Posts tagged MBI
May 11, 2009
· Filed under business, economy, investing, money, politics, stock market · Tagged ABK, Citigroup, PMI, MBI, MBIA, C, Ambac Q1
Friday was a $1500 day for me, which was a first. I made [back] the same amount of money in a day as I do after taxes in two weeks of work. I’m looking forward to being able to exclude [back] from my vocabulary.
The market has been rallying and against everyone’s suggestions, I continued to average down over the winter. Now it’s spring, or it is according to my landlord who shut the heat off for the year even though it gets into the forties over night (fucking bastard), and the world is again becoming green. I’m now down “only” 18%, and most of my stocks weathered the cold. Still, I’m looking forward to the day when I’m deep in the green with all of my survivors.
Ambac (ABK) released its Q1 results today and at one point rallied from its open of $1.58 to $2.09. It posted a loss, but “not as bad” (heh) as expected. PMI Group (PMI) was up over 50% at one point this morning before it fell to more conservative gains. PMI closed the day up 27%, which was a 50 cent gain.
After market close, MBIA (MBI) posted its first profit in five quarters, and as of 6PM, its share price is up $1.61 (23%) to $8.57. Back last summer when I first began buying stock in the bond insurers, good news for one would pull them all up. Hopefully that will hold true tomorrow.
Overall, the market sold off today after Friday’s rally. The Dow fell 155 to close at $8418, which is still the highest it’s been since January. I haven’t been following oil because the “pain at the pump” has subsided. It’s been so long since I’ve seriously written this blog because of work and work and disgust at being so wrong with stock picks and winter and work and school and just plain laziness. Winter itself takes the wind out of my sails, so add that to being six months ahead of a financial rally… well, let’s just say I felt like a total asshole. But maybe things are getting good again.
Here’s a list to consider…
Stock 52-week low Current shareprice
- ABK $0.35 $1.75
- MBI $2.17 $6.96
- PMI $0.26 $2.36
- RDN $0.70 $3.43
- RF $2.35 $5.92
- C $0.97 !! $3.96
If I was an “if only” kind of person, I’d be kicking myself for not seeing into the future that in March 2009 my stocks would be selling at fractions of where I bought them. But scrolling out their Google Finance charts to a year, two years, three years, shows that, even with current rallies, their share prices are still considerably low.
October 13, 2008
· Filed under business, economy, investing, money, politics, stock market · Tagged ABK, ambac, dow closed, Henry Paulson, interbank lending, MBI, MBIA, Mitsubishi, Moody's, Morgan Stanley, MS, Radian Group, RDN, SCA, stimulus package, stocks, Syncora, wall street
Forget Prozac, the market needs lithium. After last week’s worst week, today marked the best day in Wall Street’s history and the biggest one-day percentage gain since 1933. Stocks rallied all across the board. The Dow closed up 936 points, or over 11%, to $9,387, and the Nasdaq and S&P also gained over 11% each. Morgan Stanley (MS) traded like an OTC today, gaining 86% from its close of $9.68 on Friday after Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group invested in it $9 billion. Will it stick? Maybe. Countries all across the globe are now jointly focused on fixing their banks to stave off a worldwide recession, so if this doesn’t work, what will?
By the way, sometime over the weekend the plan changed from “buying toxic mortgage-backed assets” to “let’s follow Great Brittan because they seem to know how to deal with this crisis, so let’s pump money into a few good banks like they’re doing over there across the pond”. So that’s what we’re doing. And the figure is now $250 billion instead of $700 or $850 or whatever it ended up being once al the rum and wooden arrow makers across the nation were settled up.
The credit markets were closed today because of the holiday, but they open back up tomorrow. Analysts are now looking to see if the interbank lending rates, or the rates banks charge each other to borrow each other’s money (think what needed to happen but didn’t when people ran IndyMac) will come down so that banks will again lend to each other. Until banks again start covering each other, no one who missed one electric bill will be able to get a loan.
The only stocks I’m ahead in right now are Radian Group (RDN), MBIA (MBI), and Syncora (SCA); the rest are one big hemorrhage. Moody’s still hasn’t lifted their threat of downgrade of Ambac (ABK). But to stay positive after such a positive day, at least I’ll be able to average down. And average down I definitely will!
Word that a second stimulus package may be on its way may have also helped boost the markets today. Crude oil followed the rest of the market today, closing up $4.14 to $81.84.
The #1 movie in America is Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
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September 21, 2008
· Filed under business, economy, investing, money, politics, stock market · Tagged "Paulson's Monster", $11 trillion, $700 billion, ABK, ambac, bankruptcy, banks, Barclays, Berkshire Hathaway, bond insurer, economy, Google, hedge funds, Henry Paulson, investing, Lehman Brothers, MBI, MBIA, Moody's, SEC, Warren Buffett
“Paulson’s Monster”, as it’s being called, has now proposed the need for $700 billion of taxpayer dollars, raising the US debt limit to $11 trillion, to spin off the bad sectors of the financials into its own entity. Paulson claims his plan will “minimize” the cost to the taxpayer in the long run, but who can really be sure? As part of the plan, Paulson said that he was currently in talks with other countries for help. He wouldn’t disclose which countries.
Back in Ratings land, one ABK message boarder claimed that the Feds raided Moody’s on Friday looking for connections between the ratings company and hedge funds. No link was provided, and given that any Joe Schmo can go on a Google Finance board and post whatever he or she pleases, it could very well be completely fabricated. However, a Bloomberg article titled “Berkshire’s Bond Insurer, Moody’s Stake Face Probe”, reports that one such link may in fact come to light:
“Billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. faces a probe by Connecticut’s attorney general for possible conflicts created by owning almost 20 percent of credit ratings company Moody’s Corp. while also running a new municipal bond insurer.
Moody’s gave its top rating last week to Berkshire Hathaway Assurance Corp., created in December as existing bond insurers struggled to maintain their AAA ratings. A favorable rating for Berkshire by New York-based Moody’s, or a lower rating for competitors including MBIA Inc. and Ambac Financial Group Inc., may give Buffett’s company an advantage.”
So maybe there is truth in rumor.
In other news, Barclays is the proud new owner of Lehman Brothers’s investment banking and trading businesses. The $1.75 billion deal approved yesterday is a definite bargain as compared to the one Barclays would have had to strike last week for Lehman’s entire assets before bankruptcy.
September 21, 2008
· Filed under business, economy, investing, money, politics, stock market · Tagged ABK, AIG, ambac, banks, banned, Barclays, Ben Bernanke, Charles Schumer, economy, financials, Henry Paulson, investing, LEH, Lehman Brothers, LEHMQ, MBI, MBIA, Moody's, Moody's Ratings, short selling, stocks
Whoa mama. I was definitely wrong about the profit-taking. The US market rallied harder in the last two days than it has in 38 years- longer than I’ve been alive! Lehman Brothers, now on the OTC board as LEHMQ, gained 313% on rumors that it would sell parts of itself to foreign banks. Barclays is back in the running. In just the last two days of trading, I made up almost all of what I had lost in the last week and a half.
The SEC banned ALL short selling- regular and naked alike- of 799 financials for the next 10 days. The United Kingdom temporarily halted short selling yesterday, and the US did the same. This is a huge step from just banning naked shorting; this is a total ban on betting that stocks will lose value, essentially disqualifying half of the game. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, both New York Senators, proposed the ban. Critics say this ban will warp the market, making it seem as if the financial stocks are worth more than they are. But when naked shorting was banned in July, the effect lasted long after the ban was lifted. In fact, it lasted right up until last week when AIG teetered and fell and dragged the entire sector along with it. So in a market that is so emotionally driven, a little banning may do the trick to snap the depression (no pun intended).
Henry Paulson, our Treasury Secretary, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke proposed the idea to spin all bad parts of financial institutions into its own entity- a black hole of badness. This idea reminds me of that story I had to read in high school about the utopian society that was only a utopia because of the little girl who lived in a cage in the basement of someone’s house. Remember that one? I was never big on reading, so titles slip my mind. I just remember the girl in the cage and the annual field trip every schoolkid would take to see the girl in the dirty dark cage dungeon as a reminder of why they lived as perfectly as they did. I wonder if part of the Paulson and Bernanke plan will have the American people visiting the dark entity once a year. Oh wait, now I get it. We will be visiting once a year- at tax time. Seems these two guys kept up on their high school reading.
Meanwhile in Ratings Land, Moody’s threatened to downgrade Ambac (ABK) and MBIA (MBI), which dropped ABK 42% and another 27% in afterhours, and MBI 8% and another 8% in afterhours. The ABK message boards caught fire, and it seems Moody’s may catch some of it by Monday, if not sooner.
Do you know the name of that book yet? Maybe it was a short story.
August 28, 2008
· Filed under money, stock market · Tagged money, trading, ambac, ABK, RDN, investing, MBI, Gustav, MBIA, IEA
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.
August 15, 2008
· Filed under money, stock market · Tagged ABK, ambac, bonds, dow closed at, MBI, money, oil closed at, PMI, RDN, SCA, speculation, stocks, trading
Both MBIA and ABK were upgraded afterhours last night, so their share prices soared in afterhours trading, leaving no possibility of getting more ABK on the cheap! I put in a limit order to buy 100 more shares, but it didn’t take, so I bumped my order down to 75 shares at a higher price and the order took. Prices always seem to fall after a hot stock’s early morning surge, but I got punchy and bought in. Luckily by the end of the day, my buy-in price started looking pretty cheap. ABK broke the $6 mark, then fell to close the day at $5.63- up 23% on the day.
Shares of Silver State Bancorp (SSBX) fell 25% today on news that their second quarter loss was miscalculated and was actually larger than reported. Ouch. Google message boarders think the bank will go bust. Its 52-week high is $19 and SSBX is currently trading at just 62 cents. My very scientific calculation of dividing the current share price by the 52-week high yields the tiny fraction 0.0326, which tells me, in a very scientific way, that this thing is at least a decent bet and at most a real money-maker. I’ll keep my $77 worth of shares until the real bottom is reached, then maybe average down.
When starting this experiment, I set two goals for myself: to have a $1000 day, which happened yesterday, and to hit $10,000 by October. Today I hit the second goal two months early, thanks mostly to the bond insurers PMI, ABK, MBI, RDN, and SCA. So what now? Let it ride! I honestly wasn’t sure $10,000 would ever happen. But it did. So what’s the next goal? I like base 10.
The Dow moved sideways today to close the day up 44 points to $11,659. Oil closed down $1.24 today to $113.77 on news that world demand is down. Wasn’t demand in developing countries reportedly way up a month ago? Wasn’t that the reason oil was at $140 a barrel? Gee, things sure can change in a month! Please, it’s all speculation.
Whoo hoo, Friday! I’m headed out of Massachusetts for the first time in a while.
