Empiric Student Property Share Discussion Threads

[briarberry] 12/12/2006 17:34

EIA still sees world oil demand up 1.5M bbd in 2007







The world's problem is as follows. We now consume six barrels of oil for every new barrel we discover. Major oil finds (of over 500m barrels) peaked in 1964. In 2000, there were 13 such discoveries, in 2001 six, in 2002 two and in 2003 none. Three major new projects will come onstream in 2007 and three in 2008. For the following years, none have yet been scheduled.

The oil industry tells us not to worry: the market will find a way of sorting this out. If the price of energy rises, new sources will come onstream. But new sources of what? Every other option is much more expensive than the cheap oil that made our economic complexity possible.

[briarberry] 12/12/2006 15:44

GS must have made a lot of money shorting oil from $79 ?





Goldman Sachs on Tuesday said that net income in its fiscal fourth quarter nearly doubled from the previous year, easily surpassing the average estimate among Wall Street analysts. The firm posted strong results across several parts of its business, with profits lifted by investment gains, banking fees and strong trading results. The earnings announcement came as Goldman and other financial firms are in the process of awarding year-end bonuses, which are expected to be significantly larger than last year's take.



ECB Warns of `Herd-Like' Mentality in Derivatives

Sales of CDOs jumped 73 percent to $446 billion this year from a year earlier, according to data compiled by JPMorgan Chase & Co. The market for credit derivatives is the fastest-growing part of the derivatives market, helping to spur record earnings for banks including New York-based Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

[briarberry] 11/12/2006 22:54

QQQQs back up at resistance, could be another down day tomorrow ?


Texas Instruments Inc. lowered fourth-quarter earnings and revenue guidance on Monday, now expecting profit from continuing operations of 37 to 40 cents per share on revenue ranging between $3.35 billion and $3.50 billion.

Previously, the company, which is the largest maker of chips for cell phones, saw earnings from continuing operations of 40 cents to 46 cents per share on sales of $3.46 billion to $3.75 billion.

[briarberry] 11/12/2006 20:08

Bombay Stock Exchange's 30-share sensitive index, crashed a resounding 400 points on Monday, the seventh-largest single-day fall in its history.

While traders pointed to inflation worries and fears of a potential growth slowdown triggered by banking regulator Reserve Bank of India's move on Friday to tighten money supply by increasing the Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR)-the money banks have to keep in the form of cash and deposits with the RBI, the real reason for the freefall may have been sell-offs by foreign institutional investors (FIIs), whose moves are shadowed by domestic players. FIIs sold shares worth Rs 334 crore.

Banking stocks tanked as a result of the RBI move, as a CRR hike would cut the funds they could lend, thereby potentially affecting earnings.

[briarberry] 11/12/2006 19:31

recession watch...

Ownit Mortgage Solutions of California shut down, citing "the unfavorable conditions of the mortgage industry." That's a euphemism for subprime home borrowers getting into trouble and defaulting on loans at unprecedented speed.

Ownit would sell loans it originated to Wall Street, which repackaged them as mortgage-backed securities. But, as Dow Jones Newswires reports, the issuers of the MBS can force Ownit to take back loans that go into default. Ownit ran out of cash to repurchase the bad loans for the street, according to industry sources quoted by Dow Jones Newswires.



Ownit joins Ameriquest Mortgage Co., Countrywide Financial Corp., H&R Block Inc.'s Option One, BNC Mortgage Inc. and other lenders in shutting operations or laying off employees as the U.S. housing market slows. Delinquencies are rising, home prices are falling and borrowers of adjustable-rate mortgages are facing higher monthly payments.

Nonprime News, an industry newsletter, ranked Ownit as the 11th-largest U.S. issuer of so-called subprime mortgages.

[briarberry] 10/12/2006 12:06

Hedge funds, private pools of capital, oversee a total of $1.3 trillion, more than double the amount they managed five years ago.

[briarberry] 09/12/2006 21:42

PBS 20th Century Economics - if you're interested in history

I dare say most of you have seen them before, I watched these on DVD a few years back. I thought they were very good. Found them on the net.

Keynes vs Hayek is interesting, starts in chapter 2

19 parts:




this is interesting too (first 2 sections are anyway)

[briarberry] 07/12/2006 16:34

WASHINGTON - Dozens of sawmills around the country are laying off workers, shutting down temporarily or trimming hours, as a steep drop in home building hits demand and prices.

In Northern California, Pacific Lumber said Dec. 1 that it was laying off 90 people, or 19% of workers.

"A (price) decline of this magnitude is virtually unprecedented in the last 20 years," says Pacific Lumber spokeswoman Andrea Arnot.

Prices for structural panels are down 27% from a year ago, while other types of lumber have seen large declines, according to Random Lengths, an independent newsletter specializing in softwood lumber. Tim Cochran of Random Lengths calls the current downturn the longest bear market since 1990.

"(Prices) went up so high with the housing boom ... and so when they go up hard they just go down that much harder," Cochran says.

[briarberry] 07/12/2006 16:27

The new story is the bubble in the commercial real estate market -- offices, hotels and retail establishments -- which has generated spectacular returns for investors over the past few years.

Prices have risen to ridiculous levels, relative to the risk involved and the amount of income generated by these properties. But even those prices don't seem to scare away pension funds, university endowments and Arab investors, who continue to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into real estate investment trusts, private-equity real estate funds and hedge funds that specialize in real estate finance.




Real Estate iShares

[briarberry] 07/12/2006 12:59

oil

Even though the USA has a full tank at the moment (commercial crude stocks are high for this time of year), global spare capacity is tight and global demand is still expected to rise (until we see a recession). Plus the weather has turned colder in the US.



LAGOS (AFX) - At least one person was killed and four were kidnapped during
an attack by armed assailants on an oil installation belonging to Italian
company Agip in southern Nigeria, a Nigerian military officer said.

[briarberry] 07/12/2006 02:10

BKX seems to be up on merger news - Bank of New York to buy Mellon

The financials are weighted at around 22% of the SPX

[briarberry] 07/12/2006 00:21

UBS, Goldman Threaten NYSE, Nasdaq With Rival Stock Markets

By Edgar Ortega and Yalman Onaran

Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The biggest customers of the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Stock Market are turning into their most dangerous competitors.

Securities firms, led by UBS AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Credit Suisse Group, already steer 12 percent of U.S. stock trades away from the exchanges to their internal systems. That share probably will increase to 18 percent by 2010 as more investment banks bypass the NYSE and Nasdaq and pair buyers and sellers of stock themselves, according to data compiled by Boston-based Aite Group LLC, a brokerage-industry consultant.

Now that computers have eliminated the need for trading floors like the Big Board's, the balance of power in equity markets is shifting. By bringing more orders in-house, where clients can move big blocks of stock anonymously, brokers pay the exchanges less in fees and capture a bigger share of the $11 billion a year that institutional investors pay in trading commissions.

``More internal flow gives you a bigger chance to get more trades for your customer or for yourself,'' said Larry Leibowitz, 46, UBS's chief operating officer for U.S. equities in Stamford, Connecticut. ``Less transparency could increase the value of the liquidity that a broker has since nobody else can see it.''

Because most bids and offers are shown on the NYSE and Nasdaq, trading on either exchange is akin to playing poker with an open hand. That's why money managers who don't want to expose their strategies are sending more trades to so-called dark pools, the internal or private networks where prices are secret.






NYSE Broker Volume Top 10 (about 50% of all volume)

Trade Date: 12/5/2006

Total Purchases & Sales: 3,115,521,959

Firm Volume

Nasdaq Execution Services 551,871,496 17.7%
Merrill Lynch 241,663,954 7.8%
Goldman Sachs Group 239,527,027 7.7%
Lehman Brothers Inc 189,125,954 6.1%
Morgan Stanley & Co 183,535,786 5.9%
UBS 164,326,611 5.3%
Bear Stearns Securities Corp 143,881,384 4.6%
Citi Group 124,633,762 4.0%
Deutsche Bank Securities 113,383,287 3.6%
Jefferies Execution Services 84,374,027 2.7%

[briarberry] 07/12/2006 00:03

QQQQ looking at the EW I guess there's a chance it could do a C down tomorrow

would be good because then it could drift up into Christmas (and maybe up into opex next week?)

after nearly 6 months of up, don't feel like shorting anything :(

[briarberry] 06/12/2006 17:04

HGX borrowed a nice chart from another site, could be the line in the sand ? will find out fairly soon :) :)

HGX put:call ratio back down to more normal levels too

[briarberry] 06/12/2006 16:13

Delinquencies on this years new subprime mortgages, one mortgage company said that 2% of it's new borrowers couldn't even make the first payment!

Surely you'd have a good idea of your ability to earn enough to make the first years payments

[briarberry] 06/12/2006 15:19

some of that refi activity is due to borrowers getting out of adjustable loans that are about to reset at a higher rate. not sure what %age

[briarberry] 06/12/2006 14:41

refi figs put in a good bounce, Christmas present money maybe, I don't think this is going to stop until house prices actually fall in the national figs, new money creation is always bullish for the SPX, it's only going down now because it's over bought.


"Fueling the rise in mortgage applications last week was a 13.7% jump in the MBA's seasonally adjusted index of refinancing.

The refinance share of requests rose to 50.1% from 46.9% the week before, highest since April 2004."



A look at the following chart on housing cash out refinancings, clearly illustrates Joe Soccer Mom's (JSM) largely unrestrained ability (so far), to effectively service their old debts and continue spending, with new debt. That's true even with the kind of extremely low levels of cash in the bank.

[briarberry] 06/12/2006 13:20

The Hidden Truth About Home Prices - NYTimes

By DAVID LEONHARDT - Published: December 6, 2006

The truth is that the official numbers on house prices - the last refuge of soothing information about the real estate market on the coasts - are deeply misleading. Depending on which set you look at, you'll see that prices have either continued to rise, albeit modestly, or have fallen slightly over the last year. But the statistics have a number of flaws, perhaps the biggest being that they are based only on homes that have actually sold. The numbers overlook all those homes that have been languishing on the market for months, getting only offers that their owners have not been willing to accept.
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For many homeowners, of course, the decline doesn't much matter. They didn't really benefit from the run-up, and they won't suffer from the decline. And for any renters hoping to buy a home, the fall in prices is downright good news.

Unfortunately, there are also a lot of families that took on huge mortgage debts based on the ephemeral peak values of their properties. In effect, they cashed in on the housing boom without cashing out. As Ed Smith Jr., the chief executive of Plaza Financial Group, a mortgage brokerage firm near San Diego, said, "So many people picked up their homes, turned them upside down and shook them like a piggy bank."

The withdrawals have been so big that the average household in Boston now has slightly less equity in its home than it did in 2000, according to an analysis by Moody's Economy.com that took inflation into account.
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Then there are the people who bought their homes in the last couple of years and made almost no down payment. Many of them may now be underwater, owing more on their mortgages than their houses are worth.

Most worrisome, growing numbers of these families are falling behind on their mortgage payments, and they won't be able to bail themselves out by refinancing or selling their homes. "We're now going to combine a high amount of debt with falling home values," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Economy.com.
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We may now be living on both borrowed money and borrowed time.


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[briarberry] 05/12/2006 18:11

worth remembering too...


Few money managers want to cash in their gains in December, as their clients would then have to pay taxes on those in April of next year. If they wait until January 1, taxes on those gains won't have to be paid until April 2008.

[briarberry] 05/12/2006 17:27

company credit defaults are still very low...


Standard & Poor's has been warning for months that credit quality will deteriorate somewhat in 2007. It recently predicted the speculative-grade bond default rate will edge up slowly from its 2006 trough of an estimated 1.4 percent to 2.4 percent by mid-year and 3.2 percent by year-end 2007. S&P also warned the junk bond default rate for U.S. leveraged loans would increase as well.

[briarberry] 05/12/2006 14:39

"Erratic Sentiment" Interview with Mr. Mark Young, President of Equity Guardian LLC.

(5mb)


Interview with Mr. Jason Goepfert of www.sentimentrader.com.

[briarberry] 05/12/2006 12:58

BKX - looks like we should be watching the, Bearing's credit bubble index, not just the BKX :) :)

It's easy to talk about the credit bubble, but a picture is still worth a thousand words-or in this case millions of dollars. Below are some charts created by Houston-based Bearing Asset Management that illustrate just how crazy (and familiar) today's market has become. As Bearing's Bill Laggner puts it, "Complacency is near an all-time high and mutual fund cash positions are near an all-time low. Bank loan loss reserves are falling due to the illusion of credit default swaps. Everyone is writing default insurance!"

(charts)

[briarberry] 05/12/2006 11:30

64bit version of Microsoft Vista, you need a new computer for that don't you

our computers are still only 32bit

don't short Dell or HP etc in 2007