Empiric Student Property Share Discussion Threads

[briarberry] 13/7/2007 14:02

repost from another thread...


Retail Sales - M/M change
Consensus 0.0 %
Actual -0.9 %

Retail Sales less autos - M/M change
Consensus 0.2 %
Actual -0.4 %

edit: I remind you that these numbers ARE NOT ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION!
___

Import Prices - M/M change
Consensus 0.6 %
Actual 1.0 %

so real retail sales could be down by as much as -1.9% ????

[briarberry] 12/7/2007 17:09

Mortgage Purchase Index - Temporary Malfunction

[briarberry] 11/7/2007 23:00

roaring 20's - thought this was interesting...

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's (Wiley Investment Classics) (Paperback)



There was nothing languorous about the atmosphere of tropical Miami during that memorable summer and autumn of 1925. The whole city had become one frenzied real-estate exchange.

Yes, the public bought. By 1925 they were buying anything, anywhere, so long as it was in Florida [/b]One had only to announce a new development, be it honest or fraudulent, be it on the Atlantic Ocean or deep in the wasteland of the interior, to set people scrambling for house lots.

A lot in the business center of Miami Beach had sold for $800 in the early days of the development and had resold for $150,000 in 1924. For a strip of land in Palm Beach a New York lawyer had been offered $240,000 some eight or ten years before the boom; in 1923 he finally accepted $800,000 for it...

It began obviously to collapse in the spring and summer of 1926...

By 1928 Henry S. Villard, writing in The Nation, thus described the approach to Miami by road: "Dead subdivisions line the highway, their pompous names half-obliterated on crumbling stucco gates. Lonely white-way lights stand guard over miles of cement side- walks, where grass and palmetto take the place of homes that were to be .... Whole sections of outlying subdivisions are composed of unoccupied houses, past which one speeds on broad thoroughfares as if traversing a city in the grip of death." In 1928 there were thirty-one bank failures in Florida; in 1929 there were fifty-seven...

By the middle of 1930, after the general business depression had set in, no less than twenty-six Florida cities had gone into default of principal or interest on their bonds

[briarberry] 10/7/2007 22:44

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Standard and Poor's Rating Services is downgrading 612 securities backed by subprime mortgage loans because of high delinquency and foreclosure rates.

S&P based its ratings drops on past performance but said it expects the loans involved will continue to lose money - and that the loan quality will worsen.

Starting almost immediately, S&P will begin to lower ratings, which now range from A+ to BB, to as low as CCC. Many of the loans affected are in the portfolios of major Wall Street players such as Bear Stearns, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley.

Deadly ripples threaten subprime funds
The securities, all backed by U.S. subprime mortgages, cover a little more than 2 percent of the more than $565 billion in U.S. residential mortgage-backed securities rated during the 15 months ended Dec. 31, 2006.

According to an S&P press release, the agency took the step because of high delinquencies, mostly stemming from lax underwriting standards in effect when the loans were originally made.

According to the ratings agency, vintage-2006, subprime loans have accumulated delinquencies far in excess of historical norms and at much higher rates than the agency initially anticipated.

[briarberry] 09/7/2007 23:06

Alcoa Inc - Earnings from continuing operations were $716 million, or 81 cents per share, compared with $749 million, or 85 cents per share in the same quarter of last year, the Pittsburgh-based company said. Revenue rose to $8.1 billion from $7.8 billion.

[ian56] 07/7/2007 00:00

Earnings.

Last qtr expectations were low.
They had been revised down from the start of the year.
Subsequent to the revision they beat expectations by the usual amount.

This qtr expectations are high.
The mkt is expecting GDP growth to strengthen from 0.7% 1st qtr to 2-3% this qtr.

Alcoa reports before the bell on Monday.
My forecast is that Alcoa's earnings will disappoint. Expectations are +84c.

We shall see.

Regards,
Ian

[briarberry] 06/7/2007 20:22

mortgage debt investors offered 5c on the dollar - must be true it's in the FT...


Buyers avoid Bear Stearns' cut-priced sale
By James Mackintosh and Gillian Tett in London

Published: July 4 2007 03:00 | Last updated: July 4 2007 03:00

Investors in the worse-hit of two stricken Bear Stearns hedge funds are offering to sell their holdings for as little as 11 cents on the dollar but still finding no buyers, according to unfilled trades on Hedgebay, a secondary market for funds.

Vulture funds and others have been quick to bid for holdings in the two funds, but the best bid for Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leveraged Fund, the more geared of the two, is just 5 cents on the dollar.

Private sales of stakes are the only way investors can exit the two Bear funds, after the bank suspended redemptions in May amid a wave of withdrawals.

[briarberry] 06/7/2007 13:34

CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) for beginners

[briarberry] 05/7/2007 23:57

The housing situation is going from bad to worse
Second, the housing situation is going from bad to worse and you can forget about a recovery until next year. The starkest piece of information last week was the news that the national unsold existing inventory of single-family homes and condos surged at an astounding 82% annual rate so far this year. We still can't wrap that number around our head. The overhang is now up to an 8.9 months' supply, which is the highest inventory-to-sales ratio in 15 years. By way of
comparison, the months' supply of inventory was 6.4 a year ago and 4.3 two years ago. The massive excess supply we have on our hands today is simply going to reinforce the deflationary state in the housing market, at a time when home prices on average have already declined at an annual rate of 5% in the past six months, the biggest drop we've seen since the summer of 1991, and fully three quarters of the country is now deflating (outside of Manhattan, that is). Clearing out the excess inventory is going to mean at least another 10% downside in average home prices, in our view, which is just going to reinforce the weak performance we're seeing in the homebuilders, financials and consumer discretionary space.

[briarberry] 03/7/2007 22:51

materials expenses still rising




and as usual they're counting inflation as sales...

Factory orders fell 0.5 percent in May offering a new reminder that data on the manufacturing is mixed. The new data in today's report is a 4 tenth downward revision to durable goods orders, now at a month-to-month decline of 2.8 percent, and a 1.6 percent rise in nondurable goods orders that largely reflects price changes in oil and coal.

[briarberry] 03/7/2007 22:33

The financials profits should take a dive, a 37% decline in M&A (post 954), along with repricing for risk in debt markets, plus a drop in the markets will cut trading profits


Goldman Sachs continues to ride the deal wave. The investment bank was ranked the top M&A adviser across the world, in the U.S. and in Europe during the first six months of the year, Dealogic said. Goldman, which advised on 223 deals worth $788 billion, was followed by Morgan Stanley and Citigroup in the global M&A ranking.

[briarberry] 03/7/2007 19:10

GM'S U.S. SALES FALL 21% IN JUNE; FORD AND DAIMLERCHRYSLER SALES DOWN 8.1% AND 1.8%



Overall, new-vehicle sales in the U.S. fell 3% last month from a year earlier to slightly fewer than 1.5 million

[briarberry] 03/7/2007 16:01

Pending down 3.5% m-o-m

The National Association of Realtors reported that signings on sales of existing homes falling 3.5%. Pending sales are down 13.3% compared with a year earlier, and are down 21% from the peak year in 2005.

It leaves the National Association of Realtors' index at its lowest point since September 2001.

[briarberry] 03/7/2007 02:11

On Sunday, Gretchen Morgenson wrote in the New York Times about the CDO carnage and its fallout for the LBO and CLO markets:

A retrenchment on risk is not surprising, given that the anything-goes mentality among investors has lasted for the past three years. The mortgage market's woes were the first to tip the balance, but corporate bonds, stocks and private equity will also feel the effects of a pullback in risk-taking.

"Until now we were in a period where risk was underpriced," said Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business and chairman of Roubini Global Economics. "Debt was so cheap that anybody could take a semiprofitable company private and leverage it. Now the price of this is going to be more expensive.

[briarberry] 03/7/2007 01:43

investors starting to see the risk...

July 2 (Bloomberg) -- United Capital Markets Holdings Inc., a brokerage run by John Devaney, halted redemptions on some of its hedge funds that invest in subprime-mortgage bonds.

``We did that as a defensive move because we had an unusually high number of redemption requests and we didn't want to be a forced seller in this market,'' Gregory said in a telephone interview. One of the redemption requests was from an investor who had put up about 25 percent of the funds' money.

``There is likely to be news around quarter end of more hedge funds that need to recognize large losses, possibly forcing liquidation of the funds,'' Deutsche Bank analysts led by Mustafa Chowdhury wrote in the June 29 report. Chowdhury said total losses probably will range from $70 billion to $90 billion.

[briarberry] 03/7/2007 01:35

M & A down 37% in June...

July 2 (Bloomberg) -- The steepest drop in mergers and acquisitions in 14 months is making U.S. stocks the most expensive compared with bonds in two years.

This year's record pace of takeovers slowed by 37 percent in June, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Delaware Investments, the Hartford and City National Bank, which manage more than $500 billion, say the decline plus the decision by leveraged buyout firm Blackstone Group LP to sell shares to the public are signaling that the five-year bull market is nearing an end.



June 29 (Bloomberg) -- Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings are masking burgeoning losses in the market for subprime mortgage bonds by failing to cut the credit ratings on about $200 billion of securities backed by home loans.

[ian56] 02/7/2007 22:59

China has a new strategy?



Regards,
Ian

[briarberry] 02/7/2007 16:38

NEW YORK(Dow Jones)--Ongoing concerns about loans made to borrowers with
poor credit pressured a benchmark derivative index to a new low as investors
continued to hedge against further deterioration in the subprime market.

The riskiest, BBB- tranche of the current index, known as the ABX.HE, traded
at a record 52.50 cents on the dollar amid heavy trading, according to Alex
Pritchartt, a trader at UBS.

[briarberry] 02/7/2007 01:18

US Q2 GDP

The April-May data of consumer spending and a conservative assumption for June point to about a 1.7% annualized increase in consumer outlays during the second quarter. Consumer spending grew at an annual rate of 4.2% in each of the prior two quarters. This bodes poorly for headline GDP in the second quarter, after a 0.7% increase in the first quarter.

Is this just a one quarter slowdown? Or is this the beginning of a housing related slump in consumer spending?

[briarberry] 02/7/2007 01:01

sources of info...


Series: WBAA, Moody's Seasoned Baa Corporate Bond Yield




treasuries vs typical junk bond fund

[briarberry] 02/7/2007 00:51

LBO, leveraged buyout

credit is certainly tightening...


Fed Issues Stricter Guidance For Subprime Lenders

By Martin H. Bosworth
ConsumerAffairs.Com

June 29, 2007

Living in a Bubble?

• Fed Issues Stricter Guidance For Subprime Lenders

It may be too late to help victims of the current housing bubble's deflation, but the Federal Reserve and several other agencies jointly issued new guidance for subprime mortgage lenders that more strictly enforces the terms under which borrowers can be offered "creative" mortgage products.

The inter-agency recommendations include clear and comprehensive depictions of timelines for adjustable-rate mortgages, which often begin with a low "teaser" rate and then reset to a much higher rate than unsuspecting homeowners are capable of paying.

Other recommendations include full verification of borrowers' incomes, clear product disclosures and warnings for prospective borrowers, and prepayment penalty limits that would give homeowners up to 60 days to refinance into fixed loans without paying additional fees.

[ian56] 02/7/2007 00:13

What is LBO?

Regards,
Ian

[briarberry] 01/7/2007 22:39

credit spreads for LBO are widening...


QUOTE
jba wrote:

ABX is old news. Look at the LCDX index on the markit.com site. That is the spread on LBO debt. That is signaling the end of LBO financing....

Time / Date Price Spread
4pm Close (29Jun07) 97.73 180.7
Midday (29Jun07) 97.84 177.7
4pm Close (28Jun07) 98.16 168.9
Midday (28Jun07) 98.05 171.8
4pm Close (27Jun07) 98.22 167.1
Midday (27Jun07) 97.92 175.4
4pm Close (26Jun07) 98.38 162.6
Midday (26Jun07) 98.47 160.3
4pm Close (25Jun07) 98.29 165.2
Midday (25Jun07) 98.34 163.7
4pm Close (22Jun07) 98.60 156.6
Midday (22Jun07) 98.74 152.6

Source:Markit