These credit card co's are gonna crush the consumer over the summer by pulling credit lines. Short this market into oblivion imo.
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-credit-card-debt-vs-median-household-income-2009-5 great chart.
Estimated impact on CC issuers is 10% of revenues with the new card bill. COF already off some 30% from the high, holding on short here, thinking there some more gains to come. We still is deep recession and congress is not shy about legislation that hits credit growth and hurts the economy, imagine when the recession is over, they are going to hit financial services maybe for a whole decade. FDIC one time fee also, etc http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1131252985&play=1
Yeah, you can equalize risk by position sizing, so only the risk/reward ratio of the position matters, not the absolute market risk. Bear in mind that with a better ratio you can take more risk per trade. I agree some compromise has to be made. Otherwise you'd only trade once or twice a decade. However, there are some good "long-term" trades which are just wrong for a while because of timing. Not all pullbacks are noise.
Yeah but unlike poker you can hedge against the nuts with OTM options. Imagine you have a hand that can only lose to 2 cards, wouldn't you buy insurance if someone offered it at a price of 5% above fair value? Also there's an assumption there was no way to predict a potential squeeze. I agree predicting the magnitude was hard, but don't agree there were no signals on potential direction change. The high level of fear and the Pandit announcement were enough to at least hedge or profit-take, even if staying net short. In my opinion it was possible for bears to keep the drawdown fairly low. Obviously that would be the ideal, not necessarily the reality, but isn't it worth at least aiming for that?
I agree that the rally was predictable, the problem was that every rally was weak so I made the decision to ride it out as not to avoid missing in some kind of WB type event, a crash, bondholder swaps, nationalization, the plan was to use SPY as a hedge. My usual plan was just to cover everything however covering WB a few days before its failure made me doubt that plan, that was a mistake in retrospect As far as using options, its not my game so whatever I do there I would have to be careful. That why I will address the drawdown by running long short positions. I'm actually thinking the long Brazil short american garbage was I high confidence trade(I would not take profits soon) I could have put on back in mar, it would have worked as brazil put a 40% rally. The problem was I didnt believe in the rally, everything just kept going down and down and I found hard to buy anything, I allowed myself to get influenced by all the gloom and doom. I wont make that mistake again
these quiet markets favor the pumpers. The weak USD can cut both ways and may lead to rally in stocks, so I'm waiting for confirmation of weak eco data to signal a crack in equity markets. So i'm laying low until the june 5th payroll #'s. Without momentum, alot of these longs will fold quickly and market will unwind quickly imo.
Chanos back at shorting financials and is singing my song that bank earnings are infested of one time items http://www.cnbc.com/id/30884479
Today, there are so much leverage in the financial system and by extension, the market. Both retail and institutional market participants borrow and employ leveraged derivates (e.g. options, CFDs, futures, etc). The problem with leverage is that, when the market goes against you, your losses are magnified and you find that you are suddenly short of cash (to repay the debts, obligation, margin calls, collateral, etc). Sometimes, the only way to increase your cash level is to liquidate whatever you have- the good investments along with the bad. If enough people are in the same situation as you, this will result in widespread indiscriminate selling in the market. The folks in power in Washington and on Wall Street want to pretend that the current global financial crisis -- you know, the one that reduced household net worth in the United States by $11.2 trillion in 2008, according to the Federal Reserve -- was an accident caused by some unfortunate confluence of greed and asleep-at-the-switch regulators.
did you see UK banks warn on lower loan #'s? not because of loan standards but simply no one wants a loan.lol The one thing that still scares me about the financials is they could fudge the Q2 #'s with M2M changes and pump the stocks again. And there was talk of backdating M2M changes for previous qts. That would take these stocks to a whole other level if it were to happen. And lets not forget the PPIP hype in June.