My housing article is up on SA at
http://usmarket.seekingalpha.com/article/19458
Much more readable there…
If you want to read October posts click on the month of October where, for some reason, the formatting remains intact.
I will give it a shot tomorrow but I am done messing with this thing for the day, if you don’t see my post up by 9:30 definately check http://seekingalpha.com/by/author/philip-davis for the latest update.
Well, we had lots of fun looking at how we COULD get a soft landing but there are still a lot of bridges to cross and one major toll coming up is cancellations.
Cancellations of pending home orders had caused the last 3 housing reports to be adjusted downward with an implied margin of error of 15% or more. That means that what has been reported as a 17% drop in new home sales this may end up being a 30% drop in new home sales next month. Of course, it may also be a 2% drop but, really, which do you think is more likely?
Don’t even read this if you’re trying to be bullish – Biodeiselchris points out that David Walker, the US Comptroller, considers the economy such a crisis that he is getting a bunch of economists together to go on tour so they can explain it to the American people who, when asked, consistently fail to rank our $8,500,000,000,0000 deficit as one of the top 10 problems facing our nation.
If you think you had a tough year, check out Vega Asset Management’s performance bad enough to warrant a letter of apology from the Mega Hedge Fund.
LOW is one of the few calls I kept (because it was so bad it wasn’t worth selling!) with the Nov $32.50s down at a dime (down 75%). Earnings are not until the 20th but Cramer just jumped on board so, if the market isn’t dying on us I will add to that position but with the December $32.50s at .45, giving it more room to run.
Cramer also agrees with me that YHOO is indeed too cheap to stay at this level and represents a takeover opportunity for a big media company. Amazingly our Jan $27.50s are back to $1 (up 20%) already as the initial play in which we sold the calls worked out just right! The Jan ’08 $25s are now back even at $4.80 (DD 10/19) but those we have time for!
Check out Nick Perry’s article on the week in the ETF world – really wasn’t that bad in retrospect… http://usmarket.seekingalpha.com/article/19443
Have a good weekend,
– Phil
