Investment & Finance Thread 2014 New Year(Mar. 17 - nexttime edition)

Daily investment & finance thread ^ | Mar. 17, 2014 | Freeper Investors

[expat_panama]

Investment & Finance Thread 2014 New Year(Mar. 17 - nexttime edition)

This is the thread where folks swap ideas on savings and investment --here's a list of popular investing links that freepers have posted here. 

Open invitation continues always for input on ideas for the thread, this being a joint effort works well.  

Keywords: financial, WallStreet, stockmarket.  We still hope to include here a ----so let me know if anyone wants on or off this ping. 

Be advised that it gets posted only when I'm not feeling lazy and remember that we now know from studies that sloth is completely genetic and lazy people are the way they are because they were born that way.

======================

So, which way are we going next?

This past week saw four down days out of five with trading volume increasing on the down tics and last Thursday we saw IBD change the market outlook from "confirmed uptrend" to "market under pressure".

We'll see how tomorrow morning's futures look, but in the mean time--

 Gold Poised For Sixth Consecutive Higher Weekly Close

by Peter A. Grant  March 14, AM  (from USAGOLD.com) -- Gold surged to another six month high on Friday of 1387.87, before prices moderated intraday. The impending Crimean referendum this weekend has ratcheted geopolitical tensions steadily higher. Some U.S. data weakness offered an additional boost to the yellow metal initially.... (read more here)/

 

[ncfool]

No place else to go for a return on money. One takes the risk vs a bank CD at .025% You going to lose your principal with the devaluation of the dollar it might as well be fully invested in the market.

Those of us with money know that if we lose it all it hurts where as the masses don’t know what they are losing with our current printing press mentality in Washington.

I always wonder if I should take some money out of the market and buy some rural farm land so that I can grow food if we have a real depression? I’m not a country boy but a city guy. Just a thought.

[Red in Blue PA]

The Dow is a false index. When companies underperform they are removed from the index and newer stronger companies replace them. Yet should a company in the index outperform the averages for some reason they are not replaced. Curious, no?

[BipolarBob]

Stock traders can not find Crimea on the map. I do not expect any serious downturn until October.

Red Oktober?

[GOPJ]

All those QE’s won’t lead to inflation, will they?

You're kidding, right?

[Chgogal]

How do the regulations that regulate 1/6th of the US economy promote growth? The newly defined full time 30 hour work week? The literally Trillions of Dollars of new taxes? The increased costs to households?

[expat_panama]

The Dow is a false index.

Actually, it's not even an index, it's just an average of a few dozen big corporations.  There are a lot of other complaints about the Dow including the fact that it tracks say, 30 companies out of 10,000 that are listed and tens of thousands that aren't.  Still, the ones included are so big they do a good job of mirroring business activity as a whole.  Back in 1950 the Dow was about 400 and the total value of all corporations was about $400B.  Today the Dow's 16,224 and America's total corporate value is just over $16T.  Here's how it's been tracking:

When companies underperform they are removed from the index and newer stronger companies replace them. Yet should a company in the index outperform the averages for some reason they are not replaced. Curious, no?

--and that's exactly what happens in the real world.  Your business underperforms and the law of supply and demand removes it from the marketplace.  You do ok and you live to sell your product another day.

[Red in Blue PA]

That’s what happens in the real world?

I believe there is only one company in the original Dow index which still remains. How about putting that on a graph?

[Red in Blue PA]

Why would I be kidding about a huge increase in the money supply leading to inflation?

[expat_panama]

I believe there is only one company in the original Dow index which still remains. How about putting that on a graph?

Here's a list of the original 1896 Dow stocks:

• American Cotton Oil Company, a predecessor company to Bestfoods, now part of Unilever.
• American Sugar Company, became Domino Sugar in 1900, now Domino Foods, Inc.
• American Tobacco Company, broken up in a 1911 antitrust action.
• Chicago Gas Company, bought by Peoples Gas Light in 1897, now an operating subsidiary of Integrys Energy Group.
• Distilling & Cattle Feeding Company, now Millennium Chemicals, formerly a division of LyondellBasell, the latter of which recently emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.^[12]
• Laclede Gas Company, still in operation as the Laclede Group, Inc., removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1899.
• National Lead Company, now NL Industries, removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1916.
• North American Company, an electric utility holding company, broken up by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1946.
• Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company in Birmingham, Alabama, bought by U.S. Steel in 1907; U.S. Steel was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1991.
• U.S. Leather Company, dissolved in 1952.
• United States Rubber Company, changed its name to Uniroyal in 1961, merged with private B.F. Goodrich in 1986, bought by Michelin in 1990.

Things change, and we're glad they do.

[ncfool]

Going to have to eliminate all my middle managers and put them on the hourly payroll. Should that be the 40 hours or cut them back to 29 hours so that I don’t have to give them health care any longer?

[Chgogal]

Of course, if the regs stay as they are written, then in the long run (5 to 10 years) you are slowly going to move your work force to 29 hours with no benefits. So, now workers will have to get two 29 hour jobs with no benefits. They will make less money BUT they will also have less time to buy stuff. Brilliant! Wasn't that one of Obama’s Goal? If my memory serves me, Obama did say we Americans have to learn to use less of the World's resources.

[Chgogal]

And what the heck is Obama talking about OT? When I started working I would get time and a half when working more then 40 hrs. (I guess OT is now anything greater than 30 hours. Really?). As I got promoted my OT pay would decrease until I hit upper management and then I got no OT. I was expected to do what was necessary to make it work. Now, how in the heck is Mr. I never ran a company in my life, going to administer this? Obama is beyond stupid. There I said it.

[Chgogal]

http://money.msn.com/investing/post—the-states-people-are-fleeing-in-2014

Illinois, No. 2 on the list, with 61 percent more people moving out than in, has a depressing story to tell. Stoll says that over time the state has lost a third of its manufacturing jobs and a quarter of its jobs in construction, and a significant proportion of its unemployed have been out of work for the long term, so the real employment rate there is much higher than the relatively high official figure of 8.9 percent suggests. The Labor Department stops counting people as unemployed when they have given up looking for work or they take a part-time job that doesn't pay the rent.

[Chgogal]

Lookie Here!

You are Ranked #1.
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/efkk45ffleg/the-15-best-countries-to-retire-to-in-2014/?utm_source=money.msn.com&utm_medium=partner&utm_campaign=investing+blog&partner=msnedit

[expat_panama]

huh!

Ten years ago it seemed Panama was the best kept secret for retirement, but I guess now the word’s out.

[expat_panama]

Turns out yesterday's uptick was in really low volume, meaning that while there were traders that were thinking in economic problems would 'blow over' there weren't that many of 'em. 

This morning we got stock futures off/mixed and metals futures sharply down.  Kind of what I was thinking yesterday w/ taking 'measured' steps.  Other news yesterday had Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization both surprisingly up, and in the news this morning--

Is This the Best the Economy Can Do? - Evan Soltas, Bloomberg
New Doomsday Poll: 99.9% Risk of 2014 Crash - Paul Farrell, MarketWatch
Happy Birthday to the Five-Year Bull Market! - Jurrien Timmer, Fidelity
There Are Some Serious Blow-Ups on the Horizon - Reformed Broker
Montana unemployment falls to 5.3 percent
North Dakota tries to woo workers for empty jobs
Detroit retirees see pension cut plan as divisive

[abb]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3134454/posts

36% of Workers Have Less Than $1,000 in Savings
24/7 Wall Street ^ | John C Ogg

Posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2014 8:01:32 AM by SoFloFreeper

[expat_panama]

tx abb!

[expat_panama]

fwiw, on average Americans have a net worth of over a quarter $mil; just about at the all time high --more than 3 times what we had 50 years ago:

[abb]

Only the thrifty, though. The rest, and I don’t know the percentages, continually spend more than they bring in, and then wonder why they can accumulate nothing.