<p>BCEagle, nice link.</p>
<p>7 percent difference? Companies should just stay here…
I guess there are tax issues though.
Companies should still stay here.</p>
<p>Market seems heavy.</p>
<p>Well…</p>
<p>I said I wanted to own intc for a couple of years. I do. </p>
<p>However…</p>
<p>The stock is heavy and the market is heavy so I am short extra calls in intc. I am naked short some calls. I am expecting some of the calls to go out worthless tomorrow. I hope I get assigned on some.</p>
<p>If the stock pops tomorrow, I will deal with it.</p>
<p>I went on tumblr to see what yahoo bought. That site is not user friendly and is boring. I think MM got suckered by a kid.</p>
<p>I see that Japan is down another 4 percent plus…</p>
<p>The interest related sectors are getting hit everyday…tlt, mub, nly, and tons of others…</p>
<p>Fun times…lol.</p>
<p>I guess Tepper buried a lot of people.</p>
<p>I am starting to think (admittedly lots of help from know-it-all articles) that I should be dramatically reducing my equity exposure. I am only at about 56% equities in my IRA, the balance split between cash and bonds. Non retirement accounts I am 40% in equities, with the balance almost entirely in cash. I have come to accept being “retired” but I have no steady source of income. That’s one reason I maintain high cash balances. I feel like I am one stock market crash away from financial insecurity. I am growing increasingly uncomfortable with the stock market, both in terms of it’s overall levels and degree of manipulation, by the Fed and computer algorithms. I don’t want to be left holding the bag.</p>
<p>
[Analysis:</a> Fed Likely to Push Back on Market Expectations of Rate Increase - Real Time Economics - WSJ](<a href=“http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/06/13/fed-likely-to-push-back-on-market-expectations-of-rate-increase/]Analysis:”>http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/06/13/fed-likely-to-push-back-on-market-expectations-of-rate-increase/)</p>
<p>I don’t think that the economy is going to get any better without the fuel until the fiscal problems are addressed and we’re talking after the 2014 elections at the earliest. Today’s first time claims headline number was nice but what do the details show? I’m in job search mode with our daughter and there are job postings out there. We’ll see if she gets any responses to her applications. I’m going to tap my small network in the near future if nothing pans out. She is looking into her four-year degree options too. The backup plans are to do two years to get a BS and she needs to get cracking on applications.</p>
<p>NJres, you have to do what you think is right for you.</p>
<p>Then you have to have reasonable expectations. If you are 50 percent long equities, and the stock market goes up a lot, you accept the fact that your returns are going to be less than the market. That is ok. If your risk is the market does poorly rather than the market does well, you invest accordingly and that is that.</p>
<p>Rates may not normalize for a very long time. However, we see the turmoil a 1/2 percent increase in the 10 year can cause. The 10 year is worth 5 percent less. If rates on the 10 year quickly went up 2 percent, the 10 year would decline in price, not 5 percent, but a little less than 20 percent, right? </p>
<p>I think bondholders would be sick.</p>
<p>Dividend stocks are not going to be immune to an increase in rates. We have just seen how interest rate effected stocks behave when rates rise 1/2 percent. </p>
<p>If the 10 year rates rise to 4 percent, dividend stocks are going to have problems. Big problems. On the one hand, if rates rise maybe that means the economy is doing better and earnings and dividends increase. On the other hand, the bigher rates go, the less a 2 percent or 3 percent dividend is valued. </p>
<p>Finally, I am not comfortable with all the manipulations the central banks throughout the world are doing. The central banks think they can control the markets. The central bankers better be right. </p>
<p>Central bankers are academics, not traders. Sometimes the way things are written up don’t happen in the real world. That is a downside of letting academics running things. They tend to believe their own bs. People that believe their own bs tend to get in trouble.</p>
<p>
The story of Long Term Capital.</p>
<p>:)…</p>
<p>IBD says Market in Confirmed Uptrend. That’s was quick.</p>
<p>Summer rangebound market.</p>
<p>Has anyone been to an investor’s conference that was worth the money? I wouldn’t mind going to a good one, especially if about energy investing.</p>
<p>Overseas care a healthy alternative for wealthy</p>
<p>“While millions of Chinese tourists seek exotic experiences on foreign shores, some are going overseas for health reasons. A 46-year-old man from Shanghai going by the pseudonym Wang, was diagnosed with lung cancer in June. He went to Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States for treatment. The treatment and chemotherapy worked, and Wang is now receiving regular examinations in Shanghai. “It didn’t require hospitalization, and the side effects from chemotherapy are far less than in China,” he said, adding that he spent $63,000 on his treatment and accommodation in the US.”</p>
<p>Medical tourism to the US. I think that this has been around for quite some time but wealthy Chinese doing it seems to be something new. I guess the healthcare in China isn’t that good. It’s interesting that you now have brokerage services to do this.</p>
<p>BTW, went short Apple this morning.</p>
<p>It is interesting that there is all this talk about cheap iphones coming with multiple colors and the stock is not acting positively.</p>
<p>I am thinking of changing my intc strategy taking more of a short strangle approach than just long.</p>
<p>When I look at intc and aapl I see many similarities. Their profit margins are under attack.</p>
<p>Doct, wherever you are…</p>
<p>Next week…on Friday…</p>
<p>Spy and qqq are exdividend.</p>
<p>I know - I don’t have any spy calls although I plan on buying some spy 1/18/14 calls and put spreads starting today.</p>
<p>The problem with AAPL is that they are not executing. I would be fine with iPhones in bigger sizes and smaller sizes and more colors.</p>
<p>But where are they? Apple’s product-release cycle was fine when they had the best products out there and essentially no competition. Their competition is now releasing products at a torrid pace and they can get the innovations out there quickly. With AAPL, we have to wait 12-18 months for innovations to get into their products.</p>
<p>Intel, on the other hand, is executing.</p>
<p>BTW, Intel announced 20 nm flash this morning. Their previous product is 25 nm flash. The problem with flash and process is that you get higher error rates below 25 nm so 25 nm may be a limiting factor for flash memory.</p>
<p>Intel’s 20 nm flash is basically about 30% the speed of their 25 nm flash. It’s cheaper to make though and more dense. The speeds for 20 nm flash are 11,000 i/os per second compared to 37,000 i/os per second. Believe me, I couldn’t really tell the difference. I had a chat with another employee about this yesterday. I have 2nd generation flash in my laptop. It brought boot time from a minute down to 11 seconds. He told me that I could get it down to about six with third-generation flash. I said that the difference between six and eleven seconds compared to a minute is inconsequential to me. So Intel is innovating and executing. They have actually been doing that for many years. It’s only that they turned their attention to mobile several years ago and now are reaping the fruits of those efforts. Semiconductor companies are battleships - they are not easily turned.</p>
<p>I don’t think that Intel’s profit margins are under serious attack in the PC space. Nobody else can touch their stuff and their stuff is getting better at a rapid pace. Their problem is that their stuff is so good that people don’t need to replace it as often so they are spending money elsewhere. The current environment is that Intel is attacking ARMH, QCOM, and NVDA and it’s much more likely that Intel will succeed in the mobile market than that ARMH will succeed in Intel’s market. Intel spends seven times as much on R&D than the other guys and the fab companies combined. It’s not surprising that they can come up with better products.</p>
<p>Ok…</p>
<p>Razorsharp, I went to a market letter writer convention. I was about 19 years old.
I was a fan of Richard Ney. Ney thought the specialists were ripping off the public. He used to drive a car with license plates that said, “Wake Up” or something like that. Anyway, Ney was there. There were not many people at his booth. I remember thinking, “Why isn’t the public flooding his booth? Ney is the man”.</p>
<p>The Magic T guy was there. I can’t remember who else was there. It was fun. </p>
<p>There are similarities between the convention and investor conferences.
The convention was inexpensive.</p>
<p>You can get the information presented at conferences online, either in print or in video. What you can get at conferences is access and community. I went to one of those and it was fun but I don’t know if it was worth the time and travel. I don’t know that I picked up anything concrete that helped in my trading.</p>