August 2011 - Page 2 of 2 - Crackerjack Finance

german fashion

The German economy has detached from other developed markets over the past year. Real GDP growth in Germany grew at 3.6% in 2010, and accelerated to 5.5% growth in the first quarter of this year. This morning, we learn that the initial estimate of Q2 GDP growth has fallen sharply to 0.5%. This is the…

Google announced an agreement to acquire Motorola Solutions (MMI) as it continues a push into mobile internet and mobile hardware. The deal was announced for $12.5B and shareholders of Motorola Solutions will receive $40 per share in cash. This is a cool 63.5% for shareholders of MMI relative to Friday’s closing prices. Larry Page and…

dillards

Dillard’s investment presents an opportunity. This post is different from a “focus investment” which is a much more in-depth analysis and suitable for longer-term investment. See the post on Guess (GES) with the attached PDF for a “focus investment” selection (we still like Guess btw). This trade idea is an observation on a market dislocation.…

baloon

European banks, the cause of yesterday’s collapse, all rallied today. CDS spreads in Europe narrowed across the board, French and Italian sovereign debt rallied, and Gold sold off 41 dollars (down 2.3%). Earnings continue to meet low expectation (Kohl’s, Cisco). The BOVESPA rallied sharply, and the VIX declined all day. After an exhausting first 4-days of the…

Markets are on edge. This type of volatility is wrenching. It weighs on professional investors, it interjects more emotion into the investment process, while elevating stress, and causing people to lose sleep. The above is natural as money is made or lost at an outsized pace in hourly timeframes. This phenomena is measured by the VIX…

french model

Rumors are swirling that France is about to be downgraded by Standard & Poor’s. We do not believe France should be downgraded, unless every nation that is rated “AAA” changed to “AA” on Standard & Poor’s definition of “AA”. No country should have a higher sovereign credit rating than the US. No other nation has the world’s…

Why was the market up 5% yesterday after the Fed meeting? At first the market sold off 2%. Subsequently, the market came back to unchanged and rallied another 5%. Whoa. Our “green light” to buy worked out, if just for a day. Of course what everyone cares about is what to do going forward. We…

green light

The markets are completely destabilized and due for a bounce from dramatically oversold conditions. For those investors who are bullish and wish to take the view that the US and global economy will not be in a recession in the next 6-9 months, we advocate buying while the buying is good and other investors are…

stir fry

The Chinese CPI is not an apples-to-apples measure relative to the CPI (consumer price index) that is reported here in the US. Some are attributing the overnight leg-down in the S&P futures (down another 24 or 2.25% at 11:00pm) to the fact that Chinese inflation came in at 6.5% when the consensus was 6.4%. Crackerjack…

The immediate observation for those watching this macabre sell-off is that stocks are pretty much being sold off based upon how they would be expected to hold-up in a recession, that will presumably be starting within the next 6-months or so. Any stocks that have a very high valuation, are particularly leveraged, are pro-cyclical…

recession special

Well, the market clearly isn’t looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. Italian 10-YR bonds have surged, rallying 80 basis points (from a 6.09% yield on Friday to 5.29% yield today). Spanish 10-YR bonds have also surged, rallying 88 basis points (from a 6.03% yield on Friday to a 5.14% yield today).…

The downgrade of the US sovereign credit rating is sure to cause continued jitters in the financial markets on Monday morning. In actuality, there may be net-positive developments this weekend as it now appears clear that the ECB will engage in buying the debt of Italy and Spain. Drawing a “line-in-the-sand” for Italy and Spain…

chinese model

Crackerjack continues to hold the view, that what transpired in the markets is a crisis of confidence, more so than an actual crisis. There is a big and important difference. During the real-deal 2008-2009 economic crisis you had actual insolvent institutions as the value of mortgage securities declined when the US housing market imploded. The sovereign…

wall street crowd

It goes without saying, that the DOW dropping 500 points, and the S&P 500 losing close to 5% will put enormous pressure on Europe tomorrow morning. We will be watching Spanish and Italian bond yields and European stock markets very closely in the wee hours of the morning. The Non-farm payrolls report is a side-show…

light at end of tunnel

Fears of a Crisis Grow Interesting market reactions this morning. While many market participants are clearly being terrorized by a crisis of confidence (and this is always a risk) there look to be some genuinely better pieces of information. Markets are selling off based on rhetoric from the ECB. As we discussed yesterday, the ECB…

rome

Click Here for Formatted Europe PDF “I think we need a bigger boat!” The words of Martin Brody, played by the late Roy Scheider, ring true today with regard to Europe’s spluttering attempt to avoid a sovereign debt crisis. Now that the side-show spectacle regarding raising the US debt ceiling (i.e., whether the US would…