http://sereneinvesting.com 32 years of age ~ 10 years of active trading experience ~ hopefully a little wiser for it ~ I comment on seekingalpha under the alias "klarsolo" Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:36:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Today we witnessed the usual market reaction to FOMC decisions: randomly up and down. Completely unpredictable. As a trader you better stay away from doing anything on Fed days. I have no idea why the market retreated the way it did once the news came out. Nobody exepected anything and we ... http://sereneinvesting.com/archives/378 As I tweeted this morning, the released economic data was just average enough to allow the market to do whatever it wanted. And today it obviously wanted to take a day off. Fine with me. Let's just chill a little then, shall we? After all we haven't done that in ... http://sereneinvesting.com/archives/371 What a strange selloff today. The only explanation posted everywhere is the World Bank reducing their outlook for global growth. But seriously now? People, raise your hand: who sold because the World Bank opened their yap? Or did all you guys sell because you thought other people might sell and ... http://sereneinvesting.com/archives/367 Did you catch 20:20 last night? It was all about the effects of the credit crunch on the lives of ordinary Americans (and Icelanders at the end). The first segment was the story of a wealthy family who lost everything and the parents who had no choice but to keep ... http://sereneinvesting.com/archives/359 As I was browsing through some elitetrader posts, I noticed how some "traders" keep asking whether scaling in and out of positions is an inferior strategy. I assume strongly that these people are not consistently profitable in their trading. To become a real trader, one that actually makes money regularly, I ... http://sereneinvesting.com/archives/347 Cry me a river: on Seekingalpha you'll currently find various posts on the evils of so called reverse convertible bonds. Felix Salmon, ever zealous and spear-heading the movement, wants to outright ban them. Yes, just like he wanted to wipe out stockholders of all them insolvent banks a few months ... http://sereneinvesting.com/archives/332 Okay, by now I guess everybody watched the "duel" between "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer and TV comedian Jon Stewart. Looks like everybody declared Jon the winner, but I think this is similar to the tagline of "Aliens vs Predator": "Whoever wins... we lose". Primarily we lost time watching this ... http://sereneinvesting.com/archives/324 Let's see what happened after I wrote my article last week after how nationalization is the wrong thing to do in this environment. Citi came out on Monday and pretty much forced a conversion of some of their preferred stock on its investors. And what happened? All preferred stocks took ... http://sereneinvesting.com/archives/310 The nerve! Northern Trust, a relatively conservatively managed bank and trust, which had a fantastic 2008 with record profits, had the inglorious idea to sponsor a golf event and additional (admittedly extravagant) festivities. Talking about a public relations disaster (read up on it here). The media, Barney Frank and other dark ... http://sereneinvesting.com/archives/291 Apparently the nationalization debate is still raging on and bank stocks, especially preferred, are tanking daily. Some analysts call it inevitable; even Greenspan, now working for a hedge fund which shorts financial stocks, advocates it. And low and behold, some Republicans seemed to have had a change of heart as ... http://sereneinvesting.com/archives/271