Mac Slavo submits:Good times will not be returning any time soon.We continue to lose jobs month over month. And, while the statistics being released are showing a slow down, this is basically a fabrication. There are thousands of people falling off of unemployment compensation each week — none of them are reflected in the official numbers. Shadowstats.com estimates unemployment is above 20%. Take it for what you will, but these numbers are rapidly approaching the unemployment rate during the last well known depression.Complete Story »
China Real Estate Information Inc. (CRIC), the Chinese real estate market research leader, floated 18 million IPO shares at $12, the lower end of its proposed price range, this Thursday.This company combines together CRIC, the real estate information and consulting service unit of E-House (EJ), and LeJu, the housing portal of Sina Corp (SINA), the biggest Internet portal in China. Both units are dominant in their respective markets. They can share a broader customer base when merged and their synergy is quite visible. What interests me, though, is not the business, about which I am very positive by the way, but how the deal gets structured. The following statements appear in the prospectus: In April 2008, CRIC BVI, through our subsidiary E-House (China) Information Technology Service Limited, or EIT, together with SINA, formed a joint venture, China Online Housing Technology Corporation, or China Online Housing, to build and operate a leading real estate website in China. EIT holds 34% of the equity interest in the joint venture.Complete Story »
David Fry (ETF Digest) submits: October 16, 2009 So says Elizabeth Warren, in charge of overseeing the US TARP program. And she seems more than a little frustrated by what her role is, as told in this Yahoo Finance video. Is this a shocking admission? Her candidness is but the facts aren’t. Complete Story »
John M. Mason submits: '“Super Freakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (HarperCollins Publishers, 2009) is the follow-up to their enormously popular book “Freakonomics.” Need one say more? The theme of both books is incentives. Why? Because, as they emphasize right from the start, people respond to incentives. And how people respond to incentives is what Levitt and Dubner find interesting. Of course, Levitt is an economist and, as the authors explained in their first book, economics is the study of incentives. At least this is how more and more economists are now defining the content of economics. (The older view was that economics was the study of how scarce resources are allocated, but that definition had to do with how markets achieve equilibrium, something that microeconomists are less interested in today.) Complete Story »
Hickey and Walters (Bespoke) submit: As a market-cap weighted index, the biggest companies in the S&P 500 have a bigger impact on performance than the smallest companies.Below we highlight the year-to-date performance of the S&P 500 in both weighted and unweighted forms. The unweighted index gives every stock a 1/500th share of the index, and the year-to-date performance is simply the average of all of the stocks. As shown, the S&P 500 unweighted index is up nearly twice as much as the weighted index (38.95% vs 20.42%) in 2009. This means the biggest companies in the index have significantly underperformed the smaller ones.Complete Story »
Greentech Media submits: By Michael KanellosThe nuclear debate is heating up in Maryland. UniStar Energy, a joint venture between France's EDF (EDFEF.PK) and a local utility, is seeking approval for a 1.6-gigawatt power plant in the state, according to VentureBeat, as well as a portion of the $18.5 billion in funds for advanced nuclear research. Alhough UniStar has obtained key approval from some federal and state agencies, opponents say it will give a company owned by a foreign government too much say in rates (even though EDF is already involved in a few other joint ventures in the U.S. like Enxco and has a strong safety record).Complete Story »
Bill Luby submits: Vance at VIX Based Trading runs a blog devoted largely to using the VIX as a market indicator and as a trading vehicle. I only recently discovered the blog, but have been impressed by the content. As a matter of fact, my favorite post so far just happened to pop up on my screen a few minutes ago.Titled Pseudo Buy-Write on VIX – Long 10 Oct Calls, Short 22.5 Oct Calls, the author describes an innovative way to approximate a VIX buy-write strategy using a vertical spread.Complete Story »
Calafia Beach Pundit submits: Here are my favorite charts of the Federal budget situation. Things continue to deteriorate, and they have reached levels that were never before thought possible. In the post-war period, tax collections have never been weaker as a percent of GDP. Similarly, spending has never been higher. As a result the deficit now exceeds 11% of GDP.If there is anything good about this situation, it is this: all a smart politician needs to do is to hold these charts up to the TV cameras, much as Ross Perot did in his heyday, and show the public that we are on an unsustainable course; that we need a major rethink about how government should be managing our economy.Complete Story »
Tim Iacono submits: Remember those 2005-era animations of how the Miami skyline was expected to change over the next five or ten years given all the plans to build condos?Well, it's not exactly working out the way many local real estate experts envisioned a few years back, as indicated in this Bloomberg report, one in a long and growing list of stories that contain two important 2009-era words - "Trump" and "lawsuit."Complete Story »
Gary Gordon submits: Who doesn’t appreciate a good analogy? State Street ETFs are to U.S. markets as Vanguard ETFs are to emerging markets. Put another way, iShares ETFs are to 30-year olds as Vanguard ETF are to teenagers.Yep… Vanguard ETFs are rapidly growing. Recent ETF inflow/outflow data for the first three quarters show that Vanguard picked up nearly $18 billion in new assets, a startling 23% of its total under the Vanguard wrapper. iShares’ inflows over the same time frame corresponds to 8% of the firm’s total net, and State Street has experienced net outflows.Complete Story »
Calafia Beach Pundit submits: In dollar terms, Brazil's stock market is now up 205% (that's a three-bagger) from last year's lows. Not only has the stock market rebounded, but the real has rebounded as well. Brazil's currency is tracing the mirror image of the dollar. As the dollar closes in on its prior lows, the real is closing in on its prior highs. This is a stunning recovery by any measure.News reports on Friday floated the possibility that emerging market economies might impose controls on capital inflows in order to stem the appreciation of their currencies. Brazil's president Lula instead took the high road, saying, "the government has no plans to tax capital inflows as a way of preventing the country's currency from strengthening further." Very good news for Brazil.Complete Story »
