Think you’re the only one getting margin calls and forced into selling your stock holdings? Here’s an article about CEOs getting “the call.”
Insiders are getting margin calls at an alarming rate. Many borrowed money on the value of their stocks as they rose, and with the stock market crashing the margin man is collecting and forcing sales.
How the hell do you trade this? It is new territory….for me anyway. The markets are listening to news and rumors more than I have ever seen.
Here’s what I’m thinking….there are more bears than bulls out there; there’s a lot of bad news; many stocks are way oversold and making new lows; wild swings in the indexes and testing of the lows. So, I’ve started to accumulate some QQQQ calls out 3 - 4 months, some XLK calls…thinking that tech will recover and some QLD. Yes, you’re right, I’m thinking we are very near the bottom and I’m getting bullish.
Friday we’ll probably see a negative reaction to the September employment numbers and then we’ll see the market reaction to the House vote on the rescue plan. I’ll either be cutting my losses real quick or adding to my positions and enjoying the ride. 
As if the great psychic was looking into the future back in 1999….
Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
But as if that is not enough…..
If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.
Here’s the entire article from the New York Times.
An interesting story in the Financial Times, Tangled trading web in energy futures.
In his e-mail, cited in the lawsuit, Mr Dowson appears to be reassuring a colleague that a trading strategy they were allegedly pursuing would probably not be considered manipulation.Yet the regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, thought otherwise and pounced.
The moral of the story? Think before you e-mail….and then destroy all records of it 
What will the new name be? YaHoogle? GooHoo? YaGoogleHoo? GoogleYa (which must always be accompanied with the sound of a whip snapping). In the history of M&A, the Yahoo! board will definitely have their own chapter. The NY Times has a pretty good synopsis.
A takeover by Microsoft was your last, best hope of rewarding your long-suffering shareholders. Now that opportunity is gone. It says here Mr. Icahn is not going to go as gently into the night as Mr. Ballmer did — and if I were a betting man, I would be taking odds that your days as Yahoo’s C.E.O. are numbered.
BOISE, Idaho (Reuters) - J.R. Simplot, the billionaire founder of the Boise, Idaho-based agriculture business that bears his name and who helped make French fries a staple of the American diet and waistline, died on Sunday at the age of 99, officials said.
After pioneering the first commercial frozen French fry in the late 1940s, Simplot eventually became a major supplier of Idaho potatoes to McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s. His privately held company, where he was chairman emeritus, reported $3.3 billion in sales in 2006.
…and thus began the demise of the American waistline 
Wow, look at oil go 
Over $127 per barrel. Wonder what it’s going to do to all the other markets? Maybe oil is setting up for an exhaustion run-up.
And my long-term hold (DVAX) is taking a dumper 
No, not on why the market acts like it does 
but answers to the CNBC Bonus Bucks Trivia contests. Remember, each answer is worth 2 grand in CNBC bogus bucks.
(AIG) and oil prices brought down the DOW almost 1%, but the Nasdaq was only down a quarter point and the Russell 2000 and the S&P Midcaps closed in the green So I’m not sure what the market is telling me, but the stocks I watched and played were not too bad: (IAR), (DVAX), (CTDC), (XRM). They made up for the losers (BCON) and (SIGA).
Oil went ballistic, but I’m wondering if that’s an exhaustion gap up ending in a hammer. All the airline stocks suffered today and (FDX) took a tumble after hours when they warned oil prices will cut into this quarter’s earnings. And the market has been doing not too bad with all this bad news. Let’s see if anything happens during the weekend.
Have a great weekend and spend some time looking at charts. It really doesn’t matter what the news is, it’s all in the charts
Anybody playing the CNBC Millionaire’s Challenge?
Microsoft (MSFT) walks away from Yahoo! (YHOO)…a negotiating tactic I expect, but in the interim, my Jun 30 put options should be golden on Monday. Yahoo! You’ll see hundreds of news articles on Sunday, but the first I found was on Yahoo itself…isn’t that ironic
But this time with a few winners in my pocket (FCEL) (ANAD) (STEM) (HYTM). The market had some good earnings this morning, but the after hours reports were less than enthusiastic. We’ll see how tomorrow pans out. The Nasdaq had a strong day but can we continue with those (AAPL) and (AMZN) earnings. Volume was up a bit, but still below average. C’mon everybody….BUY!
Tomorrow we have the biggest quantity of earnings in one day…in the biggest week of earnings. Good for that, because we don’t have any economic news.
Not looking too good this morning. Intel and Citicorp letting out moans of despair…Dollar down some more….oil up some more. And in a few moments, Ben Bernanke speaks on the subprime mess. Woe is me
Bear Market is a 6 month period when the kids get no allowance, the wife gets no jewelry and the husband gets no sex.