MARKET COMMENT
Dave Fry at ETF Digest, April 14, 2009
Goldman Sachs posts great earnings last night derived primarily from its own proprietary “trading” activities. It’s easy to connect the dots between these results and using TARP money courtesy of you and me. Then they do a secondary stock offering at a relatively high price (drive the price sharply higher, then discount it) to payback taxpayers. (What? Where’s the taxpayers’ vig? Worse yet, this is like taxpayers are hedge fund clients and therefore the general partner only should get its 20% right?)
When these guys want to do a deal they muscle the Street to make it work. If you don’t play ball you’re blacklisted. Below is “Play of the Day”.
Peter Morici shines the light on the non-trading aspects of this better than me HERE.
So, maybe this con marks the end of our current bear market rally as Blankfein & Co wave “bye bye” saying, “thanks suckers!” This is what has been troubling me so much—light volume giving you a sense of artificiality and manipulation by the hedgies and trading desks. The public is hardly involved.
Volume picked up some with many now back at work. Breadth obviously was poor as profit-taking emerged with poor retail sales data.
Intel reported after hours earnings that were low but beat expectation. They sold the stock down 4% after that news so that may be the mood going forward.
Bloomberg’s Caroline Baum wrote a week or two ago that politicians should wear T-Shirts with logos of those organizations that own or sponsor them. I thought about this when watching TV interviews from the Masters Golf Tournament. Players have a cap with their sponsors logo prominently displayed. I don’t think any of these guys are allowed to make public appearances without these accoutrements. Politicians should be in the same position—even the president. Imagine a press conference where the president dons a GS cap. Get the visual?
There’s not much difference between this administration and the last. Previously Paulson, the former chairman of GS, bailed-out his old firm using Geithner as his tool. What’s really changed? Geithner gives more dough to GS and they trade the snot out of it, make money and then return it sans interest or a piece of the action. The entire process is disgusting.
The post today is abbreviated since I’m absorbed with other matters.
Let’s see what happens.
Disclaimer: Among other issues the ETF Digest maintains positions in: SPY, MDY, IWM, QQQQ, XLB, XLF, XLI, XLY, IYR, DBC, DBA, DBB, DBC, USL, MOO, EFA, EEM, IF, EWZ, and FXI.
The charts and comments are only the author’s view of market activity and aren’t recommendations to buy or sell any security. Market sectors and related ETFs are selected based on his opinion as to their importance in providing the viewer a comprehensive summary of market conditions for the featured period. Chart annotations aren’t predictive of any future market action rather they only demonstrate the author’s opinion as to a range of possibilities going forward.
