I overlaid DJIA and my favorite Insider Score chart (from InsiderScore.com, a link is in my Blogroll). Before 2007 insider activity was all over the place, but since early 2007 seems there’s been a correlation between the market (as represented by DJIA, at least) and insider buying/selling:
It’s not perfect, obviously, but I’m betting on the market going down in the short term.
6 long positions, 3 short.
Does anyone else find this phrase meaningless?
The International Herald Tribune
has reported that business confidence
in France is the worst in 1 1/2 years.
So business confidence is the worst in 1.5 years, but not the worst in 2 years. Why pick such an arbitrary number like 1 1/2 years? Because “second worst in 2 years” doesn’t sound dramatic enough. This is just an example of news being plucked out of the air, meant to fill space and with any luck to stir emotions in the reader (other than skepticism 
).
I’m still trying hard to avoid market noise, though can’t say I’m entirely successful.
On a different note, to commemorate U.S. dollar’s recent rise (whooo whaaa!), here’s a cartoon I’m borrowing from The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.
Stimulus money is old news by now, but this is more about Walmart, which remains #1 company in Fortune 500. (I just had a sort of funny thought, any Walmart employee can say “I work for a top Fortune 500 company.”)
CNN homepage screenshot:
[yellow highlight is mine]
So billion-dollar losses and thousands of job cuts are GOOD NEWS now, good enough for the market to rally on that news.
My world is turned upside down right now.
In turbulent stock market times we all wonder if we’ve diversified enough (in my case, I don’t even wonder 
).
Asset diversification is a good thing for most investors, but there can be too much of a good thing:
The common consensus is that a well-balanced portfolio with approximately 20 stocks diversifies away the maximum amount of market risk. Owning additional stocks takes away the potential of big gainers significantly impacting your bottom line, as is the case with large mutual funds investing in hundreds of stocks. We leave you with the sage words of the “Oracle of Omaha”, Warren Buffett: “wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing”.
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