Posts tagged Gustav

Labor Day 2008: Oil down on Gustav’s miss, Palin’s teenage daughter is preggers

September 1, 2008 · Filed under money, politics, stock market · Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

As much as I’m a network television junkie, the fact that oil is trading down today while the news is screaming that prices will soar, makes me wonder…  By afternoon, Bloomberg reported that oil was [electronically] trading at a 4-month low, and by close it was down $4.12 to $111.34 a barrel. 

 

Oh, and Sarah Palin’s 17-year old daughter is five months pregnant.  Can this presidential race get any better?

 

But I do go back to work tomorrow and doubt I’ll have time to watch the market as closely as I have been this summer.  It’ll be sad, but believe you me that I’ll still be watching throughout the day.  It’ll just be scaled back a bit.  TradingMarkets.com has a free E-newsletter that sums up the next week’s major earnings announcements and major economic events, so I’ll keep an eye on that.  And checking NYMEX.com in the morning for what oil is doing will take some surprise out of my check of Etrade during lunch break.  Smart Money Magazine should be showing up every month on my doorstep, and Google Finance is my homepage.  So I’ll stay up to date, just not as up to date as if I were able to watch the market from open to close.  That will have to wait for my next school vacation or day Boston cit employees get off while others are working (Bunker Hill Day?). 

 

In the meantime, I bought a book Understanding Options by Michael Sincere and plan to make that my next venture.  I’ve been meaning to learn how to trade options, or how they even work, but the market was so exciting this summer it was hard to do anything else.  Now that I’ll have some desk time, and not necessarily at the best times to trade stocks, this will be a good time to learn how to effectively trade options.  It should make for a good before bed read as well. 

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Sunday August 31, 2008: Emergency oil trading at NYMEX???

August 31, 2008 · Filed under money, stock market · Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

As a capitalization on peoples’ fears, the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) created a “special Sunday afternoon trading session”, the first time the NYMEX has ever done such a thing for a [perceived] emergency.  Hurricane Gustav has shut down most of the oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, but has everyone forgotten the IEA’s announcement three days ago?  Oil opened this special trading day at $116.65, up $1.19 from Friday’s close, and climbed to $118.60 before rationality took over and the price began to settle.  By 4:30PM when I realized today’s trading wasn’t going to stop at 4PM and decided that vegging on the couch in front of a creepy Stephen King movie was more appealing than guessing when to stop refreshing NYMEX.com, oil was trading at $117 on the nose.  Hey Bryan Durkin, hey Esa Ramasamy, was it worth your Sunday afternoon? 

 

Somehow I knew Friday wasn’t my last entry. 

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Friday August 29, 2008: Gustav closes in, McCain chooses a woman, the Dow falls but financials hold

August 29, 2008 · Filed under money, stock market · Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Exactly three years since Katrina, President Bush declared a state of emergency for Louisiana.  Gustav, now at hurricane status and predicted to morph into a category 3, is on its way.  John McCain chose Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate, which pretty much nailed his coffin shut.  Maybe the thinking is that he’ll lasso in all the Hilary supporters who feel abandoned by their party, but I think the big companies already know Obama’s slated to win.  Ford and Chrysler applied for, and will likely receive in January, $25 billion in government loans to transform their outdated factories into ones that can build alternatively fueled vehicles.  This tells me that these two giants are already hedging the tax increases they know a Democrat will bring.  Hey, if you know you’re going to have to pay more taxes, why not ask for some of the money back under the guise “green energy”?  Democrats love everything green!

 

I’m too cheap to buy cable (and I’d end up watching The Hills reruns all day) so I never get to see Bloomberg on television.  But today I spent some time at my Dad’s, who has every station imaginable, so I got to see the channel for the first time.  Quotes stream along the bottom of the screen, as anyone who watches the station would know, and whereas yesterday would have been a stream of green speckled with red, today it was just the opposite.  And the green speckles, with the exception of UnitedHealth Group (UNH), were all the financials.  Although a far cry from yesterday, the financial sector held up today and the profit grabbing wasn’t nearly as rampant as I assumed it would be after yesterday’s major gains and right before a holiday weekend.  The PMI Group (PMI) and Thornburg Mortgage (TMA) grew the most, while the tide finally caught up to Freddie Mac (FRE), which fell 13%.

 

The Dow lost 171 points today to close the week at $11,543, and oil also lost, closing down 13 cents to $115.46.  The dollar reportedly had its best monthly gain since October 1992, which is an entire decade before its value began falling against other world currencies.  The dollar is on its way back.

 

Because I go back to work on Tuesday, this may be my last entry for a while.  It’s going to be hard making the transition from watching the market continuously to not at all, but work calls and I’m hardly in a position to quit.  I like my job teaching math, and in fact, our math MCAS scores improved exponentially from two years ago to this past year.  Fifteen percent of our students scored advanced or proficient in 2007 on the math portion of the exam, and this past year that percentage jumped to 45.  Eighty percent of our students passed the math section, which is pretty good for an urban high school.  Yeah, I’m looking forward to going back, and maybe even teaching my algebra kids a thing or two about the stock market.  Who knows?  Maybe one of them will be the next Warren Buffett!

 

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Thursday August 28, 2008: MBI and ABK blow up! Revisions to economy’s growth, Oil reserves will be released after Gustav

August 28, 2008 · Filed under money, stock market · Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Yertle, my 7,000 year old turtle, woke me up this morning grinding her shell against my bedroom furniture she’s a little too big to fit under, and because it was already light out, my efforts to fall back asleep failed.  So, I got up and of course got onto Etrade to watch the premarket.  Expecting to see all zeros in the % change column in my watch list, you can imagine my surprise when most were green.  I had never realized that the premarket watch list reflected the closing price from the afterhours the night before, and because good news came out about MBIA (MBI), it blew up over night and took a lot of its fellow bondsmen with it, including ABK, PMI, SCA, TMA, and RDN.   

 

Yertle’s not really 7,000 years old; actually I have no idea how old she is.  She could be 7,000, she could be 70.  All I know is that I’ve had her for 12 years and she’s about the same size as when my friend first handed her down to me, which leads me to believe she’s probably older than anyone would guess and that I’ll have to will her to someone when I die. 

 

Europe and Japan are reportedly headed towards their own recessions, but Bloomberg reported that our economy- possibly fueled by exports to these struggling regions- grew faster in the second quarter than originally calculated.  This boosted today’s market big time.  Trading is thought to have been the biggest contributor to the growth of the economy in the quarter, and a bigger contributor than it has been in 30 years.  Well no kidding!  Everyone knows to get in at the bottom!

 

My car got towed today because I was on the wrong side of the street for street sweeping, and it wasn’t until I got to the tow lot that I realized I had my debit instead of my credit card.  So I got back on my bike, rode back home, got the card, rode back to the tow lot, and paid them $117.47 (on top of the $40 ticket this fair City slid under my wiper) to bail my car out of car prison.  If it wasn’t for MBI and Ambac (ABK), which came out of the cut today with a 41% gain sometime between the tow fiasco and when I finally sat back down to look at everything, I would have been way more pissed.  Street sweeping.  Please!  Five seconds after the zambonie passes, trash is back on the street.  What a joke. 

 

The stars align once in a while in the financials sector, and today was one of those days.  Thursday August 14 was the last time it happened.   Today’s massive gains were a combination of the revised economy numbers, MBIA’s good news, and the Bloomberg report that “Crude oil fell more than $2 a barrel after the International Energy Agency (IEA) said it would tap strategic stockpiles, if needed, because of Tropical Storm Gustav.”  Forecasters are now predicting Gustav will turn Category 3 and is headed straight to Louisiana.  Oil crashed at 11AM because of the IEA’s announcement, then took a bit of a bounce around noon, but the damage was already done.  The Dow gained 212 to end the day at $11,715, oil lost $2.56 to end the day at $115.59, my stocks pulled in $1,700, and so probably ended the week’s rally.  No doubt the profit takers will enter the market tomorrow.   

 

 

 

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Wednesday August 27, 2008: The Gulf begins bracing for Gustav

August 27, 2008 · Filed under money, stock market · Tagged , ,

Clockwork high pressure circulation over Florida looks like it will steer Gustav right into the northern Gulf Coast, and thousands of offshore platform workers are already being evacuated from the Gulf of Mexico.  Louisiana Governor Bob Jindal went on air today to urge people to get their supplies now, and the storm is still days away.  Oh God, please keep this one weak; New Orleans doesn’t need any more.  The storm is still days from the United States, so a lot can happen between now and then, and with any luck it, and the two brewing behind it, will stay tropical storms and just blow through without much notice. 

 

In happier news, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick tore up the Democratic National Convention last night.  After the keynote speaker before him, whose name is as forgettable as his speech, Governor Patrick showed the world what a great Governor we have here in Massachusetts.  Sure he gets a lot of grief from people, but he’s a bang up speaker and motivator.  Patrick came to visit our school a few months ago and my students kidnapped him into our classroom to get his autograph.  In their defense, the Governor’s many aides were egging my students on, motioning to them to come out into the hall even though we were told to keep the kids inside the classrooms.  So when I gave them the go ahead to leave, my students ran out and dragged the Governor in, introduced him to me, and grabbed paper off my desk to get his autograph.  One of my students asked if he could make the autograph out to his street name “Gunz”, but Governor Patrick said he couldn’t do that.  In retrospect it was funny, but you can bet I was holding my breath the whole time.

 

TMA crashed today; hopefully tomorrow it will regain its ground.  FRE continues to produce.  The Dow closed the day up 89 points to $11,502.  Oil gained $1.88 to close at $118.15. 

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