Reading Time: 2 minutes Week in review 030109 to 030709 We are officially in Obama bear market (source: Bloomberg), in other words, the stock market (i.e., Dow industrial for most people) dropped 20% since President Obama took office in Jan 20. Yesterday S&P 500 briefly touched 666 (the number of devil), pretty scary, huh? I am sure this economy/financial

Reading Time: 2 minutes This is the second part of my thoughts on bank nationalization, I hope President Obama and his finance team can read my blog, as they are thinking through the “bank rescue”, the No. 1 issue facing this country, and the world economy for that matter. As I said in my previous post, bank nationalization appears

Reading Time: < 1 minute March 04 1999 to Mar 02 2009, courtesy of Google Finance. Two thoughts pop up by looking at the charts: 1) We probably have not hit bottom yet; 2) The drop in mid 2008 till now is so sharp, 50% in one year 🙁 BTW, I think it’s a good idea to stay away from

Reading Time: < 1 minute (Update Mar07, 2009) I found a good example on performance comparison of regular ETF vs. leveraged ETF. In the past year, the finanicals ETF XLF lost about 75%, while the ultra financial proshares UYG (2 times bull) lost 95%. You can use google finance to draw the comparison. MorningStar link here.

Reading Time: < 1 minute I remember years ago (in dot com era) there is a book named Dow 36,000. Obviously that predication was a laughing stock becaue Dow crashed in year 2000. No I am not trying to make a fool of myself, my title Dow 5,000 is merely to reflect today the Dow and S&P dropped to 12

Reading Time: < 1 minute What is nationalization This is my understanding. Usually a company has 3 types of capital: debt, preferred stock, common stock. In terms of ownership the equity holders (common stock holders) own the company. We say they borrow from the debt holders: in return they pay interest and principle to the debt holders down the road.

Reading Time: 2 minutes I have been a Borders customer for a long time, most times buying coffees while studying (reading books) there, from time to time I also bought some computer or finance related books, such as Effective C++, My Life as a Quant, etc. One benefit of buying books at Borders (compared to Amazon) is getting the

Reading Time: 2 minutes (Update Feb 29 2009) CNBC is putting up some nice words on Buffett today. After all, he lent $3 b to GE (the parent co. of NBC) last fall. (Original) In these turbulant days, investors, ordinary and professional alike, look for directions from investor guru more than ever. Of course among gurus people pay attention,

Reading Time: < 1 minute (Update May 2020) I found from this website, it seems the US consumer saving rate went up a bit in last 5 years, from 6%, 8% to most recent 13% . I can understand the last part due to pandemic. In fact our restaurant eat out (to go, take out) shrunk a lot. My wife is

Reading Time: < 1 minute This morning, Ingersoll Rand (NYSE: IR), the diversified industrial company makes procucts to air conditioner (Trane) to Schlage locks, reported its Q4 2008 earning this morning. Some highlights: it wrote down $3.7 billion (pre-tax, $3.4 b after tax) from Trane acqusition, or a loss of $10.56 per share. Interestingly, the stock went up about 15%