The Tasgall Group

Whoever is over at Ticker Sense has decided to start a survey of bloggers. They hope to “become a convenient barometer for the consensus outlook of the blogosphere?s new wave of independent market analysts.”
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Now might be a good time to start thinking about a CD or bond ladder for your short-term or “safe money”. With the FOMC still raising short-term rates, long term rates have had plenty of time to move up as much as possible…

Why ladder? Let’s look at three scenarios: (more…)

I just read one of the IITM Weekly Emails and it described an Efficiency Trading System that might be worth following.

The beginning of the article:

This system was created for someone with good market knowledge but not a lot of time. It was designed for someone who can do a thorough analysis of the markets each weekend, who doesn?t need to spend much time on the markets.

The system he describes is very similar to the one put forward in Safe Strategies for Financial Freedom, but it looks like Tharp updated it to be a little more sophisticated in the weekly email.

I am already a subscriber to the weekly email (it’s free), but you guys might want to subscribe to follow along and see how his trades work out.

I just saw that someone is trying to put together a currency ETF.? It sounds vaguely like the Uberman Portfolio, but I have a feeling that UP is doing something different.

You can read about it at the Abnormal Returns article on the topic.

With the markets going down in price and up in volatility, I tend to ponder the nature of risk.? Here’s a quote from management guru Peter Druker:

Every decision is risky: It’s a commitment of present resources to an uncertain and unknown future. Risks can be minimized if you know when a decision is necessary, how to clearly define a problem and tackle it directly, and that you’ll have to make compromises in the end. You haven’t made a decision until you’ve found a way to implement it.

He was talking about business decisions, but I think it applies to investing or trading decisions quite well…

I think it brings the point home quickly — when we buy a stock or other financial instrument, we’re committing present resources (money, margin, time/our attention) to an unknown future in the hopes of accomplishing our goal (to make money on the trade/investment).

Do you know how to define your problem?? How you’ll implement your decisions?? I know I need to do some work in that area…

Apparently ProShares is now offering inverse and double-inverse ETFs.? That means you can short an index with leverage by buying an ETF.? Ideal for retirement accounts where you can’t short very easily and don’t want to be tied down to the end-of-day trading of ProFunds’s inverse mutual funds.

Read more about it from The Big Picture’s post on the topic.

Check out the latest CD rates at ING Direct… I copied a few of the rates here:

• 6 mo – 5%
• 12 mo – 5.25%
• 24 mo – 5.30%
• 26 mo – 5.25%
• 60 mo – 5.25%

So, if you’re shopping for CDs, ING will pay you more to hold your money for 24 months than to hold it for an even longer term. In economic parlance, that’s an inverted yield curve. (You can see a similar inverted curve at VirtualBank where the big winner is the 6 month CD at a 5.55% APY.)

Nevermind that the real bond market is also inverted right now. We can discuss the implications of that in a different post…

There can be (or should be) a distinction between “setup” for a trade, and the “entry” signal for a trade. For example, with our PowerRatings, having a high rating might not be the only criteria for entry… instead, you may want to consider a high rating a “setup”, and then wait for a entry signal (e.g., the price moving in your favor) before plunging into a position.

This could be accomplished several ways, and should be tested before using (after all, maybe this extra step causes you to lose money). One way would be to watch the shares at open, and only go long if they’ve already started an upside move. Another way would be to place a stop buy order just above the close of the prior day — if the price goes down, your stop buy never gets filled;if it goes up, you get filled, though you may face more slippage with a stop order. (more…)

Has anyone else noticed the difference lately in the Nasdaq Composite ($IXIC or $COMPQ depending on the source) and the Nasdaq 100 ($NDX – tracked by the ETF QQQQ)?

The composite is making higher lows since mid-June, but the Nasdaq 100 is testing its lows for the year today. The news (CNN, NPR, CNBC, etc.) all seem to quote the composite index instead of the NDX, even though the NDX index is more heavily traded (via NDX options and QQQQ). (more…)

I just ran across a horribly wrong search result, only to find a stock symbol with the most amusing company name I’ve seen in a while. The stock symbol WYDY is for “Who’s Your Daddy Inc“, purveyor of energy drinks by the same name.

Don’t bother considering it though, it’s market cap is an amazingly small $9.5 million dollars (yes million with an “M”). With revenue of $250k and a current cash position of $1,000 (wait… I have more cash than that in my bank account!) it’s amazing that they even went public at all.

You’ll find the shares trading over the counter as they can’t even stay above $1/share to stay listed on the Nasdaq.