The Death of Buy and Hold: Why Investors Must Learn How to Trade, Instead

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Buy and hold sure doesn’t get the respect it used to!  Is it still a viable strategy today? Perhaps more importantly – does anyone even care? Guest contributor Sy Harding takes a look at the downtrend in holding periods for stocks – and talk about a bear market, this trend has been firmly entrenched for […]

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Las Vegas may still be hurting, but the Wall Street Casino is as lively as ever. US ETF and ETP assets have just topped the $1 trillion mark – impressive because c’mon, let’s face it – ETFs are a pure speculative vehicle, nothing more and nothing less. And because ETFs are created due to investor […]

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The current headline on Google Finance is a Bloomberg story crowing about the S&P’s 86% (!) rally off the March 2009 lows.  The S&P has traded up 17 out of 22 trading days in December (Source: Elliott Wave International), and has rallied pretty much non-stop for 4 months now.  A rally which, fittingly, kicked off […]

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Today Minyanville carried a piece entitled Seven ETFs to Play Deflation, which highlighted high dividend paying ETFs and interest paying bond funds. While I agree with the premise IF deflation is mild and US growth is merely slower than normal, I’d be cautious about the dividend funds if we see a wicked wave of deflation […]

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One of our FAVORITE contrary indicators is the launch of a new Exchange Traded Fund (ETF).  By the time there is sufficient demand for one of these investment vehicles, and it’s actually put together and rolled out, the trend has more often than not already reversed on the investment theme it’s trying to represent. For […]

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I had lunch with our property manager today – he’s a sharp guy with hooks into much of the local (Sacramento) commercial real estate market.  The development company he manages and leases property for is one of the prominent developers in town…they are still doing OK, but have certainly fallen on tougher times since 2007. […]

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Yesterday afternoon, we closed our short S&P 500 futures position after hours, on the expectation that some sort of bounce was developing in the near term. If that’s what you call a bounce – it was pretty pathetic! What a lame-ass bounce! We’ll see what type of follow through we get tomorrow and Friday.  That […]

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