***Official*** 2015 Stock Market Thread

[s0me0nesmind1]

This these wild swings are not good. I'm banking on it going down much more.

I'm willing to bet it's all over at this point.

 

[sportage]

Wonderful system that 401K scam where the retiree takes all the risk, and wall street just goes on despite what may.
Like the HMO system in healthcare.
All downside for the middle class, and up side for business.

I tell you, the 401K was developed in greed and for anyone to think differently is nonsense.When you retire and how much if anything you retire with, is pretty much like playing the slots.

In the 1920's gangster Al Capone called the stock market a racket.
"All of those people are crooks".
Al preferred to invest in something more stable, bootlegging.
And here we are some 95 years later, and nothing has really changed.
Nor has Al Capone's philosophy about crooks and wall street ever been disproven.
The great crash of 1929, or Lehman Brothers in 2008.
Forget Donald Trump, we need another Al Capone to feed us poor saps the gospel truth.

 

[Charmonium]

This these wild swings are not good. I'm banking on it going down much more.

Don't be too sure. The dollar was up 0.75% overnight so my guess is that you have a lot of money from Asia looking for a safe place to ride out the volatility there.

 

[Train]

put in an order, gonna try and ride a wave up this morning. Maybe bail if the market tanks again.

 

[Imp]

"omg Dow +500, Nasdaq +175"

This crazy assed up down 3-5% moves remind me of the dot com bubble crash of 2000. You had moves like this but in the end you had one big flush of 50% and nothing but minor moves all the way down the low in 2003. It took 15 years to get back over the year 2000 levels on the QQQs.

Today will be a dead cat bounce of +3%

We're down to 1.5% mid-afternoon. Oil's up 3% or 4%. CAD is down though, probably cause USD is up -- flight to safety?

Gonna be an interesting week. Going to sit tight.

 

[Imp]

And we're down again... Thanks for reminding me why I only sell/buy in the last half hour of trading now.

DOW closed about 1% down, over 200 points.

 

[Jeffg010]

Down again looking better and better in bonds and what wild swing it was at the end.

 

[Bart*Simpson]

Wonderful system that 401K scam where the retiree takes all the risk, and wall street just goes on despite what may.
Like the HMO system in healthcare.
All downside for the middle class, and up side for business.

I tell you, the 401K was developed in greed and for anyone to think differently is nonsense.When you retire and how much if anything you retire with, is pretty much like playing the slots.

In the 1920's gangster Al Capone called the stock market a racket.
"All of those people are crooks".
Al preferred to invest in something more stable, bootlegging.
And here we are some 95 years later, and nothing has really changed.
Nor has Al Capone's philosophy about crooks and wall street ever been disproven.
The great crash of 1929, or Lehman Brothers in 2008.
Forget Donald Trump, we need another Al Capone to feed us poor saps the gospel truth.

The 401(k) and the 457 have replaced the once-popular defined benefit pension plan. The problem with the defined benefit plan is that it can easily become over-obligated as politicians allow their pet constituencies to rape the pension funds.

With the 401(k) and the 457 you reap what you sow and if you fail to save enough or pay attention to your own investments then no one else is on the hook to pay your pension.

Chicago, Cook County, and the State of Illinois are facing the real likelihood of a pension default and maybe even a bankruptcy in the next few years as they've over-obligated themselves. In these case the people who were promised a defined-benefit pension will end up with significant cuts.

The thing about managing your portfolio is to move your funds to lower risk investments as you near retirement. Some people fail to do this or else they get transfixed by high returns on high-risk funds. I took a loss this past week but I also hedged into gold and silver so I'm not hurting as bad as I could be.

Just learn to manage your investments and you'll do fine.

 

[brianmanahan]

And we're down again... Thanks for reminding me why I only sell/buy in the last half hour of trading now.

that's why i just buy mutual funds whenever possible

 

[FelixDeCat]

I love watching old videos I saw live "back in the day". This one is a classic from late 2007:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaKnDMv6ceg

This is the most famous Cramer rant on CNBC during the first year of the housing bubble market crash. When the video was filmed in late 2007, Bear Stearns was trading at $108. He criticized Ben Bernake for not brining liquidity early enough to stem uncertain values for questionable loans used to make up derivatives held by the likes of Bear Stearns. As a result multiple financial institutions and money center banks failed. He even recommended buying WAMU (Washington Mutual) ... which also failed several months later!!

At the time I had made a killing shorting New Century Financial, Nova Star and LEND because I had worked in the industry over 20 years and I knew the trash they were making....I dealt with the borrowers first hand and warned the bank I worked for at the time not to make these types of loans. Thank God they listened, but we still sub-serviced them so I had to deal with these borrowers and realized the crap mortgages they had on overvalued properties with imaginary income.

Bear Stearns went to near zero from $100+ in less than 5 months. Not long after so did FNMA (I made almost $50,000 in one day trading that one) & FHLMC. Lots of puts on Lehman was money in the bank. It was a damn shame though when I was starting to go long when the market was no where near a bottom. This lesson cost me six figures.

Frequent speculation is one the hardest ways to make money consistently. It is fun however to trade just dont do it too often because in the end you will just lose money. :'(

 

[Bock]

Frequent speculation is one the hardest ways to make money consistently. It is fun however to trade just dont do it too often because in the end you will just lose money. :'(

You should try playing baccarrat.

 

[Imp]

I am so pissed at myself for not paying attention to the crapfest that was 2006-2009. Still in college then, didn't care about politics or stock markets.

Shanghai closed down 0.5% Wednesday, looks like it did a dive near the end just like the DOW Tuesday. European markets opened down... Japan and Hong Kong didn't do too bad.

 

[KB]

I love watching old videos I saw live "back in the day". This one is a classic from late 2007:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaKnDMv6ceg

If I ever have a bad day trading, I watch a few Jim Cramer videos from around 2007 and a feel a lot better. If this guy with all his money and advisors can suck this bad, I can forgive myself a few bad days.

By far my favorite Jim Cramer: (hold Bear Stearns)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6u1kG7yuy4

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

The 401(k) and the 457 have replaced the once-popular defined benefit pension plan. The problem with the defined benefit plan is that it can easily become over-obligated as politicians allow their pet constituencies to rape the pension funds.

With the 401(k) and the 457 you reap what you sow and if you fail to save enough or pay attention to your own investments then no one else is on the hook to pay your pension.

Chicago, Cook County, and the State of Illinois are facing the real likelihood of a pension default and maybe even a bankruptcy in the next few years as they've over-obligated themselves. In these case the people who were promised a defined-benefit pension will end up with significant cuts.

The thing about managing your portfolio is to move your funds to lower risk investments as you near retirement. Some people fail to do this or else they get transfixed by high returns on high-risk funds. I took a loss this past week but I also hedged into gold and silver so I'm not hurting as bad as I could be.

Just learn to manage your investments and you'll do fine.

Ding ding. Obviously sportage is too stupid with money to understand basic finance.

Hell, these days you can toss them in target retirement index funds and it does the risk adjustments for you.

 

[dullard]

I sold half of my silver triple shorts today (DSLV) at $78.50/share. I wanted to wait out for $100+ so I kept the other half. With silver where it is now (a 6-year low), that makes triple shorts a bit too volatile for me to keep that much money in them even though the volatility means that I could have made a lot more (or lost a lot). I nearly doubled my money on the sale of the first half, so the second half is all profit that I don't mind letting ride longer.


Edit: With oil, gold, and silver all big down today, I'm getting tempted to go into Vanguard's Precious Metals and Mining funds. It should be down quite a lot today to a fresh ~14-year low. But I think I'll hold off just a bit more. I would also be betting on both sides of the same coin with still having some silver shorts, so I should fully unload DSLV first.

 

[Jeffg010]

Here we go again the market is up at the start but trending down all day. Will we see a sell off at the end of the day? This is a pretty wild ride and could even be wilder when the fed raises interest rates.

 

[holden j caufield]

I want to be long a few stocks but no way anyone likes keeping 95% of these stocks overnight.

 

[Train]

Frequent speculation is one the hardest ways to make money consistently. It is fun however to trade just dont do it too often because in the end you will just lose money. :'(

It's just a casino with no free drinks.

 

[Train]

I'm actually surprised gold and silver are low. Or perhaps the spot price is just lagging demand?

Stopped by a coin shop yesterday looking to scoop some cheap generic silver. Some guy was buying up the last generic bar. Owner said they sold about 500 oz of it in a few days as buyers rushed in.

 

[edro]

Edit: With oil, gold, and silver all big down today, I'm getting tempted to go into Vanguard's Precious Metals and Mining funds. It should be down quite a lot today to a fresh ~14-year low. But I think I'll hold off just a bit more.

That fund has been crap since its inception.
I shifted some in there a while back

 

[dullard]

I'm actually surprised gold and silver are low. Or perhaps the spot price is just lagging demand?

Stopped by a coin shop yesterday looking to scoop some cheap generic silver. Some guy was buying up the last generic bar. Owner said they sold about 500 oz of it in a few days as buyers rushed in.

1) Silver stockpiles are soaring, so there is more and more available to sell.
2) Silver industrial use is plumetting (see China's economic slowdown).
3) Silver production has been increasing year after year for this decade.
4) Countries that produce silver (Australia, Mexico, Chile, Peru, etc) have had their currencies plummet in the last two years or so. Meaning that they are getting more desperate to produce and sell.
5) Several of the countries that stockpile silver (Russia for example) are in financial freefall and selling some of their stockpiles is a good way to keep things running smoothly.
6) The gold/silver surge was mostly fear of low interest rates in the US. Interest rates are likely to start increasing over the next few months, meaning that that fear is subsiding.

I think those factors far outweigh a few silver bars here and there being bought/sold at coin shops.

Yes, there was a temporary gold bump with the recent stock market correction. But even that is subsiding.

 

[Charmonium]

That fund has been crap since its inception.
I shifted some in there a while back

It's been a hard couple of years for PMs and I don't think it's going to get a lot better anytime soon. As long as the dollar is strong, it's going to be an uphill battle for things like gold. And since China is one of the biggest markets for gold, I wouldn't even think about that until there's some stability there.

 

[dullard]

That fund has been crap since its inception.
I shifted some in there a while back

It did quite well from year 2000 to 2007 and from 2009 to 2011. Metals often have a 30 to 50 year cycle. VGPMX would have done quite well in the late 1970s early 1980s if it existed then.

It just isn't a buy-and-hold type of fund. It is a buy low, and get out when you have some profit type of fund. Unlike stock funds which generally have a flow of income from the underlying businesses, metal funds do not have any income that feeds them to naturally grow higher in values. You only make money on metals when you find a greater fool than you.

 

[Imp]

If I ever have a bad day trading, I watch a few Jim Cramer videos from around 2007 and a feel a lot better. If this guy with all his money and advisors can suck this bad, I can forgive myself a few bad days.

By far my favorite Jim Cramer: (hold Bear Stearns)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6u1kG7yuy4

If you really ever need a cheerer upper, go listen to some "analyses" and "projections" from "economists." Local news media keeps publishing these things from partisan think-tanks, banks, and government departments, like they're reliable.

The only one I'd probably listen to with an ounce of confidence -- but still with skepticism -- is Robert Shiller.

 

[ponyo]

I'm actually surprised gold and silver are low. Or perhaps the spot price is just lagging demand?

Stopped by a coin shop yesterday looking to scoop some cheap generic silver. Some guy was buying up the last generic bar. Owner said they sold about 500 oz of it in a few days as buyers rushed in.

There are plenty of gold and silver for sale. The problem with physical silver is the premiums have increased while spot decreased. I checked several major online dealers and the physical silver prices are higher now than when the spot price was in $15+ range. If spot price settles around here for the next couple weeks, we might see the physical silver price drop down little but as of today there are no bargains.