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Friday, July 2, 2010

4th of July & the 4 day weekend

Stock loan is a funny business, you basically settle trades from 3 days ago, on a T+0basis which if you think about it is; for starters backwards. You then borrow stock and give someone cash as collateral, you would think because youre borrowing you would be paying something, borrow ….pay interest, but when the stock is EASY TO BORROW, you get paid something. HMMM. I borrow I get paid, sounds backwards, but sounds good to me. Now I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself or you, so let me clarify, if you are borrower of Easy to Borrow stocks and you are a big important customer of your clearing firm, then you get paid, something. Everyone else gets nothing. Now if that stock you want to borrow becomes, HARD TO BORROW, instead of you getting a rebate on your cash collateral, you forfeit the interest rebate and pay a premium interest rate on top. So now you borrow, you give up cash they get the overnight interest on said cash, and then you pay additional annualized interest. Really backwards. In any event with the system set up in such a confusing way imagine how hard it must be to get reliable market data. Real time nonetheless. Good Luck on that one. The one piece of solid info coming out of shorts lately is that the market overall needs to go lower, and I continue to see overvalued sectors and single stocks that offer downside profit opportunities for the bears. There are platforms that quote rates, but have no execution capabilities. I often ask the question, what is the value of data if it is not executable? Earlier this week in the NY Post they were having a Jewish Senior Citizen joke contest and I read this joke from Paul Cohen of East Windsor. “So Mrs Stein goes to the local kosher butcher shop and says ‘How much for a pound of Lamb Chops’? The butcher says for you $6 a pound. She flips ‘But across the street they are $3 a pound’ ‘So says the butcher’ “go buy from the butcher across the street” ‘But he don’t got any’ she says. “Lady, if I didn’t have any lambchops I’d also quote you $3 a pound”
That sums it up perfectly. Happy Fourth of July, Celebrate our independence, its fleeting.



Short-it
In every medium from tv- radio- to web I have been calling for an end of the new normal, and a return to sensible value investing. For some time now a the markets been overvalued. An 80% 1 year move must retrace and stabilize for any rational long term strength. The artificial stimulation has not produced the happy ending so far, and it seems that now the cleansing is beginning. The shorts that utilize my platform LocateStock, have been signaling since end of April that the fun was done, and short sentiment remained steady and always biased to the shorter side. Todays jobs number will be weak, worse than expected, and there is not enough ammo in the Treasury, to artificially stimulate the employment crisis. Even the overnight weekend players were increasing, signaling to me that short term traders were more willing to take weekend carry risk to possibly catch a Monday morning gap down open. All bearish to me. Last week, in my morning eye opener-- posted here on my Instablog, and rejected as a contribution, I highlighted the following: JUNE 23, 2010:
DNDN - Dendreon was the darling of bio tech bettors. They bought in, they watched as the results came in, they hyped it, they ran it, they hoped and prayed that the FDA would finally approve Provenge, the first ever vaccine to fight cancer. And then it happened. Unlike so many other bio techs that never get that highly sought after approval, they did it. They got the approval. Way back when, the stock shot up 10 points in a couple of days on the big news. Problem is, the stock was priced as if it were already approved before it got approved, and besides some news momentum and retail hysteria, the stock traded down on the news. There was recently some decent news that Aetna would cover the expensive prostate cancer treatment, but the devils in the details. There is some fine print that the patient must be on hormone treatment for 3 months so there will be a defined lag before sales can actually start being reflected or at least collected. To me it’s a buy the rumor sell the news and the stock could trade back into $30 territory in the near term.
The shorts have been consistently right, and the ones that were most sought by shorts yesterday are the folllowing: C -- GRMN -- XLF -- FTR -- JOE

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