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Staying on the sidelines

My friend writes

Instead of following the market, this year I listen to the likes of Harry Dent  and the other bears who have been predicting a big correction.  My gut’s still telling me they are correct, but I keep remembering Marty Zweig, who predicted the 1987 stock market crash, saying “Don’t fight the FED” and that’s what I’ve been doing all year.  The FED’s just keep printing money, which the banks use to keep buying stocks of companies that are laying people off instead of loaning it out so the economy can grow and create jobs.

The bears are bearish because they can sell bearish. People will pay more for a newsletter preaching gloom and doom than they will be for happy one. Go figure.

I had an idea. Make a chart showing influences and stocks that are being influenced. Here’s my first draft. I hope to keep updating it.

Major
Trends

Stocks
Air travel boom BA, HON
Huge oversupply of all commodities and minerals Gold (SGOL, GLD) and gold miners
Big year for the barbarians as they sell assets. Big dividends coming in Q1,
2014
BX, APO and KKR
Energy from solar panels has reached par with coal and is falling Solar stocks — FSLR,
Energy from solar panels has reached par with coal and is falling Electric utilities, especially those in sunny states
Obamacare
UNH, XLV, GILD, JNJ
Interest rates low The mortgage REITs — NLY, AGNC,
The Internet GOOG, AMZN, AAPL, PCLN, NFLX, OPEN, QCOM
3D printing DDD, SSYS, VJET
Desktop design to manufacturing ADSK
Housing recovery HD,
TV’s re-emergence DTV, CCV
Falling knives to watch. CCV, AGNC, NLY
 More to come

VectorVest’s “big” stocks. I don’t know most of them. Happy hunting  in VV’s Uni-search stocks:

+ Top five Highest VST stocks:  UVE, LBMH, MEI, GTN, EVI

+ Top five Highest Aggressive Rebounders: AMIN, AAMRQ, SWHC, CSTM, RAS

+ Top five Biggest BargaIns: MSFT, JNJ, GOOG, AAPL, XOM

+ Top five Follow the Money: MSPD, INCY, YOKO, CADX, HZNP

+ Top five MO MO JO: IMUC, SIMY, KPTI, K, GPI

+ Top five Short Sellers: CGIX, FWM, CMRX, CIE, STML

iBeacon — neat new Apple technology. Imagine walking around a retail store with your iPhone. You approach a display of carrying bags. Your phone beeps. It’s just received a short message offering you the green bag at 25% off — an unadertised special. Presto, iBeacon in action. iBeacon is Apple’s name for the feature in its iOS operating system which talks to beacons which are small wireless sensors placed inside any physical space that transmit data to your iPhone using Bluetooth. They’re in every Apple retail store already. And millions more are arriving in other stores. For more, click here.

“Sal Monella” tells the story of Twas The Night Before Christmas.

SalMonella

It’s clever and funny. Click here.

What Christmas has become. Your guests are vegan or gluten sensitive or can’t eat brussels sprouts because it gives them gas. You’ll die laughing.

HOLIDAYDINNER

Click here.

Sprint is getting big money from Softbank. And investing it improving its network, especially its LTE high speed. I think this stock has ways to run.

Sprint

HarryNewton
Harry Newton extols the virtues of checklists and counting. Idiot me. I left my main backpack with all my weekend work in the city because I forgot to count the bags and boxes I was bringing. CHECK. CHECK. CHECK. My old motto. Never forget it. CHECK. CHECK .CHECK. I made it up at the time IBM had their stupid, “THINK” mottto. Talking of IBM, what the heck are they doing these days? I see they’re following Amazon, Google, Dropbox and a million others into the cloud. You’d think with their awesome creativity and huge R&D they would have spun off five hundred startups in the past few years. But nothing. Maybe I should increase my short on IBM?

From a BusinessWeek article:

How’s this for bleeding edge: The average member of IBM’s (IBM) senior executive leadership team started at the company in 1985, when the Internet was still a government project and Steve Jobs had just been fired from Apple (AAPL). Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty joined IBM in 1981, two years out of Northwestern University’s engineering school, and has been there ever since.

That’s a deep and experienced bench. The question is whether the tech giant has the right managerial perspective for what confronts it in 2013. IBM finds itself on the wrong side of a major technology shift. In the cloud era, corporate clients can rent server capacity and processing power for far less than IBM charges to hire its consultants or buy its hardware.

You can read the entire article here. The chart looks gruesome — especially given the huge run-up in tech stocks in recent months:

IBMDecline

16 Comments

  1. Fderfler says:

    On your chart… excellent idea… don’t forget biochemistry and genetics. The application of cheap computer power in modeling elements of physiology, biochemistry, and genetics will have mature commercial outcomes in a very short time. Look at who bought Navigenics (Life Tech) and deCODEme (Amgen). Look at the disruptive impact of 23andME. The FDA ordered them to stop not because they are “bad”, but really because they are disruptive.

  2. Fderfler says:

    “The FED’s just keep printing money, which the banks use to keep buying stocks of companies that are laying people off instead of loaning it out so the economy can grow and create jobs.” Your friend is right. . How can a jobless recovery have any value? The policies of the liberals in DC are benefitting the top 1% and it ain’t trickling down. Harry, you live in a bubble.

    • max says:

      Fderfler, you live in an information bubble.
      The unemployment rate was 7.8% when Obama took office and got up to 10% within the first 9 month, which I don’t think can be attributed to him since it isn’t a leading indicator. Today it is at 7%.
      Do you have any measures to back your statement about “liberal” policies and the top 1%?
      Stop watching Larry Kudlow and try thinking for yourself. This isn’t about Democrats or Republicans. It isn’t about liberals or conservatives.There are terrible policies and people on all sides of your naive black and white world, and please don’t tell me that the Tea Party is your grand solution