Posting Times

Posts will be between 8:30 PM to 10:00 PM PST
Mikey's Short Term Trading Rules

1) Make up a list of stocks, commodities or ETF's to trade. This list should be names that have good earnings and high relative strength.
2) Monitor this list and throw out the weaker names
3) Buy only stocks or ETF's that are intermediate and daily up (green) and the market is Daily and intermediate term up (green)
4) Buy pullbacks on these stocks to the 20 and 50 day averages
Usually you get 4 to 6 20 day pullback buys and 2 or 3 50 day pullback buys in an intermediate term trend
5) More agressive traders can buy the 7 day average in the first 3 to 8 weeks of the uptrend.
6) Buy pullbacks not runups. A buy should not be easy or exciting but difficult and somewhat scary. DO NOT CHASE
7) Place stop at 5% below the buy price. Do not remove
8) Sell 3 to 5 days after the stock price takes out its most recent 2 week high with at least 15% gains
9) Uptrends that are 12 weeks or more may be ripe for a correction. The first 2 pullbacks to the 50 day are usually safe.
Intermediate term uptrends and downtrends generally last from 8 to 16 weeks with 12 weeks being the norm.
10) Shorting is a viable strategy in downtrends for experienced traders only. In general, reverse the above rules
11) Tweet Mikey @themarketshadow with questions or ideas

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Bank earnings real or memorex

Read this article by Diana Olick from the CNBC website

Banks Ignore Delinquent Borrowers

Some encouraging signs on the foreclosure front may not be as rosy as some are reporting.

RealtyTrac, the online foreclosure sale site, shows a 9 percent dip in the number of properties with foreclosure filings in April, month-to-month.

The driver of that dip is a big drop in new notices of default.

The final stage of foreclosure, that is bank repossessions (REO) shot up to a new record high, up 45 percent from a year ago.

When I first read the report I thought, okay, we knew there was a big pipeline of loans that would not get modified and would have to come out the end at some point; now is that point. The fact that fewer loans are going into the pipeline should be our focus, and that's a positive. That's what I thought until I interviewed RealtyTrac's Rick Sharga.

"People are sitting in their houses not paying their mortgages, and the banks are letting those delinquencies extend longer and longer periods of time before they put them in foreclosure," Sharga told me.

That, he adds, is the main reason we're seeing lower numbers of new defaults.

The borrowers are in default, but the banks aren't paying attention, so they don't show up in the numbers.

He goes on -

"The fact that we have six to six and a half million loans that are either seriously delinquent or in foreclosure also suggests we are not nearly out of the woods. If we just started to absorb that inventory at the pace we're currently seeing new foreclosure proceedings we have about a 50 to 55 month supply of loans that yet have yet to be processed, so we have a way to go before we are out of the mess."

A lot of folks are either falling out of the trial modification period or not qualifying in the first place, and those loans are moving quickly to bank repossession.

California-based mortgage analyst Mark Hanson adds perspective with a look at "cancelled foreclosures."

These are not tracked by RealtyTrac, but they "bite right out of Notices of Default and foreclosures, so to get a real idea of how 'credit' is doing, you have to add a certain percentage back."

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What is happening is that the banks are booking trading profits and not taking loan losses. That is a fact and it pumps up their earnings. Their earning are being driven by gaming the market while they ignore the losses. Their earnings are a scam just like the recovery.

Mikey

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