LIVE COVERAGE: GREECE VOTING ON AUSTERITY

En Busines Insider

Investor Sentiment: Heading Into the Final Stages

Guy Lerner en Safehaven.com (enlace)

As long as the bulls continue to believe, the market should continue to push higher, but there will be a limit. Clearly, the best, most accelerated gains are behind us, and from this point onward, the gains will be harder to come by. Investors should have been buying back here (see article from October 7, 2011) when risks were perceived to be high. Instead, investors are buying now when there is a belief that the market is a sure thing. Sure things and market profits are normally not found in the same sentence. Nonetheless and as stated last week, I would embrace the current bullishness, but be aware that signs of a market top are starting to crop up. For example, the depth and duration of market sell offs has become very brief as investors feel like they are missing out. Or company insiders have increased their selling significantly. The best thing the market can do is sell off and take the "weak hands" out of their positions, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

The "Dumb Money" indicator (see figure 1) looks for extremes in the data from 4 different groups of investors who historically have been wrong on the market: 1) Investors Intelligence; 2) MarketVane; 3) American Association of Individual Investors; and 4) the put call ratio. This indicator shows extreme bullishness.

Figure 1. "Dumb Money"/ weekly

Figure 2 is a weekly chart of the SP500 with the InsiderScore "entire market" value in the lower panel. From the InsiderScore weekly report: "Insider selling increased last week as a big wave of insiders saw trading windows open and were free to trade following their companies' earnings announcements. Selling has not reached a level that has triggered any major red flags quantitatively or qualitatively."

Figure 2. InsiderScore "Entire Market" value/ weekly

Figure 3 is a weekly chart of the SP500. The indicator in the lower panel measures all the assets in the Rydex bullish oriented equity funds divided by the sum of assets in the bullish oriented equity funds plus the assets in the bearish oriented equity funds. When the indicator is green, the value is low and there is fear in the market; this is where market bottoms are forged. When the indicator is red, there is complacency in the market. There are too many bulls and this is when market advances stall. Currently, the value of the indicator is 69.14%. Values less than 50% are associated with market bottoms. Values greater than 58% are associated with market tops.

Figure 3. Rydex Total Bull v. Total Bear/ weekly

¿Qué está pasando en Grecia?

En twitter:
@LoomingLemming

La reforma del mercado laboral en España: Sala i Martín vs FEDEA

Comentarios Sala i Martín:


"la idea de unas indemnizaciones menores es que los empresarios no contrataban a nuevos trabajadores por miedo a los costes de tener que despedirlos. La reducción del coste de despido puede incentivar a los empresarios a arriesgarse a contratar nuevos trabajadores porque el riesgo de equivocarse es ahora menor. La reducción de la indemnización de 33 a 22 días por año trabajado y la reducción del tope de 42 mensualidades es una reducción de los costes de despido aunque espero que eso no fuera a lo que se refería De Guindos cuando dijo a micrófono cerrado que la reforma sería "extraordinariamente agresiva"!

Me parece particularmente buena la idea de reducir la indemnización en caso de que la empresa vaya mal. Miles de empresas han tenido que cerrar en los últimos años porque era más barato quebrar (o hacer concurso de acreedores) que despedir a trabajadores, cosa que ha agravado la crisis.

Dicho esto, creo que se tendría que legislar con mucha mayor precisión la definición de " la empresa va mal". La magia de la contabilidad creativa y la fungibilidad de los pagos hará que cuando una empresa quiera despedir a gente y pagar solo 20 días, simplemente "fabrique" una reducción contable de ventas o unas pérdidas contables con una total indefensión por parte de los trabajadores. Por otro lado, si no está clara la definición y estimación del concepto, los despidos acabarán en los tribunales y éstos siempre han sido el gran problema del empresario a la hora de ajustar plantillas. Es muy importante que este punto se haga bien porque si no, los empresarios nunca van a poder ajustar plantillas en momento de crisis y este punto será una buena declaración de intenciones que acaba siendo completamente inútil porque nunca se utiliza (los empresarios preferirán, como ha pasado hasta hoy, el despido improcedente que es más caro pero que no comporta ni gastos ni dolores de cabeza judiciales)"

Más en el enlace

Desde Fedea:

En fin, tardaremos semanas en saber que tal es realmetne la reforma, pero de momento, creo que mi evaluación preliminar es positiva. ¿Qué falta?

Cuatro cosas, que se pueden y deben aun ahacer en trámite parlamentario

1)     simplificar el número de contratos REDUCIENDO LOS CONTRATOS TEMPORALES

2)     una indemnización por despido creciente en los contratos indefinidos hasta llegar a los 20/33 días

3)     una transición al sistema austriaco de despido.

4)     una forma de favorecer la reducción de jornada

¡Ah! Y una cosa más: Mucha más pedagogía. Si el gobierno no es capaz de explicar esto, los trabajadores y los empresarios no lo van a entender, y vamos a ver solo despidos, no flexibilidad interna.

Comentario completo, aquí

Cómo sería la salida de Grecia del Área euro

"Grexit would likely take place in a context where Greece is no longer willing to make the minimum efforts necessary to be judged to be in compliance with the fiscal and structural reform demands of the Troika. Greece would not just have to fail to comply in substance, but would have to be sufficiently blatantly non-compliant to deprive the Troika of the fig-leaf of an ‘honest-albeit-insufficient effort to comply’." Source: Citigroup Global Markets


Aquí el informe completo de W. Buiter

La temperatura del EuroStoxx ¿frío o caliente?

Rojo: señal de venta

Verde: señal de compra

Hoy: la próxima semana actualizaremos la lectura para el mes de febrero....de momento, templado tirando a naranja

Will the SPY Make It Past This 44 Week Resistance Level?

Will the SPY Make It Past This 44 Week Resistance Level?

Temática de inversión de Rosenberg

ROSENBERG: THE INCOME THEME IS STILL INTACT

David Rosenberg has long been stressing an income oriented approach to the markets. It’s a bit more cautious than a pure growth driven approach and more appropriate for the investor who is not willing to take excessive risk. He says the strategy is still intact and outlines his approach in this morning’s letter (vía PragCap)

Jeremy Siegel, Rob Arnott and Other Experts Forecast Equity Returns

A forecast of the equity risk premium (ERP) tells you how much to save, how to allocate assets between equities and fixed income, and how much you can consume. Given its great importance, the CFA Institute recently convened a group of top-level academics and practitioners to forecast future ERPs – and to reflect on similar predictions they had made a decade ago.The ERP is defined as the total return, including dividends, that one can expect from a stock index over the long term, minus the expected return or yield on a riskless bond, typically a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond. It is what investors require or expect as compensation for taking the risk of equities instead of investing in (presumably) default-free bonds.I was honored to be a part of the group the CFA Institute employed in this project. I’ll discuss what I and the other experts foresaw, and then turn to the implications for advisors in their financial planning and asset management practices.


Jeremy Siegel, Rob Arnott and Other Experts Forecast Equity Returns

Calculated Risk: The Housing Bottom is Here

Calculated Risk: The Housing Bottom is Here: There have been some recent articles arguing the “housing bottom is nowhere in sight”. That isn’t my view. First there are two bottoms f...