Traders! Investors! Message Board Trolls! Lend me your ears! I come to praise Jim Cramer, not to bury him! Mr. Cramer has had a tough 2008. It has become quite fashionable within the investment community to mock and ridicule the man. While this had been going on for some time, several of Mr. Cramer’s calls on his show “Mad Money” amplified the cries for CNBC to suspend or remove him. From his remark that Bear Sterns was “not in trouble,” to calling a market bottom this summer, to then making his panic-stricken call on October 6th to get entirely out of the market, Mr. Cramer has been under close scrutiny. While he had defenses for each of these pronouncements, the damage had already been done. Aside from his questionable market pronouncements, even his best buddy Eliot Spitzer lost his job over a Jersey Girl. ...

digg_url = 'http://zignalsblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/stocks-for-2009.html'; Like the Christmas Sales, the Stocks for 2009 are making an early appearance. So let's see who has gone for what: Jubak at MSN: Exxon Mobil (XOM); target of $91 JP Morgan (JPM); Preferred share target of $42 Energy Transder Partners (ETP); target of $42 ONEOK Partners (OKS); target of $52 by December 2009 and $58 by June 2009. Petroleo Brasileriro (PBR); target of $41 Transocean ltd (RIG); target of $117.60 Gorman-Rupp (GRC); target of $35 Middleby Corp (MIDD); target of $75 Chesapeake Energy (CHK); target of $39 US Bancorp (USB); target of $44 Kinross Gold Corp (KGC); target of $19.75 by June 2009 Enbridge Inc (ENB); target of $48 by February 2009 Fortescue Metals Group (FSUMF); target of $5 Plum Creek Timber Co. (PCL); target of $53 Rayonier Inc (RYN); target of $55 Ultra Pertoleum (UPL); target of $107 Thompson Creek Metals (TC); target of $9.90 Yara International (YARIY); target of ...

 

 

Another Lost Decade For Japan?

This CNN.com piece takes a short yet interesting look beyond the news that Japan's export business cratered in November. Putting the latest setback into a historical perspective are a number of experts, including an economist at State Street Global Advisors.

The article raises a real concern: Could Japan be facing another lost decade?

You can read the story here.

 

Move Out Of Cash, Into Stocks

Not to beat the drum more for SSgA, but it's worth noting the global asset manager and exchange-traded funds provider has one of its chief equities managers suggesting to Reuters that it's time to move back into stocks.

You can read it here.  

 

Rebounding ETFs

As Investor's Business Daily notes, this week hasn't started well for many of the exchange-traded funds that have been rebounding strongly since stocks bottomed on Nov. 20. 

In this short sector breakdown,  markets reporter Trang Ho uses

...

IMDB.com, also known as Internet Movie Database, publishes STARmeter ratings of anyone who has ever had anything to do with show business. I'm still not clear about how they calculate this, or what it really means, but here is a list of several people connected to the stock market along with their STARrating change from last week. br /br /Suze Orman -26%br /T. Boone Pickens -19%br /Jim Cramer +3%br /Timothy Sykes +6%br /Dylan Ratigan +20%br /George Soros +26%br /Warren Buffett +127%br /The a href="http://Stockerblog.com"Stockerblog/a proprietor +193%br /br /How my rating increased so much, I can't even guess. Go figure.div class="blogger-post-footer"div class='adsense' style='text-align:center; padding: 0px 3px 0.5em 3px;' script type="text/javascript"!-- google_ad_client="ca-pub-2427831169011625"; google_ad_width=300; google_ad_height=250; google_ad_format="300x250_as"; google_ad_type="text"; google_ad_channel ="8681602088"; google_color_border="FFF3DB"; google_color_bg="FFF3DB"; google_color_link="1B0431"; google_color_url="1B0431"; google_color_text="29303B"; //--/script script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" /script /div

Pack your bags, folks - “There’s no more Wall Street.” That’s the damning verdict from Alan Greenberg, former CEO of The Bear Stearns Cos. Speaking on Bloomberg TV’s “Money and Politics” show, Greenberg declared that the existing Wall Street investment-banking model is dead.

I’m not sure about death, but the broader U.S. economy is like a 2:00 A.M. drunk, continuing to stumble towards the end of a mind-altering 2008, with little long-term relief in sight. Will it ever find its way home again?

One of President-elect Barack Obama’s most ambitious and large-scale plans quite literally seeks to dig America out of this mess – and here’s how you can profit, too. But you’d better act fast. Some of Wall Street’s big boys are already placing their bets.

The Eisenhower Model

Obama will take the oath as 44th president of the United States on Jan. 20.

Since his Nov. 4 victory, the

...

With all the varying information out there regarding the Bernard Madoff $50 billion scandal, we would like to present our readers with a roundup of what some blogs have written about Madoff.

J.S. Kim has a very interesting take on the scandal of SeekingAlpha.com. He equates the Madoff fraud to what’s going on with the global monetary crisis. He says, “What happened to Madoff’s hedge fund would happen to any large U.S. commercial bank under similar circumstances, and I dare anyone to prove this otherwise. Madoff’s hedge fund’s fraudulent scheme was exposed after more than a decade when investors cumulatively asked for $7 billion of their money back. If investors had asked for such a large cumulative amount in redemptions in 2000, Madoff’s hedge fund would have likely collapsed eight years ago instead of today. According to a January, 2008 SEC

...

Today continued a pattern that we have seen lately and that is mainly last hour insanity. We had a pretty dull day going but in the last hour the market completely puked it up and in the last few minutes another little nutty rally helped take the market off the lows. The good news about the selling was that it was on lower volume. The bad news about the selling is that it seemed to hit the few strong stocks that were out there. This could be bad news for a potential rally.

If leading stocks can not get anything going and keep it going it is going to be very hard for this market to hold up and produce the gains that so many are looking for. I think that so many think this market is oversold that we have to rally. I hate to tell some of these people

...

While Jim Cramer and others are wringing their hands, the people I respect most are turning bullish.

At least, over the long term.

Let's start with John Bogle. (Doesn't it always start with John Bogle?)

Judging by the series of interviews he's been giving lately, Bogle is very worried about the U.S. economy. As he said in an interview with Forbes today (highlighted by Murray Coleman in our invaluable new daily news roundup), "it will be a year-and-a-half to two years before [the U.S. economy] turns upward."

That doesn't mean investors should be sitting on the sidelines. Far from it. Bogle says the market may be undervalued by about $7.5 trillion right now, and thinks that the market has likely over-discounted the impending recession.

Bogle's not alone. In the forthcoming January/February issue of the Journal of Indexes, Rick Ferri (a great financial advisor) calls this "the greatest opportunity in our lifetime" for

...

In last week's edition of Trading Tools, Suntech Power Holdings Co. Ltd. (STP) was examined, as it appeared on the Zacks Put/Call Ratio Greater than 1.0 screener. This week, I've decided to take a look at the Unusually High Put Volume filter in an effort to find a stock surrounded by escalating skepticism. Digging through the result, one equity piqued my curiosity: Toledo-based Owens Corning (OC), which produces residential and commercial building materials.

Before we begin, let's explain the contrarian stance that makes Schaeffer's so unique. When searching for a bullish pick, we like to see heavy skepticism toward an outperforming stock, as this leaves ample room for upgrades or other positive catalysts to fuel the stock higher. When searching for a bearish pick, on the other hand, contrarians are looking for significant bullish sentiment toward an underperforming stock, as we believe an excess of

...

Paulson throws the markets a curve…  Goldman says to buy the yen…  RBA intervenes to protect the AUD$… China provides support to commodities… And Now… Today’s Pfennig! Good day… Chuck is out today, so I get the opportunity to share some of my thoughts on the markets. As many of you know, I spent most of last week in Washington DC giving presentations at the Money Show. On the way to the hotel, the cab driver who had noticed my EverBank luggage tag asked if I was a banker. He said he had seen a lot of us lately. I guess I was one of the few bankers flying into Washington DC who wasn’t heading over to the Treasury Dept.

...