Testicles (Stocks) Options

[impala454]

Seem to be doing pretty well lately. Dow broke 9,000 today. Lookin pretty good and starting to seem like this will end up being one of the shorter recessions, albeit probably one of the most hyped.

[dauss]

So what? There has been a big jump in the last 7 trading days. What about the previous 28 trading days before July 10th when the markets stalled and the major market indexes lost about 7%? From the "Parallels between Dow and Japan" thread, I still believe there is a correction coming. We almost had one if it dropped 10%, but with the earnings season being unofficially being kicked off last week with Alcoa, there seems to be optomism. However, though companies are posting profits, there has been little to no revenue growth. The earnings results are skewed anyways. Analysts have slashed forecasts , and remember how aggresive the layoffs were at the beginning of this year? They were slashing a ridiculous amount of jobs, and these profits the companies are posting aren't from sales, they're from extremely aggresive cost cutting measures.

Ford, says they made profit because of their debt reduction, but would have lost money if it didn't happen.
Citigroup says they made profit because of their sale of Smith Barney, but would have posted a loss otherwise.
Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase posted profit because they took risky bets on the market, but their losses from defaults keep rising. If the market doesn't add on another huge gain over next quarter, these guys will probably lose money.
Morgan Stanley who weren't as aggresive as GS or JPM posted a loss.
CIT Group nearly went bankrupt because they were almost going to be insolvent and possibly bringing down hundreds of thousands of businesses because their request for TARP money was denied. Luckily a $3 billion deal with bondholders allowed them to continue to operate.


Small example, but none of these are showing signs of recovery. It's easy to beat analyst forecasts when the bar has been set so low.

That being said, I have been over 90% liquid for many months now. I still see the the current price of the market as unsustainable, and see a correction coming. However, with the stalled market from all of June to the first week and a half of July, I saw it fit to slowly enter the market again. I'm not picking out specific stocks now, because it is still too risky, but sticking with ETFs for now. On July 9th, I bought some QQQQ, the Powershares QQQ ETF that follows the Nasdaq.
Obviously I can't show you all of it, but:
Symbol, description of security, shares bought, current price, current value, day change($0.00 because it's past midnight), cost basis, Gain/loss(unrealized).

Not bad for 10 trading days.

Fine, current home sales are up, because they're dirt cheap, 30 yr mortgage has fallen some, foreclosures are still on the rise, and the tax credits to buy a house probably played a role, but that seems to be the big news for July 23. Jobless claims numbers are still skewed from the Chyrsler and GM bankruptcy, so although it has been dropping for the past few weeks, we'll likely to see new jobless claims rise back up to 600k+ once the seasonal adjustments catch up. Microsoft, American Express, and Amazon.com have posted some poor results, that are way off of analyst estimates. We'll see how the consumer sentiment index(consensus is a drop) and other relevant news(if any) will be able to buoy the markets tomorrow after getting poor results from those 3 giants.