Subprime Insight

I missed out on predicting most of the month of March due to my spring break being right in the middle of the month. However, I can finally come to my weekly article with rest and confidence as many of my predictions have, to my surprise, eerily come true all too soon. I’d like to remind everyone why it is so important to make general predictions. As I said about a month ago: if you know where you are going, you know what to expect on the way there. Right now, the Market is using an old map to get to a place they’ve never been before (15,000 on the Dow).

• CORRECT: An inter meeting fed cut is likely to occur or a dramatic fed cut during the meeting (75 basis point).
  • This could be put on hold as inflation concerns, due to the weak dollar, underscore Fed moves. But now we know the Fed could give a rat’s ass about inflation.
  • I think it’s interesting how the market FINALLY agrees with me. It took them long enough. I’ve been saying this for the past month.

Comment on the Prediction:

When everyone said 50 basis point cut, I said 75. When everyone said 100 basis point cut, I said 75. Remember, I said 75 basis point cut back in the beginning of February, so that is foresight. I also put the bond ETF TLT in my original crash portfolio due to this prediction and it has outperformed all other bond ETFs out there. That is amazing. Why didn’t I go with a 100 basis point cut? Strategy. If the Fed cut 100 basis points, it would lose 25 basis points of future “ammunition,” as it is being called nowadays. Furthermore, giving the market less than what they expected is a bullish sign. It is the Fed telling the market, “things aren’t as bad as you think, really.” However, anyone that knows anything knows that completely false.

• CORRECT: The next time we drop to 12,000 we won’t stop there.
  • It just might be this week! If we don’t get there within two-three weeks, I don’t think we’ll test new lows.
  • All the cool kids on the block are talking about, “testing new lows.” The Market is simply comprised a bunch of followers.

Comment on Prediction:

I hit this right on the nose again. I’m even amazed how accurate the time frame I gave was. I said on March 3^rd that we could be seeing new lows within the week and said that if we didn’t cross that 12000 barrier within the next weeks, we wouldn’t test the lows. Now, two weeks later, it just so happened that we retested the lows within the week. Then, I advised wrote about why I was buying Apple call options by the end of the week because we would be seeing a rising market in the near future.

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I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I started this blog to, one, inform the public of the terrible economic crisis that is coming and, two, to make money. If anyone has been following my portfolio, they will see that I have changed the positions a substantial amount. This is because as the days pass by, I learn more about the market. I’ll be posting the to-date returns and yearly adjusted rates regularly. The yearly adjusted rates, which will be very high, will be presented just to make fun of the market. The yearly adjusted rates are completely fictional. Disclaimer: I do not work on Wall Street, I am not a CFA and I plan to invest in some of these investments. This is just my subprime insight.

Here is the performance of the portfolio on Friday, February 29th 2008 after two days of entering into the positions:

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If you looked at my original crash portfolio weighting, I had TSCM at 5%. I took the stock off the portfolio this week but I didn’t explain why. After all, why would I buy a tech share when I’m so convinced the market is going down?

I’m a tech guy. I made all the money I ever have in tech. Until the beginning of this year, I was up 150% in 1 and a half years. I’ll eventually put up my returns for all to see. I didn’t give a crap about “subprime” or financial losses. I thought it was well contained, but, boy, was I proven wrong.

I started writing this blog after I noticed trading patterns fundamentally changing in the tech sector. How did I know? Intuition. The price fluctuation I was seeing in tech shares were way too big and counter previous stock market behavior. I’ve become weary of this phenomenon called “cashing out” and it’s effect after January 2nd, the start of the new tax year. Basically, investors wait until Jan 2nd to place trades after siting on them for a month or so to stall tax payments for a whole year. It’s really smart but common sense stuff.

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I missed the opening of the market this week, but I’ll still go through predictions this week. I want to move away from the, “it will happen this week” predictions and move to concrete important predictions. Think about it like this: if you know where you are going, you know what to expect on the way there. Right now, the Market is using an old map to get to a place they’ve never been before (15,000 on the Dow). Let’s Look at last weeks predictions:

• RIGHT: Stocks will trade lower this week as February put options expired last Friday (We are in a C Wave, also).
  • Reason: The Bearish Pennant! Here’s a good article on it. I noticed it last week and was going to write a post about it, but this stuff is common trading knowledge so everyone writes about it.
  • Economic Data being released! Since I caught onto the whole subprime scandal, I made an intuitive deduction that the end of February would see the next collapse in the market. Why? This is the point when the market gets hard data that shows just how bad the economy is. Next week we’ll see no second guessing due to conflicting numbers: they’ll all just bleed red. Look for the Case-Shiller index to crash the party for the bulls.

Comment on the Prediction:
I am completely amazed at the stupidity of the market: it has no idea what is going on. For this reason, I’m going to stop predicting when it will go down, but price targets for what is going to go up when the market goes down. Last week’s rally due to foreign exchange risk will not be happening again. It is very clear that central banks are going to let their currencies appreciate against the dollar. This is not good for foreign investors. Costs for them will increase if they are going to invest in the US stock market.

• WRONG: Bond insurers will be split.
  • Well, that’s what the market rallied on Friday. I’ll go with “consensus” here.
  • Market will probably have a nice bear rally on the news. Remember: the splitting of bond insurers does not solve any problem besides saving the muni market.

Comment on Prediction:

Oh the bond insurers! First off, I have been predicting an announcement of splitting. NOT the actual splitting of the bond insurers. That takes years. I hope you guys would give me enough credit, but if not I wanted to clarify that. Alas, that announcement did not come. Second, I found an interesting page on why they were justified such a high rating. Moody’s uses the Great Depression for stress tests. I think with this in mind and the fact Pfizer got it ratings cut, Moody’s is implying a bailout. THIS IS COMPLETE SPECULATION BY ME. This is a hunch, unlike my other predictions.

Now for Future Predictions:

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I don’t necessarily believe wave theory is as good as technical analysis, but he has some very interesting points people need to consider.

Added on January 22th, 2008:

Added February 7th on YouTube:

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Last week I posted two predictions for the week. My predictions had an amazing 0% success rate. We’ll review the evidence I had for the predictions I made and make revised ones for the coming week.

Predicted Last Week:

• WRONG: Stocks will trade lower this week as February put options expired last Friday (We are in a C Wave, also).
  • I argued this after noticing C had major resistance at 25.oo on Friday. Surely preventing options from entering into the money most have been affecting other stocks. With a large interest gone in sustaining prices above 25.00 at C, I thought that would hold the same for other Dow stocks. Sure enough, C finally did break through the 25.00 barrier but only to be brought back up by the Dow’s miraculous 200 point gain on Friday at 3:15.
• WRONG: Bond insurers will be split.
  • I was just going after what Spitzer said at the end of last week. He said bond insurers needed to finalize on a bail out plan within the coming days. He outlined a couple of alternatives. Surprisingly, the same news a week later before the market closed was good enough for a 200 point gain. This after Reuters reported that MBIA’s re-insurer had its rating cut.

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I recently wrote on the topic of oil and gold. I argued we should be seeing a bull market for both mainly due to the weak dollar. This goes against the grain to what people are touting as their main excuse: demand. I already pointed out that the evidence suggests the opposite. Here is an article on Indian housewives spending less on gold. Here is an article on oil inventories going up. Here are two views on oil and gold:

Bloomberg: $1200 gold in 3 months due to weak dollar.

TheStreet: Why gold is worth waiting for: pushed up demand.

I have a personal attachment to both companies as I know people who work for each company. However, I think the weak dollar is the reason for these investments decoupling from equities.

My primary goal in starting this blog is to gather important information on the markets to inform and to potentially profit. For the past couple of months I’ve been playing catch up with the market: trying to figure out what information has been properly priced in and which hasn’t. For example, the large financial firms have experienced most of the price action they are going to get. Disclaimer: I have never traded either gold or oil or followed their price actions for any substantial period of time.

With that said, if you agree that:

• With every Fed cut, the dollar devalues and that for the foreseeable future we will get more. I’m thinking 1% Fed Funds rate by the end of summer as treasury yields go down below 2%.

• Oil is only traded in dollars. So every foreign country with a currency that has appreciated against the dollar has seen oil prices rise slower than that in the US.

• Using correlation trading, an ounce of gold has historically bought you 17 barrels of oil. At current valuation gold would buy you 10 barrels. Check out this article on the gold oil swap.

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