Posts from ‘September, 2009’

Popular opinion would clearly have it that buying shipping stocks would have to be up there with one of the most weirdest/off-the-wall things to do in equity markets right now. In support of that we can find absolutely no bullish or positive commentary anywhere. Yet shipping stocks refuse to go down in the face of [...]

Over the years we have come to the conclusion that there are only two phases of world financial markets, a risk seeking and risk adverse phase. Over the last 5 years these phases have become somewhat easier to identify with correlations between risky areas of each asset class having moved closer to 1. In essence [...]

What is superstition? We define it as man’s way of dealing with the unknown! There are many things in this world that just cannot be explained. However, it appears not to be part of our make up to accept that certain things are “unknowable”. After all we humans were given a brain with which [...]

Waking up this morning and discovering that the Russell 2000 had dropped some 2% and crude 4% was not exactly a pleasant experience considering that we are essentially bullish on both. Even more concerning is how oil fell at the hands of a fall in existing home sales but took no notice of the fall [...]

 
When it comes to commodities and inflation everyone seems transfixed on the performance of what we call the “Big Five”, that is, crude oil, gold, aluminium, heating oil, and wheat. OK you may disagree as to exactly what the big five are but to us that disagreement is merely rhetoric! The fact is that if [...]

The broad market in virtually every equity sector in the US appears to be recovering, however, there is one exception – banks. Yes while large cap banks certainly appear to be beating a very bullish path, their smaller cap “rivals” remain bogged down in a trench warfare style battle with the bears. The Russell 2000 [...]

As contrarians we could not help but to be drawn to an article in the New York Post regarding ships at anchor just out of Singapore. The article titled “Recession Anchors Trade” is rather amusing. The first bit of the article goes as follows:

In a faraway corner of the Pacific is anchored the world’s ghost [...]

In general global macro trends are taking it nice slow and easy! The trends that started late last year/early this year remain firmly in place. However, given how extended the rallies in some of the asset classes have become, we would not be surprised to see some counter trend behaviour over the coming days. We [...]

It seems that the bears remain resolute for the prospects of real estate and by default the outlook for REITs. We could not help but notice the following headline from Bloomberg:

U.S. Commercial Property Won’t Recover Until 2012, Survey Says

Below is an excerpt from the article:

The U.S. commercial real estate market is unlikely to recover [...]

Finally Oil services stocks are coming back to life. Oil service stocks are particularly appealing to us because they are likely to act as a fantastic insurance policy/hedge against inflation. With the dramatic rise in the value of gold, silver, platinum, the continued rise of inflation premiums attached to TIPs and the apparent free fall [...]