Discussions

My first attempt was entering "What is threeive?"  (from an old saturday night live sketch), but that just got me the "Come on, really?" response....

 

I had to use the equation editor in word to figure out what the sign meant.  Once I found out it stands for product, it was just a matter of putting it in excel.  Thanks for the entertainment and challenge.

 

 

Minh said:

What do you mean "suspended"?

I guess Apple itself can choose not to trade, but other people who own APPL stocks can buy/sell right? Anyway, the article mentions trading resumes after hour... and currently down 10%

What happened is the stock was halted to where no one can trade the stock.  This is a common occurance in the market whenever there is a major news item that comes out regarding a company.  This way investors have time to digest the information and everything happens in an orderly fashion. 

Bas said:

Apparently they're starting online stores in The Netherlands, Japan, France and Spain "soon". Could be interesting. Now I want to see a client for this thing in Windows, integrated with Microsoft Update. In other words, exactly like Steam.

Oh, and if I bought Office in a store, I want to be able to enter the CD Key and download it from the website, in case my disc breaks. Also exactly like steam.

Oh, and to take that one step further, since they offer the ability to download vista, what about being able to enter the CD key, and being able to download a slipstreamed install file?  That way if you have to reformat, all of the updates are already there.

jamie said:

http://rocketdock.com/

Thanks for the new wallpaper!  I love it.

I got back from the rally at Grant Park in Chicago a little while ago.  I was in the overflow area because I wasn't quick enough to get the tickets for the main stage area.  That was one of the most incredible experiences I have ever had.  Hundreds of thousands of people all gathered in the same place, and the excitement was awe inspiring.  It was a really well managed event too.  It was fairly easy to get through the security check point, and leaving went very smoothly since they had pretty much every street in the loop closed.

I just saw one on tv.  It had PC sitting at a table with a stack of money, and the Mac guy asked what he was doing, and he said that the huge stack was for marketing Vista, and the small stack was for actually fixing Vista.  The Mac guy then asked if he thought the small stack would be enough to fix it, and the PC guy said, you're right, and pushed all of the money into the marketing pile. 

That was a pretty harsh attack on the windows without walls campaign.

evildictaitor said:

Rd_Falcon said:

*snip*

I'm not saying we "need to" anything - most of the market bouyancy over 1980s capital investment isn't due to any more "real" money in the markets - it's mostly tied up in the value of property and in an overvaluation of stocks and commodities. Consequently there's little reason why the markets shouldn't in principle be able to go to 1980s levels before hitting a capital-line bottom, where the value of the market is propped up by the real value of the economy.

I try to take my assessment of the markets from a several-week long rolling average rather than based on the intra-day trading price on the stock markets, but even if you do look at the markets you may see that the financials are rallying after a whole pack-of-cards of important people are throwing US-GDP-sized sums of money at them in order to get them out of a financial rutt, there are signs the credit crisis is starting to hit the real-economy. While I suspect it's a massive overplay by the markets, BP (as in the oil and energy giant) lost nearly 40% of it's share value in the last 24 hours, and the only good reason as to why would be that big players in the energy sector are going to have to live with the fact that during a recession we use less energy. In the housing market, there's just under 98% fewer homes being sold than in 2006, and all developed countries with sensible GDPs are now entering recession, including France and Switzerland (the US and UK have hit recession in mid August /early September).

So while you may be seeing things to be optimistic about on the intra-day market trading, a more long term view might be to say that economic slowdown is a given, and that 2009 will almost certainly be a net recession for the US and the UK. This being said, if the credit-crunch has told me one thing, it's that everyday there is news that just 24 hours ago would have been ridiculous to even contemplate - so in one sense, nobody knows. The downside of that is that banks don't like risk, and they charge more when risk is involved. This coupled with the high cost of the London Inter-bank trading rate (LIBTR) and the expectation (not the likelihood - the expectation) that other banks will fail soon means that we certainly haven't seen everything that the crunch is going to throw our way.

May I ask what it was in the 80's that makes it the capital-line bottom?  I honestly don't know what the markets were like back then because I am only 20 years old, so I have only actually seen the last several years of trading to base my limited knowledge on, so I would appreciate it if you could point me to some information to find out more about this.  Right now, I am basing my thought on the bottom being higher than what it was for the 87 crash on the GDP being exponentially higher than it was back then.  Wouldn't the bottom be around where the markets were at the bottom of the 2000-2003 decline? 

I day trade, which may help explain why I am so focused on the intraday charts, so I greatly appreciate your longer term perspective.  As you mentioned, it has taken the big players tossing a substantial amount of money at the financials to prop them up here.  The key part though is whether this will be able to change the psychological perspective of the markets just enough to slow the bloodshed. 

As for  the global nature of this situation, I honestly think that is what has kept the US market from crashing all at once.  By everyone going through this together, we fall as a group.  When the US market closes red, Asia opens down, and then their decline goes over to Europe, and then back to the US.  So it is kind of a vicious cycle, but no one will fall more than the next.  This is not counting for the smaller or undeveloped exchanges that we have seen being halted.    This is just a theory that I have, so if you have any thoughts on this I would be very interested to hear them.

I absolutely agree that there will be a slow down well into the future.  It took 7+ years to create this, so I can only imagine that it will take years to begin a new uptrend.  I think we are done seeing the major banks colapse, but until the credit markets open up again, some regional banks may fall yet.  I read an article today that said the federal government may insure the interbank loans to try to help this problem, but I haven't seen anything official yet.

evildictaitor said:

Rd_Falcon said:

*snip*

There's no good reason to think that we're anywhere near the bottom yet. In the 1987 crash, the total value of markets was less than half what it's worth now, which means the markets can happily fall by another third or more before we'll hit a capital-line bottom of the market.

But what you are implying is that we need to wipe out not only all of the gains of the 2000's but also the 1990's.  So basically the businesses that make up the united states have not grown at all over the last 20 years.  I'm not saying that we won't decrease any more, but if you observe the sharp increase in volume over the last several days, I am actually seeing some promising signs.  Today's rally back from 680 down was led by the financials, which as you very well know are the cause of this mess.  If they were able buck the trend, I believe that a bottom will begin to form.

Also, if you look at option volume on various securities over the last couple of days, there has been strong interest in contracts 5-10% or even higher than the current market price.  With expiration next Friday, and it being a shortened week, either all of those people are incredibly dumb (its possible), or there will be some upward pressure as long as the G7 meeting goes well this weekend.    Just my opinion from what I have been noticing.


Edit:  I suppose I shouldn't be calling it a bottom.  I think a better word for it would be a support level, which may turn into a base, which would then lead to it being considered a bottom. 

jonathansampson said:

phreaks said:

*snip*

Well, kinda...if two steps down, one step up is "positive" Could be worse though.

Well we were up 300 for a second in the last hour of trading.  Traders tried to close it in the green heading into the holiday weekend, but it just didn't hold.  Hopefully the G7 meeting this weekend will give confidense a boost and we can get a nice bounce.  I do think that we are starting to form a bottom though, because you can see every now and then traders testing the markets to see if it is safe to go bottom fishing yet.

brian.shapiro said:

Sven Groot said:

*snip*

Sven,

did you like Seinfeld's tv show?

I just saw that one on tv, and I had a good laugh.   It was kind of interesting that computers were only mentioned at the very end of it.  I am guessing that this was just an introduction to the "stars" of the campaign, and they will slowly ramp up the windows promotion in future ads.