[poorgradstudent]

S&P 500 will end year up 5-7% from starting point
NASDAQ will end year up 2-4%

Housing will continue to fall throughout 2007, NAR will keep calling false bottoms.

[poorgradstudent]

I’ll be shocked if the NASDAQ closes below 2000 in the next 12-18 months.

That would mean falling more than 14% from the current level. Seems like a worst case scenario to me, but I’m far less doom and gloom than a lot of the people here. Honestly, if it does get that low, I’ll be shoveling every quarter out of my couch cushions to invest at those values.

I expect NASDAQ to close up 2-4% from where it started 2007 (~2430), which would mean something around 2500. I’m still expecting 5-7% out of the S&P 500 by year’s end.

I don’t think we’ve hit a bottom, but we may be at a local minima. As I write this, Japan and the rest of Asia is broadly up, by more than a percentage point for most indices. Will Europe and North America continue following Asia’s lead? We’ll see.

[poorgradstudent]

A basic rule of short term trading is “Don’t try to catch a falling knife”. Once the markets went into near free fall, there was very little interest in buying until it looked stabilized and bottomed out.

Today seemed to be a very volatile day, with different stocks moving in a wide range of directions. I don’t think we’ll know until Friday exactly how the market feels about Tuesday’s pullback.

[poorgradstudent]

Wow, this is what Conservative pundits are upset about? Matt Drudge must really have deep, deep feelings of male inadequacy.

Smoke and mirrors to attempt to distract the public from Iraq I suppose. You know FOX News was loving the Anna Nicole Smith thing.

[poorgradstudent]

1) The Shanghai market tanked on the Chinese government tightening its monetary policy. It had nothing to do with fears of a US recession. The across the board falls in Europe and the Americas were in reaction to China’s drop. As everyone on this board should know, correlation is not the same as cause.

2) I feel pretty strongly gold was unfairly punished today, especially considering that the dollar fell. Seems like investors threw out the baby with the bathwater, and there may be a huge buy window.

I pulled out about half of my trading portfolio before half of today’s losses had hit. I’m going to be watching closely for a signal to buy back in, but for now I’m happy to keep it on the sidelines.

[poorgradstudent]

Grossly overpriced vs. “Bubble”?

Tomato, Tomatoe.

A lot of tech stocks in the bubble DID have intrinsic underlying values. Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, not every company went the way of pets.com. The issue was speculators were willing to pay way too much for the stocks considering the expected earnings.

Housing is still grossly overpriced, and cycling down.

[poorgradstudent]

Uncertainty usually sends the price of Oil and Gold upward, but the Iran situation looks like a lot of posturing right now to me. Hopefully the game of chicken will have a peaceful resolution. I’m encouraged that the UN is taking an active role in the process so far.

As for North Korea, the US has wisely let China take a leading role in handling them. My personal theory is that North Korea decided to abandon their weapons program after finding out that it’s difficult and expensive to build nukes.

[poorgradstudent]

Where have all the Moderates gone?

Economies cycle. It’s normal. We’re moving from a boom period to a slowdown. A recession is on the horizon, although the exact timing of such things is nearly impossible. Things will be tough for a while, but hardly doomsday.

jg: I recently bought a small position in GLD (around 3% of my admittedly small total potfolio). I think gold has good long term prospects, but a lot of short term risk.

[poorgradstudent]

I’m starting to really think we’ll hit a recession before the end of ’07 (although, it may not be called until ’08, seeing as Q4 numbers don’t come out until then and you need two consecutive quarters of negative growth).

There’s too many factors lining up. The stock market is starting to look awfully frothy. I don’t think this rally is done yet, but we’ve definitely gotten into overbought territory.

I think Q1 will clock in between 1-2% positive growth, probably closer to 1%. But such things can be tough to predict.

[poorgradstudent]

California’s year round produce is fantastic, there’s no denying that.

The deep dish Pizza here is pretty weak. Regents Pizza in UTC makes a decent pie, BJs is ok, but it’s not the same as a good Chicago/Milwaukee deep dish. Bronx Pizza in Hillcrest is the best New York style slice I’ve found.

As for culture, I laughed when I read the claim that San Diego has great culture. The museums here are pathetic considering the size of the city. And Californians can be VERY provincial. In particular, most native Californians can’t understand why anyone would live anywhere else (this even extends to NorCal/SoCal), and while they’ve usually been to Vegas and Mexico, there’s a lot of people here that have the annoying “fly-over” attitude about the Midwest that disgusts me in Northeasterners (New Yorkers and Bostoners in particular).

Then again, Minneapolis tends to thumb its nose at Omaha and Des Moines, so perhaps there’s provincialism everywhere.

[poorgradstudent]

I have a ton of respect for people who are in sales, good at it, and honest. It’s a tough job (especially with the lure of getting ahead through dishonesty), but necessary for companies. I would say I have negative feelings about 2/3 of the sales reps that come through our lab, although many are trying to push products we have little interest in. From what I’ve seen, the best reps are the ones that truly build relationships beyond just trying to make the sale, and focus on filling the customer’s needs first.

In my experiences in retail sales I was pretty marginal at it, because given my background, I have a hard time feeling “pushy”. I’m a very analytical person who as a customer is resistant to sales techniques and advertising. I’m like a judge: I want the facts, the bottom line, and I want to render my judgement.

I do think I’d be better at company-to-company sales, which lack the personal wallets involved.

[poorgradstudent]

I grew up in the south suburbs of Minneapolis. Fantastic city. Wonderful people. Good Economy. Reasonable politics (Both Liberals and Conservatives tend to hold more moderate, nuanced views of issues, and its generally considered impolite to push your religion or politics on someone else.)

And it’s cold as bloody hell about 4-5 months of the year. Oh yeah, and another 2-3 months of the year the mosquitos are a real issue. April and May do tend to be really nice.

Southern California, and in particular coastal San Diego does deserve a weather premium. It’s just amazing here that I can go running outside in late January. You never worry about your car starting in the morning. I love the nice weather here, and it was part of why I chose San Diego for grad school.

[poorgradstudent]

The “savings rate” is a rather crude estimate. I’m not saying the negative savings rate isn’t indicative of problems within our society (overconsumption?), but it’s more of a headline grabber than a giant red flag, at least taken by itself.

[poorgradstudent]

The number of raw sales should go up in the Spring.

So should the number of listings, and the inventory. Prices will continue to fall, which will keep a modest turnover going.

[poorgradstudent]

Extremist predictions are fun to make fun of when they’re very wrong.

This won’t die until Spring ’07 when we know just how wrong it was.

[Author]

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