I am reminded in reading some of the headlines today that financial news reporters are completely clueless. Check out a graph of the S&P 500 on a daily basis including today’s action up until the time of the news article:

Notice how today’s daily range is barely detectable on the daily chart? That means that you should ignore today’s action and certainly any “news” that caused it. The market has to move 2.5% from here to mean anything at all.

It is my observation that there is a persistent need on the part of many beginning traders to react to or explain noise. Unless you are a day trader or swing trader, today, the market has done nothing at all. It is a meaningless day by itself. It is certainly not a day to make decisions. It may be a day setting up decisions for a future time (even, perhaps, later today after I submit this post) in some way. But it is not a day to make decisions.

So by using the headline “Wallstreet Lower After Housing Numbers” which implies that something happened, the New York Times is wasting my time by misleading me into doing something I would not otherwise have done. When I read the article even a few sentences and find out that I turned the page (or clicked on a link) for naught, that the headline is bogus, I don’t like it.

Is this a big deal? No. But it is annoying.

If nothing happened, ipso facto, nothing that caused it is exerting any influence. Better just to call it a “quiet day” and leave it at that. Now if something big happened but the market was quiet, that might be news, i.e. the fact that the market did nothing.

So when the market does nothing after some minor news, that’s not news, that’s noise. What do we do with noise? Turn it down or turn it off.

So it puzzles me that newspapers don’t understand why readership and profits are down so much. If they feel the need to supply news even when there isn’t any, why should they expect people to keep paying attention to what they say? Do they really think people will be happy to pay to tune out? Or might readers perhaps wonder if there are any real editors left in the industry.

Everyone and their brother has put in their two cents on the Geithner’s U.S. economy bailout plan. I thought I’d add mine here.

First, no one knows how had things really are. They are all guessing.

Second, I really like Obama but I think he’s making a huge strategic error here (and one large enough that it may outweigh all the good he does). All the banks that don’t have the cash to continue operations should be unwound and the assets sold off. There should be forced bankruptcies for most of the largest banks. 

The executives should be fired and then equity holders should be wiped out. Then pay the creditors in order like any normal bankruptcy.The way to get the “toxic debt” off the books of the bankrupt banks is to transfer the debt to creditors. Let them decide whether or not to sell it at fire-sale prices or wait until it returns to its “real” value.

In some cases where one could justify a Chapter 11 bankruptcy the feds could provide DIP (debtor in possession) financing for the bankruptcies but I don’t see many banks worthy of this treatment. Most anyone who played with mortgages or CDOs is wiped out, plain and simple. They are bankrupt, we just haven’t acknowledged that yet. Having taxpayers foot the bill to subsidize the banks is a big mistake.

Anything less than letting the banks fail is simply pretending that reality is something other than it really is. It may feel better in the short term but it is only going to prolong the pain and make things worse.

- Curtis

After a long hiatus. The blog is returning.

I dusted off the backup copies and have got the basic system back and running with the same layout. I will be updating things over the next week or so and expect to be back posting in a week or so.

- Curtis