lmao... same here... 4.5trillion i think it was right??? lol or something ridiculous as that... in any event i wouldnt believe in any of that... and if it where theres two ways of looking at it, one theyll prolly bleed it into the market and not just plunked down a large chunk of money... and 2. what are the chances (if youre sitting on down longs) that theyll pick yours to pump into??? in any event... i could be dead wrong... what do i know.. what do any of us know???
If I where a company with a pension plan that held company shares, I would play games with the timing. If I knew that the next quarterly report was going to be good, I fund the pension before reporting and reap the gains. If I knew that the next quarterly report was going to be bad, I fund the pension after reporting and get a lower basis and prop up my stock price. I'm sure such a tactic would be considered illegal, but I wonder how much oversight there is on the matter. In reality, I'd bet that the entry of pension money is spread out relatively uniformly. Even if every company funded their pensions on the same day, there would a range of delays before the money made it into the market. There may be some concentrations of funding around the quarterly and yearly reporting cycle. Anybody know the ERISA regs for correcting underfunded pensions???. I doubt there will be much of an 401k/IRA funding bump this year -- fewer people with unexpectedly high taxable income and extra dollars to put into retirement accounts. Also the IRA bump is even more spread out than is pension funding -- individual investors take even longer to decide how to move money from cash into investments. Cheers, Traden4Alpha