The Tasgall Group

Since adding all the blogs from Ticker Sense to Bloglines, I’ve been going through them mostly with a virtual machete, finding most to be irrelevant to my style of investing or simply poor and uninteresting.? There are a few that are making a place in my daily coffee routine.? One that caught my eye this morning as likely to be of interest to you fellas is CXO Advisory, not because it’s the best blog ever but because it has a great cohesive structure and some very interesting research to share.? The perform inflationary and market forecasts based on the RTV and REY models (similar to the Fed Model) and give daily updates on the status of the market relative to these models.? They also have a great section called Guru Grades that attempts to quantify the success of internet investment guru’s predictions.? The current long-time leader of the list is Ken Fischer, and they have a very interesting article of his on the site.? All in all, an interesting bag of goodies to explore and chew on.? You will note that the market is currently moving in relative lockstep with the 2 models (which are, I grant you, lagging) and that, if you look at what the Bubble looked like, we aren’t in any way close to that kind of overvalued situation.? But then again, you know that.? At the very least, the articles at CXO are thoughtful in a quant sort of way.

So, I’ve used BigCharts for over 9 years now, but I recently noticed a new feature. You can chart the P/E Ratio, Yield, Rolling EPS, and a few other fields below a price chart. (I’ve known since the beginning about the more traditional technical indicators that can be shown there.)

The data is a bit off in a few cases, but you can get some interesting little charts. (more…)

It was requested that I make mention of the CPA firm that focuses on the needs of active traders and hedge funds. It is Green & Company run by Robert Green, CPA, who literally wrote the book on trader taxes.

There is a guy that does a fairly interesting look at the official statistics released by the US Government over at Shadow Government Statistics. He has taken the official releases, documents, disclosures, and footnotes, and figured out what all the real values would be for the US economic statistics without the adjustments that have become common in the last 10 years. (Both hedonistic and opportunistic adjustments).

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Well, as a self-proclaimed avoider of stocks, I still enjoy contributing to our discussion and analysis of stock pick services. I’m still sorting out a problem in getting my Daytraders.com trial started but, hopefully, I’ll have something to report soon. In the meantime, I want to bring light to another service that looks very interesting: WhisperNumber Risk Sentiment Reports. These reports, updated weekly, provide a model portfolio with unambiguous entry/exit signals. So those are two pluses in that it isn’t a daytrading system with lots of market watching and commission expenses and the calls are not fuzzy. The theory behind it is appealing also. Here is what they say:

The concept is simple – present favorable stocks with low sentiment risk and improving technicals and heavy short interest. Conversely, present unfavorable stocks with high sentiment risk and low short interest and technicals that are long in the tooth.

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This is by far the tastiest morsel of economic data I’ve ever seen:

Big Mac Index

Now, do you want fries with that?

Having just finish Kessler’s Running Money, I was very interested in his theory about the margin surplus vs. the trade deficit.? John, I suggest you find the time to read the one chapter in the book that breaks down this theory nicely and is really the best part of the book whether or not you care about hedge funds.? But what it amounts to is that we shouldn’t worry about our trade deficit because we have what can be termed a “margin surplus” where our intellectual property gets exported without being put on the books to manufactories in Asia who then export to the US creating what looks like a deficit but is really money in the pockets of the US companies that produced the IP in the first place.? (more…)

Well let’s break it down:

What War Means For Your Wealth

There’s a great story about a famous local trader at the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). One day, he was on the floor of the CBOT and a U.S. inflation number came out that was totally unexpected. Pure pandemonium ensued. When all the noise died down, he walked out of the pit having made $10 million and said, “By the way, what was the number?”

-Dr. John Porter, Barclays Capital

as quoted in Inside the House of Money, p. 133

This is the last batch of fresh Power Ratings that I have to report since I canceled my free trial tonight. I had to phone in to cancel and they guy gave me a hard time and asked tons of questions before he’d submit the cancel request. He tried to offer me a free month if I’d agree to pay for a month, then he wanted all sorts of info about my experiences and wanted me to compare them with other strategies that I’d tried. Anyway, the updated spreadsheet is attached: Power Ratings Worksheet