Archive - Nov 12, 2009 - Blog entry

Technical Profiles of 8 Key Stocks: AIG, BIDU, CAT, CELG, DRYS, IBM, GS, SKF

With an asset allocation of 45% in public equities and 11% in private equities - by far one of the more aggressive asset mixes among the large pension funds - it's all about beta. If equity markets tank next quarter, so will CPPIB's performance.

This is aimed at those banking execs that believe that they will be better off hiding losses than taking them now and preempting the guaranteed higher losses to come in the future. Yes, the US is Japan - the "19 year" lost decade, redux!

The FDIC will announce today its final plans on how to bridge a $45 billion shortfall in its accounts. Our pals, the bankers, have submitted letters on this matter to the FDIC. Some make interesting reading. Guess what? They all want to get paid for bailing out the FDIC. They will get paid and this will be all off balance sheet. Presto, the problem no longer exists.

Recently, the Pragmatic Capitalist questioned who the mysterious large buyer of eMini S&P 500 futures (ES) was, when there has not been a corresponding large buyer of SPY ETF shares over the same short periods. We decided this warranted a further investigation to assess whether it is SPY or the ES that has historically had the greatest impact on the S&P 500 cash index. The results were surprising.

In developing my REIT short thesis, I am being forced to spend more time than anticipated quantifying the effect of explicit sell side manipulation combined with purposeful opacity in the CRE mortgage holdings as endorsed by our dear government. I am actually entertaining a direct head to head analysis competition with an entity such as Goldman Sachs that ends up explicitly detailing which properties of which REITs are underwater and by how much, which may end up in a "run on the REITs", by the banks (at least those with common sense), who don't want to be left with the least edible scraps at the table.

"Military Keynesianism" - the idea that war is the best economic stimulus - is false.