For the last month, our server has been having a slew of nightmarish database issues. Our tech guy fixed all the problems, so now things up and running flawlessly again!
Looks like the recent credit and mortgage meltdowns have taken a toll on American Express (AXP). They are aggressively trying to land new business credit customers, so they are currently giving away FREE domestic round-trip airplane tickets if you sign up for their American Express Gold Business Card.
This offer expires August 31st, so act fast and get your free plane ticket.
If you haven’t already done so, sign up for SocialPicks and join The Bull Trader Group to share stock picks with me and other thebulltrader.com readers.
Covestor.com is a new Web 2.0 startup that tracks the performance of your brokerage account. You upload your transaction history to Covestor, and it breaks down your performance.
Then, others can see what stocks you are buying etc. If your performance is really good, people will pay $$ to see your trading activity, and Covestor will split the profits with you.
I’m always a big fan of new Internet startups, so I’m going to give out 10 Covestor invites to the first 10 people who comment on this post.
Stock Trading VI (6) officially launches today over at Stock Trading 101, and is now open for registration. Of course our community is involved, and there is no doubt we will win.
Registration Dates: Friday May 18th - Sunday May 20th 9:00 PM EST
Contest Dates: Monday May 20th - Friday May 25th
HOW TO REGISTER
To register, leave a comment with this post including:
One guess of what you think the NASDAQ Composite will close at next Friday the 25th of May… to the penny.
One stock pick for next week (include the ticker please, must be over $1 a share and be findable on yahoo finance!)
One SHORT stock pick for next week (include ticker, must be over $1 a share, yahoo finance requirement)
Note: You can chose to participate in just one, or two, or all three categories.
$200 PRIZE and Other Winners
Winners will be determined by the following:
Closest NASDAQ Close Guess to the actual close
Highest Return for the week on your stock
Highest Return for the week on your stock SHORT
Cash Grand Prize: If you can guess the NASDAQ close to the PENNY, Blain will give you $200 CASH. I was off by only $.30 two contests ago, and am the current record holder for this category!
Our blog is having trouble lately because last night, our SQL database, which contains all of our blogposts, was corrupted either by hacker or shoddy hosting.
Either way, I’m running the site off a backup from April 15. I’ll be posting up the blogs from April 15 to April 25 manually since I can retrieve them from my RSS newsletter emails.
Hey guys, thanks to your support, we are in the final round of the blog contest over at Derrich.com!
All we have to do is win this round, and we will be awarded the best finance blog award! Please vote for us! It only takes a few seconds and you will be helping us out tremendously.
This sounds too good to be true but I read somewhere that Zecco offers free trading. If anyone has ever used this service please post a comment and tell us about your expereince. I really want to change brokers but I am afraid that one of these brokers will go out of bussiness and take my money with them.
If anyone uses zecco, Ineractive brokers or any other service that is extreamly cheap post some comments. Thanks
SocialPicks is an online community of traders who share market information with eachother. It looks like it is still in invites only mode, so I will probably distribute a few of my invites to you guys over the next couple weeks. Leave me a comment if you really want an invite and I will try to do it.
TechCrunch recently covered the launch of SocialPicks, and go look and see who shows up in the screenshot ?!? *thanks to Michael Bina for this link!
Hedge fund managers can make an investor rich quicker than anyone else. Sometimes they can make him poor even faster. Amaranth Advisors, the Greenwich are some examples. They stumbled over wrong-way bets on natural gas. In September 2006, Amaranth was up 26%. And by October, it was facing a loss of $6.6 billion. Probably, the next Amaranth is waiting somewhere to happen.
Since 2000, the hedge funds world has more than doubled in size. Today, there are more than 9000 of these funds with combined assets of $1.34 trillion. Everyone is chasing these funds, which have become private pools of capital and allow managers to participate substantially in the investment returns they generate for clients.
A huge investment of $110.7 billion was recorded into these vehicles during the first nine months of 2006, more than twice in all of 2005. Since September, Morgan Stanley has purchased a hedge-fund firm and bought stakes in two. According to HFR and Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs Group has become the largest manager of hedge fund money since late 2005, with $29.5 billion in assets and certificate of deposit rates.
So many hedge funds have emerged in the markets that it is becoming difficult to generate standout profits. On September 30, the average hedge fund was up 7.1% in 2006. Investors would have got higher returns buying a mutual fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, which returned 8.5% through September. While hedge funds typically take a 20% cut of profits and charge a fee of 2% of assets, the Vanguard Institutional Index Fund charges expenses as low as 0.025% of assets.
Theodore Aronson, a principal of Philadelphia-based Aronson & Johnson & Ortiz, thinks there is a potential danger ahead. “You don’t have to go back to the tulip bulb mania to see how things could turn out,” he said. “It could be ugly.” Returns have started slackening and analyst think hedge funds may have a hard time hitting the investment goals of an investor.
US investors who had invested into stocks in Europe and Asia may soon find the best times are over. Two-thirds of the 116% return that investors got from the Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index since January 2002 has come from the decline of the dollar against the euro. The dollar reached a 20-month low against the euro and a 14-year low versus the British pound in the week ending December 1.
Now investors are facing a potential double whammy. The dollar’s weakness may restrain exports to the US, stocks around the world and hurting economies. And the currency’s slide might finish, eliminating the added kick for American investors.
Lincoln Anderson, chief investment office at Boston-based LPL Financial Services says, “If you are a US investor who invested in Europe, you’ve had tremendous outperformance since early 2002.” According to him, now such investors should “start cutting back on their overseas investments”.
The Stoxx 600’s 116% return in dollars since early 2002 contrasts with 39% in euros. In 2006, Germany’s Dax Index is up 30% in dollars and 15% in euros. The France’s CAC 40 Index is up 25% in dollars and 11% in euros. In Spain, the IBEX 35 Index has risen 43% in dollars and 27% in euros. Outside of the euro region, the FTSE 100 Index in the UK has climbed 7.2% in pounds and 23% in dollars.
US investors have also done better in Asia. Japan’s Nikkei 225 Stock Average has gained 3.7% in dollars and 1.3% in yen. In many cases, Americans’ dollar-based gains outside the US outpace their earnings at home. In 2006, The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has risen 12%. US investors have invested $106 billion into mutual funds that invest in stocks outside the US. This is up 40% from the same period in 2005.
According to Michael Metcalfe, a senior strategist at State Street Global Markets in London, at the moment, the windfall effect of dollar weakness would encourage US investors to continue to lose their home-market bias. A weaker dollar would make imports into the US more expensive, hurting exporters around the world and thus depressing international stock markets.
Well, everyone. My name is Brett. I am 23 years old and going to chiropractic school. I was thinking about taking my loan money and putting it in to the market but my parents would kill me. I have been doing this for a couple years now and have improved 10 fold. Out of my last 50 transactions, only 8 were losers. Some of my great picks that i got into were NTRI @14, Grow @ 23.50, Hans @ 50 (before spilt) But unfortuanley i sold wayyy too earley on all three of those. I hope I can keep this up and improve. I swtiched my trading style and now try to find charts that are similar to other charts that went up. This change of trading has been more lucrative for me. I shall share this with you guys as well. So lets make money!
I am looking to see if someone who is comfortable with technical analysis would like to write for this blog? The job would consist of posting 3-5 annotated technical analysis stock charts every week (as I have been doing in the past).
This is a paid position (I’m just a poor college student, so don’t expect much haha), and I can afford to pay you a few dollars per post. If you are interested in this position, please leave a comment (make sure to fill in the email field) and we can talk about the details!
The pressure on Pfizer to improve its financial performance intensified after the announcement that the company has ended development of a key drug Torcetrapib. Now Pfizer, the world’s largest drug maker, is likely to slash staff and accelerate merger and licensing deals. Pfizer took the decision after an advice from independent board monitoring a study for cholesterol treatment Torcetrapib that work be ended because of unexpected number of deaths.
Analyst differed on how much Pfizer stock would fall. According to Barbara Ryan, an analyst at Deutche Bank, the dividend yield of around 4% would keep shares from a free fall. However, some analyst estimated the stock could plunge to $20 a share.
Pfizer had been counting on the drug to revitalize stagnant sales that have been hurt by a number of patent expirations on key products. Pfizer was spending around $800 million to develop Torcetrapib, which was supposed to fill the void when its best-selling drug, Lipitor, is going to lose patent protection in either 2010 or 2011. “This is obviously unfortunate because this was the biggest opportunity in their pipeline,” said Barbara Ryan.
Two months ago, Pfizer announced it would detail plans in January to change the company into a more nimble organization and would go beyond the program announced in 2005 to cut $3 billion in expenses by 2008. Patent expirations are expected to cost the company $14 billion annually between 2005 and 2007.
Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler said the company’s speed of transformation would accelerate because of the loss of Torcetrapib although he didn’t give any details. Last week, Pfizer announced to cut 2200 jobs of US sales force. Pfizer employs roughly 1,00,000 people.
According to Ryan, Pfizer may lay off as many as 10,000 people in near future. She expects Pfizer to increase its annual dividend from 96 cents to $1.10 per share in the next few weeks in the hopes of putting a floor on the stock.
