The Tasgall Group

Interested in watching the housing situation in painstaking, constantly updating detail?

Look no farther than HousingTracker.net. They have aggregated a fair amount of publicly available data for your train-wreck watching enjoyment.

Here is a chart of the affordability index for Raleigh:

And the inventory for Raleigh:

Raleigh is starting to be affected by the nation-wide slowdown, but has not been hit as hard as a lot of other places…

The last two weeks have been quite the opposite of each other… Here is the WSJ’s weekly roundup of market performance for the weeks ending 12/2 (first chart) and 11/25 (second chart).

See anything notable? The best performers one week are the worst performers the next week (and vice versa).

Bill Cara recently noted that the efficient pricing mechanism of the markets has broken. Volatility is the result, and we have plenty of that.

While in a Marriott for Thanksgiving, I was quite surprised when I saw this name on my hotel’s complimentary conditioner…

(We might need a new topic for “waaaay off topic”…)

Here is a website listing all the REOs for Countrywide Financial in North Carolina.? REOs are the post-foreclosure properties where the owner has defaulted and the bank has collected the property as collateral on the unpaid loan.

CFC’s REOs in North Carolina

The official list is also available from Countrywide’s website.

So I’ve always had gripes about mediocre software… the latest is with Quicken 2008 and it’s constant flickering within the program. Intuit (the makers of Quicken) failed horribly with their GUI re-write, and it shows.

I actually contacted customer support at Intiut, and their responses were:

• Use less data — the more stuff you keep in quicken, the slower it runs
• Try downgrading your video driver
• Try turning down your video card’s hardware acceleration

I’m not making this up — these were their suggestions. To be fair, I tried all three suggestions. No improvement with the flicker, so I wrote back to them.

Here is their verbatim response:

Jason, regarding screen flickering we face the issue on 2007 and 2008, we are not sure when the issue will be resolved but the issue has already been notified to our concern department.

Jason, I hope you understand that this is an issue with the Product and there is nothing further I could have done to resolve this for you.

Wow, bad technical support, and a completely defeatist attitude. Bravo! If only I could create a $10 billion company and run it so poorly.

The BigPicture has another book available for a free chapter or three…? this time it’s for The Panic of 1907.

The 1907 market panic tends to be forgotten with the great depression following 20 years later, but it was a time of great stories and great events.? From Mr. Big Picture’s intro:

I found the book, published exactly a century after the original event, to have some rather interesting parallels to today.

The significance of the 1907 Panic as an economic event went far beyond the mere crash and recovery.? It eventually led to the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Sorry about that random posting earlier today… Call it a technical oops.

For anyone who is interested, I’ve started using MS Word 2007 for writing some of my blog postings. It nicely handles uploading and resizing images, which is a killer feature… though I can’t get it to do the lightbox effect directly.

All together, Word does a good job… unless it accidentally posts to the wrong blog when you click on “publish as draft”.

I’ve been checking out a blog called Bespoke recently, and it’s a pretty good financial blog.? They have frequent, well informed, and fairly short tidbits about things they notice in the markets.

Today, they had an interesting tidbit…? Van Gogh: The Art World’s Sub Prime Paper?

Today, Sotheby’s (BID) is down nearly 30% after a weak auction last night where a Van Gogh that was estimated to sell for between $28-$35 million received no bids.

Here’s a 3 month chart of BID:

Ouch!

From over at The Big Picture, we have two interesting graphics that show the difficulty in the mortgage and housing markets.

The ongoing APR mortgage reset process isn’t expected to peak until some time in 2008. Following that, we see a new surge in resets, as Option Adjustable Mortgages begin to come up in 2010-11. Note that these are non-subprime mortgages.

After two up days, and plenty of celebration over Apple and similar tech profits it’s easy to think that Friday’s drop was just a single bad day, overdone because of option expiration and what not… But one thing to keep an eye on over the next few days is the volume on up or down days…

Over the last week, we’ve seen what technicians would call a low-volume bounce. To the right is a segment of the chart of the last two weeks of the Dow 30. The biggest volume came on down days, and yesterday and today, both up days, had relatively low volume.

I’d want to see volume return on the up days before declaring the market in good health…

It’s also worth noting that the banking sector has been under-performing the rest of the market. John suggested recently that this might be a good leading indicator that the market still faces trouble, and I agree. This is another red flag for me…

What do you guys think? Is is time to be bullish due to the market’s ability to rally even with constant subprime fiascoes and credit market meltdowns? Or is this just a sucker’s rally?