ducati998

Mid-term exam today.

Spent most of yesterday answering past exam questions. The issue, will be time. In a two hour exam, there simply isn’t much time to think too long, nor too hard. You simply have to blast through at speed and in doing so, avoid careless errors.

Fly Buy: $AEGR
Fri Jun 6, 2014 11:00am
Biotech stock down huge, but CEO is buying large blocks of stock–regularly.

I started a position in this today.

I prefer [don’t hold] ISIS. Better pipeline, partners. Also down big.

By totally avoiding the issue of inequality in the distribution of wealth and income, these models often lead to extreme and unrealistic conclusions and are therefore a source of confusion rather than clarity. In the case of public debt, representative agent models can lead to the conclusion that government debt is completely neutral, in regard not only to the total amount of national capital but also to the distribution of the fiscal burden. This radical reinterpretation of Ricardian equivalence … fails to take account of the fact that the bulk of public debt is in practice owned by a minority of the population … so that the debt is the vehicle of important internal redistributions when it is repaid as well as when it is not.

Current figures:

Reserve Bank: 2014:Q1: 2,319.6 Billions of Dollars
Public: 2014:Q1: 12,619,199 Millions of Dollars

So I just bought one this colour. Not this exact bike, just model & colour.

I’ve been doing some selling this morning: EWP; EGPT; EWI; and EWG. All are up 50% or greater. Time to bank some profit. Even with Drahgi and the European rates going negative [which should work for stocks] it is always prudent to take a little off the table when you have it…just in case you’re still holding if they don’t [that’s the time to buy].

One of the concerns I have with this market is the narrowness of it. In plainer terms, fewer and fewer stocks are doing the heavy lifting. With each successive peak in the S&P 500 (the black line), the number of stocks hitting new highs decreases (the blue line). That’s not a good sign.

Agreed. Same phenomena in the build up to the 2000 peak. Stocks fell away from about 1998…so it takes time.

A large team of researchers analysed 1,769 studies, surveys, and reports about obesity around the world, and their conclusion, published in The Lancet, is grim: In 33 years, not a single country has reduced its obesity rate.

From an investment point of view, this is why fast food, MCD, etc have proven to be such good investments and why hospitals/medical care around obesity will prove to be so good going forward.

After unprecedented stimulus by the Fed and other central banks made many traditional models useless, investors and analysts alike are having to reshape their understanding of cheap and expensive as the global market for bonds balloons to $100 trillion. With the world’s biggest economies struggling to grow and inflation nowhere in sight, catchphrases such as “new neutral” and “no normal” are gaining currency to describe a reality where bonds are rallying the most in a decade.

Inflation nowhere in sight.

Electric utilities… are seen by many investors as a sturdy and defensive subset of the investment grade universe. Over the next few years, however, we believe that a confluence of declining cost trends in distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) power generation and residential-scale power storage is likely to disrupt the status quo. Based on our analysis, the cost of solar + storage for residential consumers of electricity is already competitive with the price of utility grid power in Hawaii. Of the other major markets, California could follow in 2017, New York and Arizona in 2018, and many other states soon after.

In the 100+ year history of the electric utility industry, there has never before been a truly cost-competitive substitute available for grid power. We believe that solar + storage could reconfigure the organization and regulation of the electric power business over the coming decade. We see near-term risks to credit from regulators and utilities falling behind the solar + storage adoption curve and long-term risks from a comprehensive re-imagining of the role utilities play in providing electric power.

If that is the case…then TAN:

I think I’ll add it to the portfolio. It would be nice to catch it on a pullback. I’ll watch it Monday and maybe open a half or quarter position.