Archive - Jan 2011 - Blog entry

DAVOS: 0600 [EUROPEAN BULL SH*T TIME]--East Coast USA: 12:00 AM [EASTERN SWINDLER TIME]

AlpInvest Partners, Europe's largest private-equity investor, has been sold to Carlyle Group and the AlpInvest management in a move that looks set to shake up Europe's buyout landscape.

Entire towns exploded and collapsed based on where oil was discovered. One area only 15 miles from Titusville, Pennsylvania (where Drake first discovered oil) went from being unnoticeable on the map to a booming metropolis of 15,000 people and back again in one years’ time (the fifty hotels and other businesses that sprang up in that time were all gone within 24 months). Parcels of land went from a few dollars in value to $2 million and back again in less than a decade.

I'm asking.

Too many investors want a magic elixir that guarantees outrageous profit with no risk, either to their pocket or their brain cells. But it does NOT have to be this way...

Everything is great!

Well, if you are a corporation, that is and that's all the matters in the United Corporations of America, right?

The world today is riddled with unique economic, political, and demographic risks. Finding attractively priced assets that will perform well in spite of these challenges is excruciatingly difficult. For investors, though, one segment of the market – the highest-quality stocks – still offers attractive risk-adjusted returns.

In the 1850s, a small group of investors lead by George Bissell, a New York lawyer, and James Townsend, president of a New Haven Bank, launched a venture that most of their contemporaries would deem ludicrous. Their goal: to see if “rock oil” (as oil was originally called to distinguish it from the oils produced from vegetables and animal fat) could be used as an illuminant or fuel for light.

Odds and ends.

The heavy price of a “head and shoulders top”. Competition from rising interest rates in emerging markets and record scrapage rates are eating into the prospects for the barbarous relic. So are higher margin rates for traders. Moving out of hard assets into paper ones. Exiting from a one sided trade. (DGZ), (GLL). (GLD).

A look back at China 2010 econ measures and indices, plus some of my observations.

The proper decision now regarding your child's education may be the difference in whether you set your child up for a life of failure or a life of success. Yes I really do believe that the decision on whether to send your child to university now or to forgo that traditional route is a “make or break your child’s life" type of decision.

Retail traders are notoriously wrong at picking market direction/tops and bottoms. Most retail traders very naturally seem to adopt a counter-trend stance and this offers very accurate signals for individuals looking to trade against this group. This daily report is designed to help traders focus their efforts on higher probability pairs.

Naming names ...

Does all of this rhetoric mean anything or is all this just another batch of empty promises to add to the long list of empty promises that Barack Obama has already made and broken?