Sunday, November 9, 2014

11/9/14 A piece of plastic on a round revolving tray



(a) 'Modern Day Magic.' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gcjHUBYMoQ Odds are this will be the first time you've heard this. Made the playlist on Detroit's WMJC quite a bit in the summer of 1976. 

(b) 'I Don't Know Where To Start.' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i77NbZgkCK0 IMO the late Eddie Rabbitt's best composition. 

(c) 'Color My World.' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcZm4oRCz8k There weren't many rock songs in the Sixties that featured the piano in a non-percussion role. An older cousin taught me this Chicago standard during a weekend stay in 1970. I did the same with my youngest son a few years ago.

29 comments:

  1. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hong-kong-shanghai-stock-connect-to-start-nov-17-2014-11-09-19914711

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    1. I'm starting to feel as if I'm always a step or two ahead of market moves. I front-ran the miners by a day or two. Now it's emerging markets.

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    2. In the zone. Very nice. It's a feeling of rhythm I love having when it comes. Almost like being one with nature.

      Thanks for the feedback on the towns south of SF. Been looking into some of them. Not sure I can convince my wife's parents to head a lot further than south of Monterey but I'll try my best. They want to live within 30 minutes or so of us and my wife wants to move contingent upon them moving. It's all just a work in progress at this point. The Santa Cruz area sounds nice but maybe a little too college townish. Love the idea of having beaches and redwoods nearby and being within 90 minutes of a great city.

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    3. Thanks for the kind words, tof, but undeserved. What I meant to say is that I've been selling out of my positions 1-2 days ahead of when they take off.

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  2. XOP - Will this be the week everyone loads up the XOP, or is there another leg down in store? Seems too easy?

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  3. MEMP is a hottie, RES is no slacker either.

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  4. ORI - A rocket ship. ORB - Well, maybe not for a while.

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  5. BALT- Would be a sweet little higher low here.

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  6. Interesting article about Tony Robbins. I never really knew what to think of him. I think I subconsciously associated him with just another cheesy infomercial guy from the 90's...

    http://fortune.com/2014/10/30/tony-robbins-best-advice-executive-coach/

    "Paul Tudor Jones was in a slump. It was 1993 and Jones, then 39, was already regarded as a full-fledged master of the hedge fund universe. His legend had been established when he correctly anticipated the market plunge in October 1987 and made huge profits when most of his peers lost a bundle. Jones earned his investors a 200% return that year. But six years later he was going through a “rough patch” that had hurt his confidence, and his friend Pat Riley, the Hall of Fame basketball coach who was then leading the New York Knicks, recommended that Jones reach out to Robbins. “Pat told me Tony would light a fire inside me, but in a very thoughtful and understanding way,” says Jones. The first thing Robbins had him do was get in the best physical shape of his life, because so much of winning is mental and attitudinal. “By controlling my body, which for me was an easy win, the path was then much easier to control my mind,” says Jones. “He was right.”

    The next step was to delve into the secrets of Jones’s past success. Robbins helped Jones identify what made him profitable in his trading—the behaviors and circumstances under which he did best. “I had been a trader for more than 17 years,” says Jones. “But I really had no road map as to how I made money for my clients. I thought it was mostly instinctual, but it isn’t.” Working with Tony over the years, says Jones, has allowed him to get “clarity on where my ‘alpha’ or edge originates from, and that has helped both my longevity as a trader and peace of mind as a person.” Jones says his biggest challenge was overcoming a bad tendency to trade reactively and emotionally instead of developing a planned execution scheme with risk and reward propositions that are carefully thought through. Robbins helped him build a system. “I think that planning process alone has added 5% or more to my returns every year,” says Jones.

    Over the two decades that Robbins has been working with Jones, the investor has made money every single year, including in 2008 when the U.S. stock market dropped nearly 40%. To maintain his edge, Robbins and Jones communicate daily. Jones sends Robbins a couple of paragraphs summarizing what happened that day in his trading. He also dictates a set of 12 to 15 criteria that he and Robbins measure together so that Robbins can monitor them. “I know the patterns,” says Robbins. “I know what to do to intercede so that we don’t run into a significant challenge. If we do, we can shut it down quickly if at all possible.”

    Robbins says he establishes metrics for all his coaching clients—some more, some less. “It’s just like when I take over a business,” he says. “If you don’t measure, you don’t have a clue what you’re doing.” He has them track metrics of their psychological and emotional state. “I give them a set of qualitative measurements that they give me feedback on, so I get a sense of where they are psychologically,” he says. They also agree on certain key indicators to measure progress in their businesses. “Psychologically, I’ll measure a person’s weight every night,” says Robbins. “If this person starts gaining weight, if I see that something’s happening with them physically, I can see that something is happening emotionally. Within a few seconds, I can go, ‘Four pounds! What the hell happened over the weekend?’” For this level of personal guidance, Robbins charges Jones and his other elite clients $1 million a year, he says, plus a piece of the upside of their business. (Robbins says he has offered many times to stop charging Jones, but the trader insists on keeping the arrangement in place.) Of course, he gets compensated in other ways too. Going deep with Jones and other highly successful businesspeople is a powerful way to achieve what Robbins likes to call “mastery.”"

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  7. Buying a stock for your portfolio is just like buying a new car, it loses value as soon as you sign the paperwork and drive it off the lot.

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  8. KWK - The verdict is in, dead as Kelsy's nuts.

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  9. GM - Probably a decent entry here under $31 but what if the market sells off from these levels?

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  10. Given the volume in FCAU lately there's no way institutions have even begun the process of building positions ahead of the Ferrari IPO. The papers for the IPO are being worked on right now and Marchionne said on the last conf call he planned on beginning a road show some time this month. That's the near term catalyst. Last year Ferrari did about $350 Million in net income. This year their production was up about 5% so I'd expect NI to be somewhere in the $370 range or so. With talk of growing production about 40 to 50% in the next few years, coupled with it being one of the world's most premium brands, I think it wouldn't be outlandish to expect a $10-12 Billion valuation, or about 20-25X 2016 NI. I'm interested in seeing what they discuss as far as growth strategy...whether or not its rolling out more Ferrari Worlds like the one in Abu Dhabi or if they plan on pushing more licensing stuff for kids toys like Caterpillar has done so well over the years or something else. On the low side I think a $7 to $8 Billion valuation is reasonable. Either way, you're talking about a remaining equity value of $2 to $7 Billion for a company with the potential to generate $4-6 Billion in Net Income within 3 years and doing $120 Billion+ in revenues.

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  11. Scaling back into miners, which have fallen off the wagon and are backsliding this morning in the -5% range.

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  12. Not sure what happened to energy today. Many of the stocks were up nicely went I went out, but now quite negative. Price of oil and gas down too.

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    1. Yep, mystery to me as well, except $US is up some.

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  13. Part of me thinks a long position in TZA is good right here for the next 2 weeks or so.

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  14. I put on a short position in IWM at $116.73 using some margin, mainly as a hedge.

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    1. Not really looking to do much with this and will prob take off before end of day. I think the odds of every single index being at new all time highs before the year end is pretty high, just concerned about the near term bullishness.

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  15. BID - Earnings response indicates improved mood.

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  16. BXE - There's a sort of gap up around $4.40 area, remember the $4.4x price target?

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  17. The market, in its inimitable way, delivers the 'impossible.' 75% of Friday's gains in the mining sector evaporated today. Emerging markets, which opened strong on last night's announcement re the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connection, has faded to a +0.3% gain going into the close.

    (a) Reopening RYPMX (Rydex Precious Metals) at the close.
    (b) Reopening RYWVX (Rydex 2x Emerging Markets) at the close.

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  18. Looks like my stop on IWM short was hit while out to lunch. Sold at $116.9

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  19. FWIW, Hussman stili extremely bearish "but under current conditions, we view the investment environment for stocks as being among a handful of the most hostile points in history."

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  20. BALT- Take a look at this TOF

    http://www.conferencecalltranscripts.org/summary2/?id=1254531

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