Stocks I’m watching this morning: Avaya (AV), Advanced Medical Optics (EYE), Bausch & Lomb (BOL), Peru Copper (CUP), China.com (CHINA), Apple (AAPL), Jones Soda (JSDA), MedImmune (MEDI), Micron (MU), and Yahoo! (YHOO).
Good bit from an interview with Ray Dalio (a guy who gets it) in this week’s Barron’s:
“Our situation today is a modern-day version of the time before the Bretton Woods breakup. It is very much analogous to 1968, ‘69, and ‘70, a period in which we had large imbalances, a fixed exchange rate, and Japan and Germany bought our bonds, and then there was a rebalancing. China today is similar to Japan then, in transition from being an emerging economy, except it is about eight times as large. The imbalances are only going to increase, and there’ll need to be an adjustment for that. This will lead to depreciation in the value of the dollar relative to emerging countries’ currencies, particularly those in Asia.”
Correct.
Good solid day of buying.
Notable New Lows: Sterling Financial (SLFI), JDS Uniphase (JDSU), and DivX (DIVX).
Notable New Highs: Research in Motion (RIMM), Chipotle’s (CMG), McAfee (MFE), CVS (CVS), and RadioShack (RSH) — hold The Onion… joke.
Verigy (VRGY) jumped after hours on Thursday but it gave an excellent low-risk spot for Dummies to get long this morning.
Here’s a historical look at the Shanghai A-share market turnover (in US dollars). This chart is arithmetically scaled to give it the drama it deserves. Keep in mind that this is only the Shanghai A-share market and the chart does not include the turnover in the A-share market in Shenzhen or the B-share market in either city. If you add them all up, China is doing over $50 billion in daily turnover these days. Wild!
Thanks to commenter “Punting Analyst” who hipped me to the Bloomberg function VALU. You can see how enormous the Chinese A-share market turnover is compared with other Asia-Pacific markets, including Japan. I got some historical data too for turnover and even some breadth (advances vs. decliners) data for the Shanghai market, but I’m tired and have been drinking so I’ll leave the charts for this weekend.
More good stuff from a WallStrip interview, this time with Curtis Faith:
Lindsay Campbell: What is the biggest obstacle for most traders?
Curtis Faith: I would say faith in their own decision making. I think people second guess themselves too much. They might follow their strategy 95% of the time but it’s that 5% that they stop is almost invariably when they would have made a lot of money. Successful traders are able to avoid what’s known as the outcome bias which is the idea that you look at your decisions and say if I made money on this trade then I’m really happy and if I lost money on the trade then that means that I did something wrong.
Interesting malapropism from Michael Chiklis during his interview with Terry Gross:
“I shaved my head in male-patent baldness at 20 years old.”
Those of us suffering from male pattern baldness are deeply jealous of how good Chiklis looks bald. I’ve only seen season one of The Shield but I liked it a lot.
Catching up on old WallStrip interviews… good bits from NBC Integrated Media’s Beth Comstock:
“If you have great content, if you can tell good stories, you’re always going to find distribution platforms.”
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“Pre-roll ads, I’d short those, but I think what we have to do as an industry is figure out more innovative ways to do pre-roll ads because if you’re looking at them on the Internet they can’t be like television.”
Mixed morning until 10:30 when selling kicked in and continued uninterrupted all day — impressively bad tone.
Notable New Lows: Marvell Technology (MRVL), Komag (KOMG), IAMGOLD (IAG), and Vista Gold (VGZ).
Notable New Highs list the shortest I’ve seen it in ages: EMC (EMC), Garmin (GRMN), Express Scripts (ESRX), Toro (TTC), Manpower (MAN), and Siemens (SI).
I’ll feature the Utilities SPDR (XLU) as the stock du jour… it has had a bad week and you can see how one week’s action has enveloped the last month’s action — the kind of thing you see at intermediate, and long-term, tops.
