Dark Horse Hedge is Rocking On
by Sabrient - March 9th, 2011 2:42 pm
By Scott at Sabrient and Ilene
For those about to rock, we salute you – AC/DC
Dark Horse Hedge is Rocking On
With February and the most of earnings season passing, we decided to "stand up and be counted" with a summary article on the VIRTUAL Dark Horse Traders’ Hedge (DHH) portfolio.
Our mission has been to generate absolute returns through the use of a tilted Long/Short strategy that remains market neutral, but with a partial bias towards momentum (as defined by measuring the S&P 500 relative to its 50 and 200 day Moving Averages). We have been tilted to the long side since October 2010.
Over the long term, reasons for using such a strategy include being positioned to take advantage of both bull and bear runs. As evidenced by the near zero returns of the market over the last 10 years, buy-and-hold strategies are majorly flawed. The market also teaches hard lessons to those who attempt to predict direction, and has forced many retail investors to reconsider their strategies after being pounded in 2001 and 2008.
Alpha is a measure of a return over and above a benchmark index’s return, and Beta is a measure of the portfolio’s performance as it is correlated to movements of the market. With DHH, we strive to optimize Alpha while minimizing Beta to protect our portfolio in up and down markets. Beta is reduced by holding both Long and Short positions and using a rules-based approach to determine which stocks have the best chacteristics to benefit when the market is rising, and conversely to determine which stocks are most apt to perform poorly when the market is falling. In other words, we want to be long stocks of the best companies and short stocks of the worst companies – we want to identify the "tails" of a market, index, sector or basket of stocks.
Once a portfolio of Long and Short stocks is established, then it is a matter of gaining the desired exposure using the available tools, such as …
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
BlinkBits
BlinkList
Stock World Weekly 2-27-11
by ilene - February 27th, 2011 8:22 am
Here’s the latest edition of Stock World Weekly: Irresistible Forces Meet Immovable Objects. - Ilene
Excerpt:
On Saturday, February 27, the Security Council of the United Nations (UN) voted unanimously to institute sanctions on Libya, including travel bans and freezing the assets of Muammar al-Gaddafi and others associated with his regime. Protests have dragged into their twelfth day, and protestors refuse to yield in the face of utterly horrific retaliation by Gaddafi’s loyal forces. U.S. ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice said, “When atrocities are committed against innocents, the international community must act with one voice – and tonight it has.”
The Telegraph reported over the weekend that Gaddafi apparently made good on his threats to trigger a civil war, using irregular forces largely composed of hired mercenaries to launch a counterattack against protesters. “Anywhere we go there is danger,” said one woman, a 28-year-old mother of four who asked not to be named. “All we want is food and fresh water for our children but it is impossible to find. Security is the only concern of the authorities.”
An accurate report of the death toll is impossible to obtain at this time, but on Wednesday, Italy’s Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini said, “We believe that the estimates of about 1,000 are credible.” The situation in Libya has deteriorated since then. Multiple stories coming in from all over the country have cited dozens to hundreds of casualties in each city. It appears that Libya has slipped into the abyss of complete social breakdown and civil war.
This is just one example of the tide of popular unrest that has been unleashed in the wake of the Federal Reserve’s and other central banks’ inflationary policies. The chart below shows the U.S. Adjusted Monetary Base increasing from $1.75Tn in 2009, to $2.0Tn in 2010, and now nearing $2.3Tn, an increase of $300Bn in just two months! This represents an increase of 35% in less than 18 months. (The U.S. Monetary Base is the total amount of currency that is circulating in the hands of the public or in the commercial bank deposits held in reserves of member banks of the Federal Reserve System.)
Another revolt of a more peaceful nature took place in Ireland. The long-dominant Fianna Fail party was brutally rejected by Irish voters, taking just 15.1% of the vote and losing…
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
BlinkBits
BlinkList
The Next Two Years in the Financial Asset Markets – Emperadores en Fueg
by ilene - February 16th, 2011 3:07 pm
Courtesy of Jesse’s Cafe Americain
As Ozzie Osbourne says, "All Aboard!" lol
The good news is that it will not be as straight down as this.
Keep your hands and head inside the train at all times.
Don’t worry. Trust in Ben and Tim.
And meanwhile in the Mideast…
Note: Most people think of stocks as the be all and end all of dollar financial assets. In the case of a burst of inflation or a hyperinflation, the equity market will soar for a time, although its gains will be illusory. So stocks are an insurance but not so much as you might expect if that is the outcome. Try not to get in front of it, as phony as you might think it may be. But the stock market is of much less consequence as compared to the bonds and currency markets. It is the three card monte to the bond and currency numbers rackets. The stock markets are the pretty lights and buildings that the tourists stare at while the carnies pick their pockets.
 |
| "Higher and Higher. What Could Go Wrong?" |
 |
| "What a Beautiful View At the Top. We’re the King of the World." |
 |
| "Who Could Have Foreseen This? Remain Calm. All Is Well." |
 |
| "Mommy!" |
And if the Fed should make a mistake, the efficient electronic trading markets are designed to be self-correcting.
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
BlinkBits
BlinkList
“Is this the line for the pullback?”
by ilene - February 14th, 2011 1:09 pm
Courtesy of Joshua Brown, The Reformed Broker
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
BlinkBits
BlinkList
Stock World Weekly
by ilene - January 30th, 2011 8:23 am
Here’s this week’s Stock World Weekly. Enjoy! Comments welcome.
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
BlinkBits
BlinkList
Stock World Weekly
by ilene - January 23rd, 2011 3:20 pm
Here’s the newest: Stock World Weekly Newsletter. Comments welcome! – Ilene
Archives here.
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
BlinkBits
BlinkList
Big Top or Pee-Wee Concerns?
by ilene - January 19th, 2011 12:15 pm
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker
Do we care about the little things anymore or are they merely trifling datapoints in an empirical sea of economic expansion? Are those calling for the Big Top mining for negative indicators or are they seeing things before the crowd?
Apple’s lack of follow-through after destroying earnings is the big iElephant in the room, but very few people notice or seem to mind. Momentum fave Cree ($CREE) rocked for 13 percent after earnings, Goldman Sachs ($GS) and Citi ($C) report light quarters…is this thing on?
How about, for example, what Mark Arbeter had to say about the extended nature of this tape. Arbeter is the Chief Technical Strategist as S&P so listen up.
From IBD:
“As of (Thursday), the NASDAQ 100 was almost 16% above its 200-day simple average, nearly equaling the overbought levels we saw in the middle of April,” Arbeter wrote in his weekly commentary. “The only other time in the last 10 years that the NASDAQ 100 was this overbought or extended was in the fall of 2007.”
Investor sentiment is overly bullish, which usually signals a correction is coming, Arbeter adds. Based on Fibonacci analysis, Arbeter believes the S&P 500 could decline to 1,190 or 1,130, down 8% to 12.6% from Friday’s close at 1,293.
Or how about the comments of another notable technician, Tom DeMark, as recorded in BusinessWeek this morning:
U.S. stocks are within a week of “a significant market top” that is likely to precede a drop of at least 11 percent in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, said Tom DeMark, creator of a set of market-timing indicators.
DeMark’s Sequential and Combo indicators, designed to identify market tops and bottoms, are giving a sell signal on the main U.S. stock benchmark for the first time since mid-2007, he said in a telephone interview. The S&P 500 began its 57 percent plunge from a record in October 2007.
I am an intermediate-to-long term bull, but I can’t help but be sensitive to these warning signs. They are multiplying.
Read Also:
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
BlinkBits
BlinkList
Settling Prosecutions For Pennies on the Dollar Is a Type of Bailout
by ilene - January 15th, 2011 4:40 pm
Courtesy of Washington’s Blog
The following is an excerpt of my much longer roundup of the many covert ways the government is bailing out the giant banks.
Fraud As a Business Model
If you stop and think for a moment, it is obvious that failing to prosecute fraud is a bailout.
Nobel prize-winning economist George Akerlof demonstrated that if big companies aren’t held responsible for their actions, the government ends up bailing them out. So failure to prosecute directly leads to a bailout.
Moreover, as I noted last month:
Fraud benefits the wealthy more than the poor, because the big banks and big companies have the inside knowledge and the resources to leverage fraud into profits. Joseph Stiglitz noted in September that giants like Goldman are using their size to manipulate the market. The giants (especially Goldman Sachs) have also used high-frequency program trading (representing up to 70% of all stock trades) and high proportions of other trades as well). This not only distorts the markets, but which also lets the program trading giants take a sneak peak at what the real traders are buying and selling, and then trade on the insider information. See this,this, this, this and this.
Similarly, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley together hold 80% of the country’s derivatives risk, and 96% of the exposure to credit derivatives. They use their dominance to manipulate the market.
Fraud disproportionally benefits the big players (and helps them to become big in the first place), increasing inequality and warping the market.
[And] Professor Black says that fraud is a large part of the mechanism through which bubbles are blown.
***
Finally, failure to prosecute
…
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
BlinkBits
BlinkList
“The Fed No Longer Even Denies that the Purpose of Its Latest Blast of Bond Purchases … Is To Drive Up Wall Street”
by ilene - January 15th, 2011 4:36 pm
Courtesy of Washington’s Blog
The stated purpose of quantitative easing was to drive down interest rates on U.S. treasury bonds.
But as U.S. News and World Reported noted last month:
By now, you’ve probably heard that the Fed is purchasing $600 billion in treasuries in hopes that it will push interest rates even lower, spur lending, and help jump-start the economy. Two years ago, the Fed set the federal funds rate (the interest rate at which banks lend to each other) to virtually zero, and this second round of quantitative easing--commonly referred to as QE2--is one of the few tools it has left to help boost economic growth. In spite of all this, a funny thing has happened. Treasury yields have actually risen since the Fed’s announcement.
The following charts from Doug Short update this trend:
Of course, rather than admit that the Fed is failing at driving down rates, rising rates are now being heralded as a sign of success. As the New York Times reported Monday:
The trouble is [rates] they have risen since it was formally announced in November, leaving many in the markets puzzled about the value of the Fed’s bond-buying program.
***
But the biggest reason for the rise in interest rates was probably that the economy was, at last, growing faster. And that’s good news.
“Rates have risen for the reasons we were hoping for: investors are more optimistic about the recovery,” said Mr. Sack. “It is a good sign.”
Last November, after it started to become apparent that rates were moving in the wrong direction, Bernanke pulled a bait-and-switch, defending quantitative easing on other grounds:
…
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
BlinkBits
BlinkList
Could the U.S. Dollar Rise 50%?
by ilene - January 13th, 2011 3:33 am
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds
Conventional wisdom is that the Fed wants the U.S. dollar lower, so it must drop. But the dollar seems to be lacking proper obedience to the Fed’s grand commands.
Before you shout that all fiat currencies go to zero, let’s stipulate that the U.S. dollar has already proceeded 95% of the way to zero. According to the handy BLS inflation calculator, the 2010 dollar is roughly worth 4.5 cents of the 1913 dollar. Put another way, it now takes $22.10 to buy what $1 purchased in 1913.
(Interesting that the BLS inflation calculator only goes back to the birth of the Federal Reserve….)
So a 50% rise in the dollar would register as a mere blip on a 100-year chart. I mention this to put a 50% rise in perspective. It will seem like a large move in the present, but on a longer timeline it wouldn’t be that big a deal.
How could the dollar rise when the Treasury and Fed are moving Heaven and Earth to drive it down? Let’s turn to the Fed Flow of Funds for some perspective: what happened from 2007 (pre-recession) to the present?
Household Real Estate Assets: $22.7 trillion to $16.5 trillion: -$6.2 trillion
Corporate Equities: $9.6 trillion to $7.8 trillion: -$1.8 trillion
Mortgage debt: $10.53 trillion to $10.12 trillion: -$ .41 trillion
Household/non-profit Net Worth: $64.2 trillion to $54.9 trillion: -$9.3 trillion
And this is after a tremendous run-up in both bonds and stocks since early 2009. Add in whatever estimates of commercial real estate losses you reckon are semi-accurate and other impaired enterprise assets currently valued at "historical cost," i.e. marked to fantasy, and you get a number well north of $12 trillion even at conservative estimates.
The Fed has fought off this mass devaluation of assets by expanding its balance sheet by $2 trillion. First it sought to stem the collapse of the housing market by buying $1.2 trillion in impaired mortgage backed securities (taking garbage off the banks’ balance sheets) and now it is trying to suppress interest rates by buying $1 trillion in Treasury bonds (recall that QE1 already loaded the boat with T-Bills, so QE2 is simply adding another $600 billion to an already heavy cargo.)
In both cases the Fed’s campaigns are mere rear-guard actions: housing continues to slip, and the tides of higher yields and rates have started rising despite the Fed’s…
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
BlinkBits
BlinkList
German
Spanish
French
Italian
Portuguese
Japanese
Korean
Russian
Chinese
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
(