Luv2Read's Account Talk

[Asylum]

Again.. all the more reason to rename the little used Daily News Bulletin Board the Political & World News or some such and carry on the discussions!

 

[XL-entLady]

So I decided the very best thing is to NOT try to challenge or outdo each other. If I prove "irrational beliefs" are the root behind the way we feel about others and the way we treat them - but I cause someone to leave - or it results in greater division between the MB members - then what did I really accomplish? NOTHING

So just to make it officially clear - I respect everyone on this BOARD

Steady, L2R said you have an "old soul" and did she ever nail that one!

And how appropriate for your statement to appear on L2R's thread, because in my opinion she is another one with wisdom.

"Namaste" is a sanskrit word with a complex meaning, but one way to explain it is that the divine spark that is in each one of us is bowing in respect to the divine spark within you.

Namaste, my friends!

Lady

 

[luv2read]

For those TA who count volume....

NYSE Trading Falls to 7-Year Low as U.S. Volume Rises (Update1)
By Jeff Kearns and Edgar Ortega
May 23 (Bloomberg) -- Trading on the New York Stock Exchange fell 26 percent this quarter to the lowest since 2001 as alternative venues captured market share and the total volume of U.S. equities climbed.
The shares changing hands each day on the 216-year-old exchange fell to an average 1.27 billion in the second quarter from 1.57 billion a year ago, according to NYSE data compiled by Bloomberg. Total trading rose 19 percent from a year ago to an average of 6.84 billion shares a day, as companies such as Bats Trading Inc. and Direct Edge ECN LLC won more of the business, Bloomberg data show.
``With hedge funds popping up and the ability to do things anonymously and cheaper and quicker, it definitely has an impact on the NYSE,'' said Michael Nasto, the senior trader at U.S. Global Investors Inc., which manages $6 billion in San Antonio. ``There are different avenues to get things done.''
The NYSE's share of the total value traded slipped to 52 percent in the first three months from more than 70 percent in 1990, according to data from the World Federation of Exchanges. Analysts who depend on volume to help forecast the market's direction are losing one of their tools.
Bats, the third-largest equity market, took business from the NYSE and Nasdaq Stock Market since it started in January 2006. Kansas City, Missouri-based Bats matched about 8.9 percent of total U.S. shares in April, up from 3.5 percent a year earlier.
Trading, Volatility
Direct Edge, which is based in Jersey City, New Jersey, has matched 4.1 percent of the shares traded this month, up from 1.2 percent a year ago, spokesman Rafi Reguer said.
``Technicians should be losing sleep over this,'' said Ralph Acampora, the 40-year Wall Street veteran who helped pioneer technical analysis. ``I can't be as trusting of my indicator, because I don't have all the data.''
Trading in U.S. markets rose with stock volatility as investors took advantage of wider price swings. The NYSE's move to lift restrictions in March 2007 on automation increased volume by making it easier for brokerages that accommodate rapid-fire strategies.
The new venues make it more difficult for technical analysts, who use exchange data to measure demand for stocks. A rally in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index without an increase in volume may fade, analysts say. Last year's rebound in the S&P 500 during September came with the lowest volume in four months. The benchmark peaked in Oct. 10, and fell 11 percent since then.
`More Money'
``More volume means there's more money and support, more demand and momentum,'' said Acampora, the director of technical studies at the New York Institute of Finance. ``You need money to push stocks up.''
Analysts can no longer count the NYSE or Nasdaq trades to gauge volume. Trading on the NYSE, a unit of NYSE Euronext, the world's largest owner of stock exchanges, fell to 1.05 billion shares on May 12, the lowest this year. The average over the last 30 days dropped to 1.26 billion shares, the fewest since October 2004. The 30-day average on the Nasdaq, owned by Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., declined to 834 million shares on March 14, the lowest since October 2004.
U.S. stock trading on every exchange rose 24 percent in April from a year earlier to an average 6.8 billion shares a day. The average reached a record 8.92 billion in January.
Bigger Picture
``At one point, you were able to focus on the volume on the NYSE or Nasdaq,'' said Ryan Primmer, the Stamford, Connecticut- based head of U.S. equities trading at UBS AG, the brokerage that handles the most shares in the U.S. ``Now it's only a slice of the picture. You need to look across all venues to understand the whole picture because no exchange is the dominant trader.''
The NYSE has overhauled its technology to execute trades faster, cut transaction costs and introduced new ways for investors to handle block trades as way to lure back business.
``We are doing everything we can think of to try to reverse the trend,'' NYSE Euronext Chief Executive Officer Duncan Niederauer said May 15 at the annual shareholder meeting. ``The bottom line is that it's very easy to get started and compete with us. The barriers to entry for someone to get a license and compete with us are lower than they have ever been.''
The S&P 500 rallied 9.5 percent since March 10, boosted by the Federal Reserve's support for the bailout of Bear Stearns Cos. and the steepest interest-rate cuts in two decades. Average NYSE volume during the advance was 1.41 billion shares a day, 9.5 percent below the same period last year. Total volume on all exchanges rose 32 percent to an average of 7.27 billion a day during the period compared with 2007.
Dan Wantrobski, senior technical analyst for Fox-Pitt Kelton Cochran Caronia Waller in New York, says investors have reason to be concerned about the S&P 500's rally from March because total volume slipped since the index was falling in January.
``Volume was expanding on the way down and it's contracting on the way up,'' Wantrobski said.

 

[Steadygain]

"Namaste" is a sanskrit word with a complex meaning, but one way to explain it is that the divine spark that is in each one of us is bowing in respect to the divine spark within you.

Namaste, my friends!

Lady

That's beautiful - wow - nothing could go beyond that.

Nasmaste is the greatest quality I could want and by far what I would most want to extend to others.

I have found this in animals as well - my dog and cats.

Have a great weekend everyone!!

 

[luv2read]

Steady, L2R said you have an "old soul" and did she ever nail that one!

And how appropriate for your statement to appear on L2R's thread, because in my opinion she is another one with wisdom.

"Namaste" is a sanskrit word with a complex meaning, but one way to explain it is that the divine spark that is in each one of us is bowing in respect to the divine spark within you.

Namaste, my friends!

Lady

That's beautiful - wow - nothing could go beyond that.

Namaste is the greatest quality I could want and by far what I would most want to extend to others.

I have found this in animals as well - my dog and cats.

Have a great weekend everyone!!

Lady,

I am at a loss for words. I have learned so much from you already in just your short time with us here. "Thank you" just doesn't express my feelings adequately enough, so I'll just say "ditto" to Steady's post.

 

[luv2read]

New York Times
Truth or Consequences

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Imagine for a minute, just a minute, that someone running for president was able to actually tell the truth, the real truth, to the American people about what would be the best — I mean really the best — energy policy for the long-term economic health and security of our country. I realize this is a fantasy, but play along with me for a minute. What would this mythical, totally imaginary, truth-telling candidate say?
For starters, he or she would explain that there is no short-term fix for gasoline prices. Prices are what they are as a result of rising global oil demand from India, China and a rapidly growing Middle East on top of our own increasing consumption, a shortage of "sweet" crude that is used for the diesel fuel that Europe is highly dependent upon and our own neglect of effective energy policy for 30 years.
Cynical ideas, like the McCain-Clinton summertime gas-tax holiday, would only make the problem worse, and reckless initiatives like the Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep offer to subsidize gasoline for three years for people who buy its gas guzzlers are the moral equivalent of tobacco companies offering discounted cigarettes to teenagers.
I can’t say it better than my friend Tim Shriver, the chairman of Special Olympics, did in a Memorial Day essay in The Washington Post: "So Dodge wants to sell you a car you don’t really want to buy, that is not fuel-efficient, will further damage our environment, and will further subsidize oil states, some of which are on the other side of the wars we’re currently fighting. ... The planet be damned, the troops be forgotten, the economy be ignored: buy a Dodge."
No, our mythical candidate would say the long-term answer is to go exactly the other way: guarantee people a high price of gasoline — forever.
This candidate would note that $4-a-gallon gasoline is really starting to impact driving behavior and buying behavior in way that $3-a-gallon gas did not. The first time we got such a strong price signal, after the 1973 oil shock, we responded as a country by demanding and producing more fuel-efficient cars. But as soon as oil prices started falling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we let Detroit get us readdicted to gas guzzlers, and the price steadily crept back up to where it is today.
We must not make that mistake again. Therefore, what our mythical candidate would be proposing, argues the energy economist Philip Verleger Jr., is a "price floor" for gasoline: $4 a gallon for regular unleaded, which is still half the going rate in Europe today. Washington would declare that it would never let the price fall below that level. If it does, it would increase the federal gasoline tax on a monthly basis to make up the difference between the pump price and the market price.
To ease the burden on the less well-off, "anyone earning under $80,000 a year would be compensated with a reduction in the payroll taxes," said Verleger. Or, he suggested, the government could use the gasoline tax to buy back gas guzzlers from the public and "crush them."
But the message going forward to every car buyer and carmaker would be this: The price of gasoline is never going back down. Therefore, if you buy a big gas guzzler today, you are locking yourself into perpetually high gasoline bills. You are buying a pig that will eat you out of house and home. At the same time, if you, a manufacturer, continue building fleets of nonhybrid gas guzzlers, you are condemning yourself, your employees and shareholders to oblivion.
What a cruel thing for a candidate to say? I disagree. Every decade we look back and say: "If only we had done the right thing then, we would be in a different position today."
But no politician dared to do so. When gasoline was $2 a gallon, the government never would have imposed a $2 tax. Now that it is $4 a gallon, the government should at least keep it there, since it is really having the right effect.
I was visiting my local Toyota dealer in Bethesda, Md., last week to trade in one hybrid car for another. There is now a two-month wait to buy a Prius, which gets close to 50 miles per gallon. The dealer told me I was lucky. My hybrid was going up in value every day, so I didn’t have to worry about waiting a while for my new car. But if it were not a hybrid, he said, he would deduct each day $200 from the trade-in price for every $1-a-barrel increase in the OPEC price of crude oil. When I saw the rows and rows of unsold S.U.V.’s parked in his lot, I understood why.
We need to make a structural shift in our energy economy. Ultimately, we need to move our entire fleet to plug-in electric cars. The only way to get from here to there is to start now with a price signal that will force the change.
Barack Obama had the courage to tell voters that the McCain-Clinton summer gas-giveaway plan was a fraud. Wouldn’t it be amazing if he took the next step and put the right plan before the American people? Wouldn’t that just be amazing?

...

 

[Steadygain]

...

Thank you Darling,
I plan to address Oil later today - as time allows. So this was very good timing.

Then later on will cover the Great Lakes and "Fresh Water"

Then end with highlighting Paul Light's "A Government Ill Executed" - which shows the mounting evidence of too much government control over the past 30 years (both parties) - and how the present one takes all the awards - with numerous forced out of vital positions for fraud and corruption.

 

[luv2read]

Hello Steady my dear,

Wonderful! That will set me up for reading tonight!

If I still had 2 IFT's for May...I'd go 100%C today then 50%C/50%I tomorrow...or all I tomorrow. Just have one left so will wait until tomorrow to make the move, then I'm in until June 4-6..next high IMO.

Wow look at all 4 charts rise and fall together this morning...money coming out of bonds is not going into stocks and vice versa....unless there's a big buy this afternoon. Looks like profit taking/moving into commodities IMO especially since oil went back up at 11am.

 

[Birchtree]

More poppy-**** from the NY Times. Congresional donkeys have forever been against efficient offshore drilling (I do own drilling stocks), they've been against coal (I do own coal stocks), they've been against nuclear energy (I do own many utilities), they are pro-earned income tax credit subsidies, pro-gasoline taxes (I do own energy stocks), they are against natural gas and coal gasification (I do own natural gas stocks), they are pro-ethanol infrastructure which is nonsense, they are basically pusillanimous and anti-military (I have a daughter that is serving her country as a patriot), and Obama wants to talk to Mahmoud Ahmadink from Iran, heck why not send Pelosi. Personally, when talking to a lunatic without having first bombed him into submission, the only possible result is appeasement.

 

[Buster]

More poppy-**** from the NY Times. Congresional donkeys have forever been against efficient offshore drilling

Strom Thurmond once said after seeing pictures of Ted Kennedy naked with some chick on a boat.."Well, I see the Good senator has changed his views on offshore drillin"

 

[Steadygain]

Hi there,

I'm pretty sure you'd said something about getting a new mower for 2.5 acres of lawn for under $2,000.

I just got my Toro TitanZ - for $4,000 (+$250 tax) and wondered if we could do some comparisons. I had a lower scale Toro Z cut before this but it wasn't designed for 2.5 acres week after week.

Anyway would you be willing to exchange maintainence/tune up costs? If yours holds up any where near as well then I'd probably get a similar model years down the line.

 

[luv2read]

Hi there,

I'm pretty sure you'd said something about getting a new mower for 2.5 acres of lawn for under $2,000.

I just got my Toro TitanZ - for $4,000 (+$250 tax) and wondered if we could do some comparisons. I had a lower scale Toro Z cut before this but it wasn't designed for 2.5 acres week after week.

Anyway would you be willing to exchange maintainence/tune up costs? If yours holds up any where near as well then I'd probably get a similar model years down the line.

Sure Steady, if I can get my other half to keep track of that. We bought one for my parents (both in 80's) too and they love it. They have 1 acre. Mom cut the grass last weekend and had a ball. Only problem when she let go of one of the handles to scratch her nose she went in circles...:laugh:

This mower is great because everything is pushbutton including blade raise and lowering and blade height adjustment, which is infinite.

 

[luv2read]

http://www.govexec.com/story_page_pf.cfm?articleid=40130&printerfriendlyvers=1

Senate aides and oversight officials Friday applauded the appointment of an independent inspector general to oversee U.S. reconstruction spending in Afghanistan, but noted that with no funds appropriated, the IG's office is a long way from functioning.
President Bush Thursday appointed retired Marine Corps Major Gen. Arnold Fields as the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, overseeing billions of dollars in annual U.S. spending on reconstruction projects there.
The Defense Department inspector general's office and other oversight agencies will continue overseeing military spending.

In addition to the billions being spent on Iraq reconstruction which falls apart or gets blown up within 6 months. While US infrastructure rots and we sell it to sovereign wealth funds and corporations to maintain and manage....who lease it back to us. Highways in particular.

Iraq has a budget surplus - no wonder. It's time they spend THEIR money on THEIR country...instead of OUR hard-earned tax dollars. OR...we should get OIL and GAS in return for money spent there.

 

[Buster]

Iraq has a budget surplus - no wonder. It's time they spend THEIR money on THEIR country...instead of OUR hard-earned tax dollars. OR...we should get OIL and GAS in return for money spent there.

I 100% agree!!!

 

[luv2read]

Promoting energy conservation?

"On a cloudless beautiful Sunday, 10 motorcyles rumbled up the South Lawn drive at the White House at about 12:35 p.m. Most of the bikes were Harley-Davidsons; at least two were Hondas. ... Four Bush administration officials were among the group, including well-known Harley fan and White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, wearing a black collared shirt and jeans; Transportation Secretary Mary Peters (simple white shirt); and Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer (blue casual oxford). But the award for best stepping into character goes to Edward P. 'Eddie' Lazear, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, who sported a leather Harley vest and a black bandana wrapped around his head. All of the Bushies appeared to be riding Harleys and everyone wore helmets. Lazear told the pool he borrowed his bike from a Virginia dealer." -- Dan Eggen, The Washington Post.

 

[luv2read]

For a more complete glimpse of the coming earnings reports and economic releases, be sure to visit our Earnings Calendar and Economic Calendar pages.
________________________________________________________________
Monday, June 2:

• Earnings: Credence (CMOS), Lululemon Athletica (LULU)
• Economic Data: Construction Spending (April)... ISM Index (May)
• Events: None
• Conferences: Goldman Sachs Lodging, Gaming, Restaurant and Leisure Conference... RBC Capital Markets Energy Conference
• Fed Speakers: Atlanta Fed President Lockhart speaks on economic outlook (12:20 PM ET)

Tuesday, June 3:

• Earnings: Toll Brothers (TOL), Bob Evans (BOBE), Guess (GES), Hovnanian Enterprises (HOV)
• Economic Data: Auto and Truck Sales (May)... Factory Orders (April)
• Events: Altera (ALTR) Mid-Quarter Update
• Conferences: JPMorgan Basics & Industrials Conference... Goldman Sachs Lodging, Gaming, Restaurant and Leisure Conference... RBC Capital Markets Energy Conference
• Fed Speakers: Fed Chairman Bernanke speaks to International Monetary Conference (9:00 AM ET)

Wednesday, June 4:

• Earnings: Williams-Sonoma (WSM), Collective Brands (PSS)
• Economic Data: ADP Employment (May)... Revision to Q1 Productivity... ISM Services (May)
• Events: Weekly Crude Inventories
• Conferences: JPMorgan Basics & Industrials Conference... Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Diversified Financial Services Conference
• Fed Speakers: Fed Chairman Bernanke speaks at Harvard on economic challenges (2:45 PM ET)... Atlanta Fed President Lockhart speaks on Japanese trade (8:30 PM ET)

Thursday, June 5:

• Earnings: Brown-Forman (BF.B), Ciena (CIEN), Del Monte (DLM), Jackson Hewitt (JTX), Smithfield Foods (SFD), Vail Resorts (MTN), National Semi (NSM), Take-Two (TTWO)
• Economic Data: Initial Claims (week ended May 31)
• Events: Same-Store Sales reports for May
• Conferences: Jefferies & Co. Global Clean Technology Conference... Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Diversified Financial Services Conference... Merrill Lynch Agricultural Chemicals Conference
• Fed Speakers: Philadelphia Fed President Plosser speaks on financial stability (12:00 PM ET)

Friday, June 6:

• Earnings: Piedmont (PNY)
• Economic Data: Employment Report (May)... Wholesale Inventories (April)... Consumer Credit (April)
• Events: Wal-Mart (WMT) Analyst and Investor Management Update
• Conferences: None
• Fed Speakers: Fed Governor Kroszner speaks on financial markets and credit conditions (8:45 AM ET)... St. Louis Fed President Bullard speaks on housing (1:30 PM ET)

• ...

 

[Guest2]

Although its not a true market mover, The ADP Employment Report for
Wednesday might come in better then expected. The real concern is
the Weekly Crude Inventories (for me). If the report fuels (pun intended)
an increase in the price of oil, the overall market might not fair to well.
But if inventories are higher then expected and demand (being as it is)
is preceived as still dropping, tomarrow can be a big rebound day. :worried:

Employment and Initial Claims on Thursday & Friday will "Bear" watching.
Big Ben's talk on Wednesday will do little more then it did today.

 

[luv2read]

Indeed. And Day Traders are messing up my C Fund entry point for tomorrow. I was hoping for that sustained drop down to 1360 through tomorrow...oh well, I might still see it this week. I fund still looks like a good bet for 100% entry tomorrow though...but I was planning for C/I.

 

[Silverbird]

I agree, it seems like every time we hit 1370, the buyers storm in. You're not the only one waiting for 1360.

 

[Buster]

Made up my mind..I'm going all S tomorrow before the nooner