“Days to save the Eurozone”, then the big rally
A couple of days before Wednesday’s coordinated central bank action goosed global markets, Wolfgang Münchau wrote in his FT column (“The Eurozone has only days to avoid collapse”) that if the European summit on December 9th didn’t lead to an ambitious three part plan to [...]

– I neglected to mention this at the time, but I picked up a few more shares of AYSI on Thursday at $0.75. No new news on it, but when I saw it hit .75 I entered a limit order which was partially filled. This was my most recent Seeking Alpha article on the [...]

Earthquake hits NYC, BAC blamed.
After a rare East Coast earthquake shook New York City Tuesday, this was one of a number of tweets I saw blaming the tremor on Bank of America (another suggested what we felt was BAC’s implosion).

Bank of America is one of the top holdings of [...]

Last week was an interesting week for stocks, and, if the performance of one foreign stock market that was open today is any guide, tomorrow may be interesting too. Here’s a snapshot of how stocks did on Israel’s Tel Aviv stock exchange this Sunday:

Last week was also the best week yet for subscriptions to Portfolio [...]

Hedging costs after the debt deal
Last week, with the debt ceiling negotiations dragging on, we looked at the costs of hedging a handful of equity index, gold-, Treasury bond-, and dollar index-tracking ETFs. Below is a snapshot showing the current hedging costs of the same basket of ETFs.

Hedging against a >30% correction [...]

Credit Suisse on the consequences of a default
On Thursday, Credit Suisse’s global strategy team said that a U.S. default was still unlikely. However, they predicted that if the U.S. did default, stocks would suffer a 30% drop.

Hedging against a >30% correction in stocks
With that in mind, the table below shows the costs, as [...]

The chances of a debt ceiling deal
The Intrade prediction market enables participants to bet on whether Congress will approve an increase in the U.S. debt ceiling to $15.1 trillion on or before three dates: July 31st, August 31st, and September 30th. As of Tuesday evening, these were the chances of [...]