Karl Denninger - Seeking Alpha Profile Karl Denninger is a SA certified contributor and an author of the popular blog called The Market Ticker. He has been a full-time trader since 1998, providing valuable insights to thousands of SA readers through his articles.Complete Story »

  Larry MacDonald submits: This is the time of year when many investors sell lagging stocks to claim capital losses that can be applied to capital gains to reduce taxes. The prices of some securities may therefore come under abnormal selling pressure for a time and fall below what company fundamentals would warrant. Consequently, tax-loss season is a time when many value investors step up their search for investments Complete Story »

  Wade Slome submits: NOT putting all your eggs in one basket makes intuitive sense to many investors. Burton Malkiel, Princeton Professor, economist, and author, summed it up succinctly, “Diversity reduces adversity.” Diversification acts like shock absorbers on a car – it smoothens out the ride on a bumpy financial road (read more on diversification). Jason Zweig, Wall Street Journal writer, acknowledges the academic findings that underpin these diversification benefits by stating the following:As many studies have shown, at least 40% of the variability in returns can be reduced by moving from a single company to 20. Once a portfolio contains 20 or 30 stocks, adding more does little to damp the fluctuations in wealth over time.Complete Story »

  Trader Mark submits:It is always interesting to see how a "pundit" (usually a strategist) does when they take their hand in the real investment world, with a public track record. Most of the current "celebrities" on CNBC are personal traders, strategists, or economists - without a public track record to be found. But they sound like they are right about 98.2% of the time - no one is that right, except Goldman Sachs. [Nov 4, 2009: Goldman Sachs Q3 Winning Percentage: 98.4%] (frankly, this is why when readers throw "pundit stuff" at me, or "Joe Blow on CNBC said this", I mostly ignore it - unless it's a hedge fund manager i.e. Doug Kass - or mutual fund manager whose returns I can eye for myself. Being on TV means nothing to me in terms of a person being good at investing - legend Julian Robertson makes 1 CNBC appearance a year.)One major beef I have with CNBC America, is they rarely talk about people's past calls or previous appearances - not just the stock pickers but even the economists who have been wrong over and over... yet still get huge amounts of air time. Meanwhile on CNBC Europe, I've seen emailers write in (and the hosts actually read the email on air) lambasting people for bad calls and asking for explanations. Therefore, everyone seems like a genius on the American version of financial entertainment information. There is no issue with being wrong... everyone is wrong at times; just be frank about it.Complete Story »

  International and Emerging Market Government Bond ETFs List (click on symbol for data and articles) International Treasury Bond ETFs SPDR Barclays Capital International Treasury Bond ETF (BWX) iShares S&P/Citi International Treasury Bond ETF (IGOV)Complete Story »

  Benchmark VC Michael Eisenberg submits: These two slides should scare the $%^&* out of the Israeli Government, Chief Scientist, Entreprenuers, VCs and Economists. Israel must invest in innovation in order to come out strong on the other side of this financial crisis. Israel is well position to do that but without continued investment in research, innovation and tech infrastructure, it will not happen. If early stage funding dries up, there will not be late stage opportunities in the future. It could be that this is merely a rightsizing of the Israeli VC industry (which is probably needed) but to me that first graph looks like a cliff, not a diet. Slides courtesy of Dow Jones and sent to me by EYComplete Story »

  Trader Mark submits:Like hungry lemmings gerbils, we almost escaped out of our box, in the 16th day of containment. But someone slammed the lid of our cage back down Wednesday AM. No worries, all it takes is some US dollars lubricant and we can get this lid unhinged again. The good (or bad) news, is the longer the base we build [sideways] the more powerful the next move shall be, hence we should be seeing some fireworks once we finish this base building process. The only question now is direction... until proven otherwise it is up. However there is still that niggling tiny gap created on November 9th at S&P 1070....Complete Story »

  Gregor Macdonald submits: The November issue of Gregor.us Monthly, Coal World, has now been published and it carries an unhappy message. I am forecasting that the world will not successfully transition from oil to a broad basket of renewable energy and power sources over the next twenty years. Instead, I strongly favor an outcome in which oil, the construction fuel for the global buildout of new power generation, becomes so expensive that the world becomes energy poor, and turns instead back to coal. In case you hadn’t noticed, the process of energy impoverishment has already begun.Complete Story »

  Fertilizer stocks were up convincingly yesterday, up about at least 5% each. So what drove up prices? First of all, there was already technical strength in most of these issues, as they had already broken out of large bases (area patterns) more than a week ago, and were pausing at similar flag pattern setups. Second, there were a couple of news items that came out. From TheStreet.com, on buoyant remarks by POT at a basic materials conference:Potash CEO Bill Doyle in particular added fuel to a recent rally in agricultural shares when he said during a luncheon talk that domestic demand for potash in November reached levels not seen since May 2008, before the financial crisis and the depths of the recession. "November is normally a lousy month, but it was the best month in a year and half," Doyle said. "We're seeing a return to a more confident customer out there, not only in North America but around the world."Complete Story »

  Mark O'Byrne submits:Gold Gold reached a new nominal high overnight of $1,226/oz. Gold is currently trading at $1,218.40/oz and in euro and sterling terms, gold is trading at €807/oz and £732/oz respectively. Gold may be overbought in the short term but in bull markets with strong fundamentals, markets can remain overbought for long periods of time as was seen in the 1970s. There are many institutional and central bank buyers on the sidelines at these prices but they will provide strong support with many waiting to buy on the dips. The recent sanguine reaction of markets to the Dubai default and buoyancy in equity markets has led to leveraged players returning to the futures market and this in conjunction with the strong physical demand from more risk averse investors and central banks means that there will likely be more diversification into gold in 2010.Complete Story »

  Dr. Duru submits: “Mish” posted the latest chart from the Investor’s Intelligence Survey, and it shows that bulls are back up to 50% and bears have hit a new low for the year at 16%. (You can directly access two years of data using the chart tool at Schaeffer’s Investment Research). He also noted that bears have only been this scarce three times in the last 25 years. It seems that there are not enough bears in the market, but bullishness has also been higher in the past two years: 52% at the end of August and 56% in December, 2007 (right after the bear market began).Complete Story »

  Don Dion submits: After being peppered with bad press concerning the incessant 787 Dreamliner delays, it appears that Boeing (BA) is finally getting its act together. On Wednesday, an industry watcher said sources at the commercial airline maker claimed that that the firm’s first 787 test aircraft could see its first flight as soon as December 14th. However, further tests could derail the flight and it’s dependent on cooperation from the weather.Still, a positive step forward is likely to be a morale booster both for the company itself as well as shareholders.Complete Story »

  Dr. Duru submits: Now that major markets worldwide have completely recovered from the Dubai debacle of last week, it is easy to consider this episode just another blip on the way to eternal bliss. Not even the U.S. dollar could sustain more than a mirage of strength on this “temporary crisis” (I had thought that even after the market ceased to care specifically about Dubai, increased risk aversion would linger). However, the passing of this incident did not demonstrate the resiliency of the global economy. As many have noted, Dubai is only a tiny, maybe even insignificant, part of the global economy. In fact, by many accounts, Dubai appears to be a very unsustainable city-state that seems doomed one way or another (for example, see “The dark side of Dubai” written April, 2009). I suspect the market in general wrote off Dubai a long time ago…even if its lenders have not yet officially taken that step.Complete Story »

  Beige Book shows that “The Great Credit Crunch” is continuing I consider the Beige Book as the Gossip Columns from the twelve Federal Reserve Districts. Let’s look at some of the anecdotes from comments presented.Complete Story »