing to keep up with the rest of the World but America is close to getting a failing grade in Infrastructure. That’s right, what was once the World’s mightiest and proudest economy, this once great nation of builders has been given an overall grade of D in the American Society of Civil Engineers report on our Infrastructure.
The 2009 Grades include: Aviation (D), Bridges (C), Dams (D), Drinking Water (D-), Energy (D+), Hazardous Waste (D), Inland Waterways (D-), Levees (D-), Public Parks and Recreation (C-), Rail (C-), Roads (D-), Schools (D), Solid Waste (C+), Transit (D), and Wastewater (D-). Awful? Shameful? How about DANGEROUS? Deadly even…
For one thing, The number of high hazard dams—dams that, should they fail, pose a significant risk to human life—has increased by more than 3,000 just since 2007, when there were "just" 1,000 dams at risk and 3,000 to pro actively maintain but the administration refused to fund the project, now the costs have tripled as the situation deteriorates but that’s nothing compared to what happens if just a few of them break completely. 1,819 dams are now in the "high hazard" category and, with the current budget, for every one damn that is reparied, two more become an emergency.
In urban areas, roadway congestion tops 40 percent. According to the report, decades of underfunding and inattention have jeopardized the ability of our nation’s infrastructure to support our economy and facilitate our way of life. At risk of catastrophic failure besides the dams (including levees) are things like our drinking water, sewage systems, bridges, waterways, rail lines, airports, roadways (especially elevated ones) and, of course, our entire electrical grid. Additionally, 7 Billion gallons of clean drinking water is lost every day through leaking pipes – that’s 23 gallons per citizen per day WASTED for want of $11Bn in repairs – don’t bother worrying about it, the last Administration wouldn’t fund it in 2001 or 2006 so why bother now – 10 Trillion gallons later?
The ASCE calculates a 5-year $2.2Tn investment is needed to address the situation, that’s $500Bn (25%) more than it was 5-years ago, when they released their last report and nothing was done by the previous administration. So, rather than having invested in America, putting people to work and improving EVERYONE’s way of life, we spent over $1Tn fighting a war, another $600Bn a year on our regular military operations and gave over $1Tn worth of taxe breaks…
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High Frequency Friday – The WSJ Finally Catches On!
by Phil - April 16th, 2010 8:27 am
Has the World gone sane?
I was amazed this morning to see both the usual contrarian indicator of a bullish cover on Newsweek (mission accomplished market pumpers) and a good piece of reporting in the Journal on a topic ZeroHedge and I have been pounding the table on for a year. Our readers will find nothing new in the article "This Market Has Its Freq On" but to see it finally summarized in the MSM (giving us no credit at all, of course) is at least a little bit satisfying.
The Journal highlights the following facts (and they are now MSM FACTS, not "conspiracy theories" Tyler and I were making up):
- The recent gains have come with only marginal support from traditional long investors. Wall Street trading desks and the relatively new breed of high-frequency traders have been fueling the rest.
- Investors pumped only $396 million into domestic stock funds in March. Since the start of the year, they’ve only added only $1.8 billion, according to the Investment Company Institute. Compare those inflows with some other recent rallies. Between April and July 2009, investors poured $28.76 billion into U.S. stock funds and in the first three months of 2007 they moved $19.1 billion into such funds.
- Insiders are dumping stock at an alarming pace, $15 billion so far this year, more than six times the $2.5 billion they’ve bought, according to Trim Tabs. Moreover, they’ve been dumping their stock more in recent weeks. Insiders sold $6.9 billion in March and bought just $831 million.
- Six stocks represented 27.51% of the overall stock market volume: American International Group Inc., Ambac Financial Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., Popular Inc., Fannie Mae and Citigroup Inc. Since the start of the year they’ve represented 16.55% of the composite volume on the New York Stock Exchange, and more than 22% on each of this week’s first three trading days, reaching as high as 30.62% Tuesday..
- The rise in these stocks has mirrored, or perhaps driven, the recent broader gains. Through Wednesday, Bank of America was up 28.8%, Citigroup was up 48.9%, Ambac shares have doubled, Popular shares are up 74.3% since the start of the year. AIG shares are up 32.5% for the year through Wednesday.
- Program trading represented 27.9% of NYSE volume for the week
…
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Toppy Tuesday – Happy Anniversary Bull Market!
by Phil - March 9th, 2010 8:26 am
It’s hard to believe that just one year ago today investors thought the world was ending!
Well, not all investors – we were BUYBUYBUYing at the time, as I recapped back in September whan we did our "Market Crash – Year One Review." Click on Cramer’s picture for the Daily Show’s March 4th, 2009 review of the magical moments that led us down to the bottom and here’s another great video from the evening broadcast on March 9th and, of course, there is my own legendary appearance on LiveStock from March 6th, but that’s summarized in the crash link, so save yourself 3 hours, although the first 10 minutes are worth it for people who want to learn about our buy/write strategy as I explained the logic of it as I recommended FAS at $2.41 using those hedges.
And what a wild year it has been as we’ve made an epic recovery. The only question is – have we come too far too fast? Should we be up 75% from our March 9th lows? We are still down 25% from our highs but let’s keep in mind that we made those highs thinking AIG was MAKING money, that FNM and FRE were great stocks for your retirement portfolio, that Kirk Kirkorean was going to rescue GM, that BZH wasn’t some kind of scam, that BSC, LEH et al were "the smartest guys in the room." I urge you to click on Cramer and listen to the idiocy of the analysts who would tell you everything is all right even as it was all falling apart around them – why does everyone suddenly trust them again?
How could we not love this market? Markets do this sort of thing all the time don’t they? It’s all part of the "efficient pricing model" that always lets you know what a stock is truly worth like when GE was "worth" $30 in 2008 and "worth" $6 in 2009 and is now "worth" $16. This is not some biotech folks – this is GE, they’ve been around for 100 years and they have $170Bn in global sales. Did they really drop 80% in value in 2009? No. That’s why it was easy to pick a bottom – the valuations got ridiculous and, as fundamentalists, we siezed on the opportunity to BUYBUYBUY despite the negative sentiment.
Now, we are in a very different situation. Now we…
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Fannie Mae Put Action Explodes in Afternoon Trading
by Andrew Wilkinson - February 5th, 2010 4:30 pm
Today’s tickers: FNM, EWZ, IYR, GILD, FXI, WLP, EEM, ARG, DWA & WMB
FNM – Fannie Mae – Mortgage-financer, familiarly known as Fannie Mae, jumped onto our ‘most active by options volume’ market scanner after one investor went hog-wild with put options. Fannie’s shares slipped 3% during the trading day to $0.95 apiece. The investor appears to have traded 118,000 in-the-money put options at the March $1.0 strike for a premium of $0.15 apiece, spread against the sale of 118,000 puts at the January 2012 $1.0 strike for a premium of $0.40 each. Open interest of 156,689 puts at the March $1.0 strike indicate the trader could be buying-to-close a previously established 118,000-lot short put position initiated back in September of 2009. If this is the case, the investor is extending the short put position out to the January 2012 contract and expecting the government agency to ultimately survive the next couple of years. In this scenario, the trader keeps the $0.40 in premium on the sale of the fresh batch of put options if Fannie’s share price rallies above $1.00 by expiration in 2012. But, there are a other possible explanations for the trade. It is possible that the open interest at the March $1.0 strike is unrelated to today’s activity. In this second scenario, the trader is essentially predicting that shares will erode ahead of March expiration. If this is the case the trader sold 118,000 January 2012 $1.0 strike puts for $0.40 apiece in order to take a long 118,000-lot put stance at the March $1.0 strike for which he paid $0.15 each. The net credit received in this scenario amounts to $0.25 per contract and generates additional profits as Fannie’s shares continue to fall under $1.00. It will be interesting to see whether the open interest level at the March $1.0 strike changes to reflect the closing of a previously established long or short put position. Regardless of the direction of- or motivation behind- the transaction the large volume of the trading activity is certainly noteworthy.
EWZ – iShares MSCI Brazil Index ETF – A ratio put spread enacted on the Brazil ETF suggests we may continue to see bearish movement in the price of the underlying stock through expiration in June. Shares of the fund are down 3% to $61.80 as of 2:20 pm (EDT). The investor responsible for the transaction purchased 7,500 puts at…
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Fa La La Friday – Scroogy Swap Prices Blacken Christmas
by Phil - December 18th, 2009 7:58 am
Where is our Santa Clause rally?
We usually have one. Even last year the Dow went from 8,149 on Dec 1st to finish at 8,776 on Dec 31st. This year, we’re lower than we were on Thanksgiving and challenging the 10,200 line, the lowest we’ve been since Nov 9th. Why has Santa Clause forsaken us? Most likely, it’s because we already got our Christmas present in November, when the Dow ran from 9,712 on the 2nd to 10,406 on the 16th. That was when we threw in our bullish towel as it was way over our 2009 target (9,850), which is based on fundamental market valuations, rather than Christmas wishes.
We still face serious headwinds in the economy and, as I’ve said many times this year, the current market valuations are ignoring the risk factors of owning equities – an amazing thing considering how recently those risk factors showed up and bit people’s faces off both last fall and this spring. For example, according to the NYTimes this morning, American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and GMAC, are not only unable to repay the government, they are in need of continuing infusions that make them look increasingly like long-term wards of the state. The total risk they pose to the taxpayer far exceeds that of the big banks. Fannie and Freddie, in the final days of the year, are even said to be negotiating with the Treasury about greatly expanding the money available to them.
While some banks are repaying TARP funds, these wards of the state need MORE money or we are right back to the default risk that sent the market plunging last year. What else sent the market plunging last year? Oh yes, it was credit default swaps. We still have many hundreds of Trillions of those nasty little suckers outstanding and now the cost of insuring sovereign debt against default in Europe is right back to where it was in March, when we thought the World was ending. “It’s going to prove extraordinarily difficult for countries to cut back on budget deficits,” said Ciaran O’Hagan, a fixed-income strategist at Societe Generale SA in Paris. “Many countries are facing severe difficulties in coping with the economic downturn.”
Credit-default swaps on Portugal’s debt jumped 6.5 basis points to 80 today, CMA prices show. Hungary climbed 13 basis points to 243, Spain increased 5 to…
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Stock Market Crash – Year One in Review – The Gathering Storm
by Phil - September 7th, 2009 7:13 am
Happy anniversary market crash!
One year ago, in September, the market started falling in earnest. A lot of people were caught by surprise by that drop as many thought we had just had a major correction and the worst was over. We had bounced off 10,800 on July 14th and had made it all the way back to touch 12,000 on August 14th but that day I warned my members in the morning post:
We’re really through the looking glass when you see investors stampede right back into oil and other commodity stocks at the first sign of a bounce off a 20% drop. I guess they’ve never seen a pullback off 20% before so it makes sense that Cramer would hit the BUYBUYBUY button on anything that smells like crude. I wish I had access to the tapes of all these same idiots telling you to BUYBUYBUY housing stocks and mortgage companies when they made their first bounce on the way to 80% losses.
It’s not just oil that is expensive, now it has to compete for consumer dollars with food and airline fares and tobacco prices and consumer goods etc. Oil was able to bubble up because people were enjoying a robust economy and it was the ONLY thing that was rising out of control. Metals began to follow it as that didn’t affect the average person but then companies had to start passing on the increased costs and the banks stopped lending money and the consumers were forced to stop using their home’s equity (if there was any left) like a piggy bank and *poof,* suddenly there isn’t enough money for oil. This isn’t going to change because there’ s a hurricane or a shut down pipeline or anything else.
Oil was trading at a still ridiculous $115 a barrel that day, down from $147 on July 1st but still choking the life out of the economy. We were very bearish on oil and natural gas ($14 at the time) as the fundamentals simply didn’t support the price of oil at $115 as much as they didn’t support $147 a month earlier. I had gone negative on oil too early though, as we thought $120 was surely the top back in May. Sometimes fundamentals can get you too ahead of the market. Our man Ben was between a rock and a hard place as he HAD to do something to…
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Wild Weekly Wrap-Up – August in Retrospect
by Phil - August 29th, 2009 8:28 am
It has been a crazy few weeks!
I went back over our Long Shots list from August 9th, thinking all our picks must be doing great but really only C, with a 67% gain, is really outperforming. Long spreads on UYG and BHI are on target for nice gains but haven’t moved much. Looking at our original picks in Pharmboys Phavorites from the same week, GSK is on track and up nicely already, our AZN cover is up 45% and MRK flew up 19% already. On the riskier Biotech side, ARIA’s stock is up 16% and our spreads are all performing well, ONTY has been flat, OGXI is up 33% and the Jan $17.50s are up a rockin’ 63% with that "cautious" spread up a surprising 75% already.
SPPI had a wild ride (as we predicted with TSCM’s failed assassination attempt) and the buy/write is already up 24%, the Feb vertical is up 50% and the naked Jan put sale is up 27% and our Feb hedge play is right on track so all good there and a fine example of how following Cramer and his lackeys and and doing the opposite of what they say can be very profitable! Congrats to Pharmboy for a very fine set of picks, proving once again that there is room for research and fundamentals - not a single loser in the bunch in a choppy market! It was very timely as I had mentioned just that week in my interview with AOL Finance that XLV was my favorite sector and our IHI pick of 8/10 is up 28% on the naked Feb $45 put sale while the Feb $45 calls have already jumped 16%. It was a great call as IHI outperformed XLV and all our major indexes.
So our energy service pick (BHI) and overall financial pick (UYG) have not done much in 3 weeks and those were our leading sectors into my call to cash out our exposed long calls on Aug 13th, ahead of expirations. The Dow was at 9,400 on that day and now, a bit more than 2 weeks later, we’ve gained another 144 points but to listen to the MSM, you would think you are missing the rally of the century the past couple of weeks. This is one of the reasons I’ve gotten a bit more cynical about the rally – there is so much hype and so…
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Fall Down Friday for China – Shanghai Down 3%
by Phil - August 28th, 2009 8:06 am
The Shanghai Composite fell 3% this morning.
That drops them to 328, down from 398 on August first (-17.5%), which is almost a perfect 20% retrace off the run from the last consolidation at 250 in March. As you can see from the chart, we are about midway between the high for the year and a 50% retrace of the entire run from the bottom at about 280, which happens to be the 40-week moving average. This is significant in many ways as the Chinese market has been the driver of the global recovery and our global markets (and our local stocks and indexes) are all flying high above their 200 dmas, just about where China was 30 days ago.
I am sorry to be the annoying voice of caution the past two weeks but, when I was a kid, "Spinning Wheel" was a hit song and "what goes up must come down" is etched into some very deep neural pathways in my brain. We’ve been using the FXP (ultra-short China) as a cover for almost exactly a month as I had put my foot down when the Shanghai hit 400 and the Hang Seng hit 21,200, up exactly 100% from their November lows.
As David Fry points out in his daily S&P chart, the volume for the days is DOWN volume and, once the sellers get their fill, the auto-bots come out to play and run the markets back up. I pointed out on Wednesday, close to 40% of the entire volume of the markets is centered around 4 stocks (C, FNM, BAC and FRE). Throw in AIG’s 150M shares and we’re getting close to ONE HALF of the total market volume in 5 stocks.
While that may be shocking and ridiculous and has now been pointed out by several analysts, what I’m not seeing discussed is the implication that holds for the rest of the market. If those 5 stocks are 50% then the market, which is already trading at historically low volumes, is actually trading 50% LOWER than that! Then we have the well documented indications that GS, CS and a handful of other firms account for 40% of all trading volume. That means, if GS and other manipulators aren’t trading those 5 stocks, then they are accounting for 80% of all remaining transactions!
More likely the real number is somewhere in-between. Perhaps half their trades are in the Big 5 so that would…
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Will They Hold It Wednesday?
by Phil - August 26th, 2009 8:25 am
This is getting very interesting!
As we expected in yesterday’s morning post, the morning pump was a great selling opportunity and we had a very good time riding the gentle dip we got in intra-day trading. The Dow hit it’s high for the day at 10:03 and by 10:09 I had an alert out to members to ignore the consumer confidence number and go more bearish on the Dow, buying back the Sept $95 puts we sold Monday for a quick 20% profit. We also grabbed the OIH $105 puts for $2.30 that made a nice buck during the day (43%) and we entered a couple of spreads on ERY at 10:57, well ahead of oil falling off a cliff in the afternoon.
Great call by David at the Oxen Group on making DUG his long of the day yesterday with a perfect buy in at $15.10 and hitting the 4% goal for that day trade. It was David’s call that inspired us to pick up the very profitable (and much riskier) ERY trades, which were also an idea of his from an earlier trade so mega Kudos to the Oxen Group!
We got a second rally on low volume around noon and my 12:09 comment to Members was: "Still a very good time to look at some of those long put plays we discussed in yesterday’s morning post" so I guess you can say we were still pretty bearish at that 9,600 line on the Dow. Keep in mind that the top of our prior trading range was 9,100 on the Dow so the 5% rule off that mark takes us to 9,555, which was where I predicted we’d close. We had a good chance to press our long DIA covers higher but we feared the overnight stick and we went with a 1/2 cover on our long puts, selling the DIA $95 puts for $1.75 just in case we have another crazy pre-market pump.
As you can see from David Fry’s S&P charts, we are "outside the box," very much as we were in June but note that we held that level (S&P 950) for quite a while before getting a 10% correction into early July. I’m not getting the feeling that we have enough energy to sustain us up here that long but, the way things have been going, we kept all of Monday’s bear covers in longer time-frames because as Chantale…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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