Currencies have strong rally!  Trade Deficit jumps 16.3% in July!  HR 1207 Gets a hearing!  Gold gets back to $1,000! And Now… Today’s Pfennig!

Good day… And a Happy Friday to one and all! Today is Patriot Day in the U.S. and a day that brings back memories of cowardly attacks on our country 8 years ago. I remember the shock and horror on everyone’s faces, and that image will remain with me to the grave. I also remember trying to write the Pfennig the “day after”… It just didn’t seem that important of a thing to do, but a reader told me that to keep things as “normal” as possible was the best thing I could do… So… I wrote…

OK… The currencies, and this time I mean the majority of them not just euro and yen, added to their gains this week VS the dollar yesterday… The Big Dog, euro, is once again

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eDOORWAYS Corporation today provided the investment community with a final update on its proposed walk-through presentation described in the press release issued on Friday, July 24, 2009.

“Recently, we extended an offer to show SOLVE to those shareholders who would like to gain a better understanding of the design and workings of the SOLVE doorway via a live walk-through demonstration,” stated eDOORWAYS Chairman and CEO Gary Kimmons. “These same shareholders would then have the duty of giving an unbiased reporting to those shareholders who were not made privy to the demonstration.

“Our offer was made with the provision that any shareholder desiring to view the presentation would be required to make necessary representation that they were, in fact, a shareholder of record and that they would comply with certain SEC legislation that would limit their activity in the marketplace as it

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Government TARP Investing – Paying off

by The Investment U Research Team

Today the government announced that it would be allowing 10 banks to repay their government TARP investments. While they didn’t disclose which ones, by looking at the list of banks that were deemed not to require more capital we can get a pretty good idea.

Bank of New York Mellon (NYSE: BK), BB&T (NYSE: BBT), Capital One (NYSE: COF) and U.S. Bancorp (NYSE: USB) would probably be on this list. Reuters has a good overview of the banks and their financials for the who’s in the ten guessing game…

What we find most interesting, and gratifying as taxpayers, is that we (meaning the U.S. citizenry) have made a profit on our little investments. Uncle Sam has received

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U.S. Jobs losses are out of control, 598,000 vanished in January pushing the unemployment rate to 7.6%.  Yet today the market bucked the trend and the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq all finshed up 2%+.  So what if you’re broke, the market went up, but if you don’t have the money to play it, it hurts Navin R. Johnson style.

Once you lose your …

The majority of investors, and the vast majority of investment fund managers, have been investing in a period of sustained interest rate decline for the last 27 years.  That means most active investors or managers under the age of 50 don’t have experience with a sustained period of rising interest rates.

There isn’t much more room for rates to go down, so we now face years, perhaps decades, of flat to rising interest rates. Therefore, the majority of investors and managers face what may be a new learning curve – at least a new environment.

Click image to enlarge

reasonable proxies for 10-year bonds is IEF (7-10 yr Treas) and SPY or IVV for the S&P 500 index

Since peak interest rates in 1981, at the 13% to 15% level, stock markets have experienced price appreciation at a rate above that of the preceding

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As we all plan our investments for 2009, no factor is more important than the economy.  It is a subject on which everyone has an opinion.  That is the natural state in the American democracy, dating back to the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville.  His famous work, Democracy in America, is still read by every student of political science. While a complicated work should not be summarized in a sentence, the Wikipedia article includes a good warning: Democracy in America predicted the violence of party spirit and the judgment of the wise subordinated to the prejudices of the ignorant. The 21st Century Democratic opinion has advanced into the 21st century.  Modern scholars are impressed with how well de Tocqueville's work has held up, but there are some changes.  With the help of the Internet, everyone is able to offer ...

Here at "A Dash" it is one of our biggest signals of respect if we add an "anonymous" source to our featured list.  The bar is a bit higher.  We do not just "exchange links" with anyone and everyone.  We also take some pride in identifying real experts. It did not take us long to see that Calculated Risk was the real deal.  We exchanged some emails with CR, but we were also quite impressed when he added "Tanta" as a fellow author.  She obviously had insider knowledge. Anyone who read her work would learn something important about the mortgage market.  Readers would also be entertained by her engaging style and willingness to confront.  She understood that active discussion is the path to truth. We cited her at length, both learning ourselves and pointing our readers in the right direction. We feel a special sadness at ...

This is truly unprecendented. In case you haven't heard, Lehman is basically declaring itself bankrupt. AIG is searching hard for captial, and Merrill Lynch is bought by Bank of America. I hope people grasp the gravity of these events. These institutions have controlled corporate America for most of our nation's modern history. Its all changing now. It shows us the problems of too much leverage, too much cheap money, and the constant cycle of bubbles. I'm now listening to Nouriel Roubini say that investment banks' model is "fundamentally flawed", and he says Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs may not even be able to survive. The problem with investment banks is that they require confidence from investors to stay afloat. That confidence has obviously dried up. Where large diversified banks (like Bank of America and JP Morgan) end up being ...

There's no end in sight for ETF volumes. Capitalism is alive and well. So are bad trading ideas. It is obviously no exaggeration to say that ETFs have completely altered the way the people look at the stock market. And for those of you who have been around ETFs for 10 years, making that sort of assertion would have elicited either a chuckle or an "E T What?" ten years ago. And I think that you've really hit the hammer on the nail, Matt, by saying that ETFs are all about trading. We focus on the long-term buy-and-hold side. But that is NOT where the bulk of those hundreds of millions of traded shares daily are going. As I've noted before, ETFs are actually being used (in tremendous volume) by some of the very largest players - including the very largest hedge funds - out there. And that is another assertion ...