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the market: stocks, bonds, options, whatever

dow jones up and then back down 170 points over the course of an hour.

after eyeing it for a year and a half, i bought $HCN yesterday.
 
recent equities rally just took S&P 500 to previous support level, it's at $2015 now and I'm betting it drops to $1900 by some point next week. i just can't imagine anything happening meanwhile that could cause it to break out of the range.
 
yeah, i made (back) a lot of money last week in stocks. and i'm not sure what's the relationship, but oil had an alright week as well.


thujone said:
nice, that looks like a great buy!
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thanks, it's working out so far. i don't fully understand everything surrounding the interest rate decision, but it benefited REITs at least in the short term.


do you have an expected time frame for your CHF/JPY investment? that something that takes months, years, decades?
 
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depends on whether the trend is holding or if that capital is needed elsewhere. if it's a good trend can always hop back in at the next correction. the rate decision itself was sensible given the macros but the hype around it was nuts. i guess expectations for the economic recovery put upward pressure on the trends throughout the year so now that it's really starting to sink in that the recovery is a dud things have started moving sideways. US will rise again, but the window has closed on chances of a rate hike this year.
 
so my S&P bet didn't go as planned, there was enough of a drop that I didn't lose (stop loss was hit) but then a sudden climb. going to be interesting to see where it closes for the week.

oh, in my post on the S&P I meant to say "resistance" where I put "support".
 
Forex and Bitcoin speculation anyone? I've been playing around with the latter a bit lately. Just recently it's been a bit of a wild ride.

I'm trying to decide when to buy some more.

5 days:
34652zn.png


In context:
2jdkxv4.png

So BTCUSD had been pretty much oscillating between 200-300 all year, then we get this massive uptake at the beginning of October all the way to 400, hit some significant resistance and now we're on to the inevitable correction and have been in free fall the past week, spot is 308 as I post this. I am betting on it going a bit lower 250-275ish and trying to decide what my buy point is going to be. I do see in the longer term heading north of 350-400 but this recent uptick was too quick, felt artificial just something to do with a whale making moves.
 
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i don't trust any BTC exchange enough to actively trade but it's nice that what BTC i have is worth a bit more (assuming I get to spend it before the price falls again). as far as FX goes, there's a lot of bullshit in the air. The latest U.S. jobs report jacked up USD again and now there's a lot of confidence in rates starting to rise by the end of the year, but on the other hand, the Fed has been talking up a rate hike for so fucking long now that I've lost faith in the meaning of numbers. It's no secret that the winter months are roughest on economies, I can't imagine there would be any advantage in starting to move on rates before Q2 of next year, but then there's the old adage: "the markets can remain irrational longer than...", and so on.
 
Yeah I wouldn't touch Forex with the proverbial ten foot right now and it's not really my game although I'm trying to learn more. As far as BTC goes it's a bit of a niche interest for me, I'm not actively trading it on a daily basis but more so watching for long term trends. I'm kind of bearish on it right now i.e. in the short term because I expect more regulatory issues and an inevitable crackdown on some of the illicit uses (and I also suspect that various kinds of movements and drama in those communities might have impact on swings in BTC value), but in the long run I think it's going to gain more ground, so basically as far as following it goes I'm looking for opportunities to buy low. Last few days trend is upward now spot is 327. Maybe we're in for a lot of ping pong in the 300's? I still think short term trend overall will be down.

I don't have any urgent need to buy anything with bitcoin, I don't do the drugs by post game, but I find the whole thing fascinating and a potentially good investment. Alot like gold. (Anyone here into PMs?) Gold was trying to head to 1800 a few years ago and actually shortly after that we had peak BTC and then the post-Ulbricht-bust crash then now a bit of recovery of confidence, but 400 last week seemed "irrationally exuberant." Now Gold is hovering pretty low lately:

2mdgkkk.png

Might be able to draw some analogies to the bitcoin chart. I have similar opinions and interests in the two and suspect they might be in similar moments right now although I can't see gold going south of 1000.
 
the bitcoin crowd does seem to talk about gold a lot. i don't know much about precious metals aside from them being priced in USD, which explains why the latest news about gold plunging is all about the Fed.

hard to tell where bitcoin can go from here, on one hand the front-end infrastructure is finally hitting the prime time with services like Bitpay and even banks taking interest in blockchain (they don't like the word "Bitcoin", allegedly), but on the other hand there's dev wars and the XT fork that has a serious chance of challenging Bitcoin's dominance. There's a good post here explaining the problem facing Bitcoin and the fact that it has just a few weeks left before Bitcoin XT launches implementing BIP 101, which solves the aforementioned problem with Bitcoin classic.

Long story short, Bitcoin classic is facing an existentialist threat sooo this mysterious rise in value could possibly maybe actually just be one last pump n dump. Wouldn't be the first time it happened before a cryptocurrency dropped off the radar, would just be the first time it happens to the dominant one.
 
The first shipment of uranium from Canada arrived in India on Friday. The consignment was shipped by Canada’s Cameco Inc, which entered into a contract with Department of Atomic Energy during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Ottawa this year.

The first consignment of uranium from Cameco Inc arrived more than four decades after Canada cried foul over India’s first nuclear test in 1974 and ended all bilateral cooperation in the field of atomic power.
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http://www.deccanherald.com/content/515898/canada-sells-uranium-india-41.html

With Japan finally restarting some of its nuclear reactor fleet (two reactors have come online since August) and China continuing its breakneck reactor build-out (with 29 reactors in operation and 22 under construction), the one commodity in the natural resource space that is actually carrying some positive fundamentals today is uranium.

Bloomberg recently noted that the bonds of at least two uranium producers, Cameco Corp. ($CCJ) and Uranium One Inc., have been kind to investors, “…demand for nuclear power comes roaring back from the Fukushima disaster, powering the bonds of Canadian uranium producers to top returns among their beleaguered commodity peers.”
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http://www.equities.com/news/5-of-the-best-projects-in-canada-poised-to-leverage-the-uranium-rebound
 
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Nasdaquiri enters le Canadastan

Nasdaq Inc. agreed to buy Chi-X Canada for an undisclosed amount, setting up a clash with the Toronto Stock Exchange.

The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2016, Nasdaq said Tuesday in a statement. Dan Kessous, chief executive officer of Chi-X Canada, will continue to lead the Canadian equities trading business.

The transaction gives Nasdaq a beachhead in the world’s eighth-largest stock market. Chi-X Canada was launched in 2008 and now accounts for about 13 percent of the nation’s trading volume, though that is dwarfed by the approximately 70 percent market share controlled by TMX Group Ltd., which owns the Toronto Stock Exchange and other trading platforms.

...

The transaction also opens up the possibility of a stronger link between the U.S. and Canadian equity markets. Some corporations already trade on stock exchanges in both nations, including Nasdaq-listed companies like BlackBerry Ltd. In Tuesday’s statement, Nasdaq said the transaction would “enhance the trading experience for customers by promoting greater uniformity in technology and functionality across U.S. and Canadian trading venues.”
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...canada-setting-up-clash-with-toronto-exchange

good times for financial engineering ;)
 
I'm currently watching USD/JPY as it's about to return to the long-term trend. there was a lot of hype about the Fed rate hike happening THIS MONTH but now there's plenty of trepidation because the fundamentals are screaming not to hike (duh) so we could be in for some range-bound action in the short-term.
 
Currency trading is way too crazy for me. Too much global politics in play.

Right now is a good time to put some money to work in the market imo. It's kind of like the crash in 2008 when good companies were trading at huge discounts, except this crash is mostly only affecting the oil and energy sector. The squeeze on oil will end up putting some of the smaller players out of business within the next year or two, mainly oil servicing and drilling companies. But the oil bluechips are being hit too and the chances that they recover from these prices is basically 100% even if oil were to drop under $20 a barrel in the short-to-medium term. Chevron(CVX) is trading at $80 a share down from over $130 in April 2015 and is now paying a very safe 5.5% dividend. Even if you only have $500 to spare, open an etrade account, put it into Chevron, set your dividends to automatically reinvest, and forget about it for a few years. You're basically guaranteed to double or triple your money. It's also a position you can feel reasonably safe about leaving there for a decade or two. If you do that, it'll end up growing into thousands without you having to even look at it. Exxon Mobile(XOM) is the exact same situation except they're currently only paying a 4% dividend.

Apple also looks like a good buy here trading at only 7.5x forward earnings. Every couple years they seem to hit this patch where a particular submodel(like the 6s) comes out and doesn't do quite as well as analysts expect. Then all the analysts pile on singing doom and gloom and predicting the beginning of the end for Apple's popularity. The stock sinks for anywhere from 3-12 months until their next major release and then people wake up and remember that the company is still making obscene amounts of money and has more cash reserves than a lot of countries. It's currently trading at $97 a share down from $134 last April. I have no doubt it will hit new all-time highs within the next year or two. It's like clockwork. They also pay a 2% dividend.

Those are your surefire safe bets. For a little riskier propositions I absolutely love Twitter(TWTR) here. Probably the most hated tech stock on the market over the past year. They've ran into a standstill in user growth but the stock is currently priced like people are going to start leaving twitter by the millions. They're still growing revenue at a breakneck speed. They've also been working on a lot of initiatives to recharge Twitter's user growth that I think will pay off big in the coming quarters. Their acquisition of the livestreaming video app Periscope is going to be worth billions in itself in a few years imo. And even if their management screws the pooch and twitter's stock keeps falling, someone like Google will just buy them out for a nice premium. With Google's resources, they could turn Twitter into a $100 Billion company and rival Facebook's influence imo. Right now the stock is trading almost $10 below it's IPO price with a market cap of like $12 Billion.

For super risky trades, stocks in the oil services and drilling sector like National Oilwell Varco(NOV) and Seadrill(SDRL) are still treading water. The former has been hammered 60% and the latter is basically priced for assured bankruptcy. Both will either go bankrupt if oil stays this low or will return crazy profits over the next few years if oil recovers.
 
Seadrill(SDRL) is the one I've put some "lotto ticket" money into. It's a company that has a HUGE amount of debt that nobody thinks will survive this drop in oil prices. That's why it's trading at under $2 a share. After a lot of research though, I think the billionaire owner is crafty enough to weather the storm. He seems to have an unusually good relationship with the major foreign bank they owe money to(probably personal friends with some board members) and he's already successfully pushed back the delivery of some new drilling rigs from this year to 2019. That saves the company from having to pay almost $1 Billion in debt this year, which they definitely couldn't, to paying it in 2019 when oil prices are almost assured to be much higher than they are now. If they don't go bankrupt within the next year, I could see SDRL returning over 1000% to shareholders between now and 2020.
 
I'm very happy this month, flipped some USD for CAD at $1.44, splurged on XBT in the recent dip and did well extending FX gains while cutting losses short. Currently I'm shorting S&P 500 and that's going well so far, should know by tomorrow if it's going to break north, if not then I might look at getting some U.S. bond and equity ETFs for my TFSA (tax shelter).

As for the future of oil, I have no clue so I'm happy to sit it out. Nobody seems to have any idea when the current glut will end, and now O&G is diversified into biofuels and algal shit anyway, there's no telling how advances in that field will impact the future of crude but it's definitely not going to be good news for OPEC.

I dunno about Twitter either. I just don't think I would ever invest in a company that doesn't make a single product I would consider paying for, and Twitter is pretty high up on that list. Microsoft and Facebook are already getting really aggressive with their advertising so we could be inching close to the tipping point where people realize it's not worth the service when it comes with so much baggage.
 
Twitter is a big question mark for me. I am a prolific Tweeter and have noted some changes in the culture of the platform. It feels like it is sort of jumping the shark in terms of it's popularity and user base, there has been some discussion about "peak twitter" or something of the sort. First, Twitter reached critical mass as a social network and all sorts of great things were going on and connections being made, now the signal to noise ratio is different, and people aren't using it the same way. Not sure how much more the user base is going to grow and I think a lot of the core user base may retreat eventually as the experience is qualitatively changing. There will be more commercial and celebrity stuff than ever, probably, but if the consumers start fading away, the opportunities to monetize will as well.
 
Twitter is still the go-to for instant breaking news. People don't go to Facebook to live post while following things like presidential debates. Politicians use to to make official announcements. Sports teams use it to give up-to-the-second team news. Hedge fund managers used aggregated Twitter data to predict market moves. Google and Microsoft pay millions of dollars for access to Twitter's internal data to predict trends and use it for analytics. Microsoft's Watson supercomputer uses Twitter data. If you watch CNBC every analyst and talking heads say "follow me on Twitter," not "follow me on Facebook."

If it doesn't succeed on its own then it will be bought out by a company that can capitalize on its unique platform. With Google shuttering Google+ they're the most likely buyers imo.
 
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