This week has totally sucked. Congress is dragging its feet with the bailout plan and Washington Mutual (WM) was seized tonight by the FDIC and sold to JP Morgan. What does that mean for WM shareholders? I haven’t a clue. Message boarders think it means terrible things. This afternoon, WaMu closed the trading day at $1.69, then fell in afterhours trading to 45 cents. What I do know is that, right now, it looks like I made a big mistake on investing in this one.
Thornburg Mortgage has been extending and extending and extending an offer to its preferred shareholders to tender their preferred stock and receive a few shares worth of common stock for each of those shares. Tomorrow is the latest extension’s deadline. If the tender offering goes through, the loss I incurred with WaMu will be erased. If it gets extended again, or does not go through, I will seriously consider pulling out of this whole experiment altogether, paying off my car, and taking a nice trip somewhere.
The fact is, there aren’t enough hours in the day to keep a finger on the economy’s pulse, be in graduate school, and hold down a full-time non-desk job. My head is spinning from the amount of information I’ve missed this week. I have no idea why Freddie Mac (FRE) has been making consistent daily gains of 50%. I have no idea why the OTC IndyMac (IDMC) made a 300% gain today. What are the changes Congress made to the bailout plan? No idea. Is cosine or negative cosine the antiderivative of sine? Not sure. The only thing I do know is, that when push comes to shove, I’d rather be in a classroom of 9th graders for 80 minutes than in a room with slimy bankers for 5 minutes. So all’s not lost.
The Dow gained 196 to close the day at $11,022. Oil made gains today to close at $108.02 per barrel.
Go TMA!
