Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Test from my new asus transformer tablet to blogger

I am ging a little more adjusted to my Asus Transformer.
Just downloaded blogger for it and so fr it looks decent, I have to figure out how to uploaed pictures and annotated charts.

Some pics uploaded

New screen shot uploaded

Best of the Worst?

I’ll look at the major banks and try to determine which are the best out of a field of really bad players.

Bank of America: BAC, Citi Corp: C, JPMorgan Chase: JPM,

Card Holders:

American Express: AMEX, Mastercard: MC, Visa: V

umm… did you notice that NONE of the stocks mentioned are in IBD’s Group Leaders?

BANK OF AMERICA

… most under-valued stock ever or just really bad?

CITI CORP

233% DEBT? I thought they paid all that TARP money back? yeah, right… them and GM both…

JPMorgan Chase: JPM

Just a cursory look shows JPM is probably the best of the worst… I figured BAC would be stronger…

Continuing on we have the credit card companies: American Express, Visa, Mastercard:

Visa and Mastercard are only holding-type companies, they do not have great amounts of outstanding debt or loans to sub-prime borrowers as the banks do. They simply process credit card statements – this makes them much less vulnerable to any debacle the banks are going through.

VISA: V

MASTERCARD: MA

Maybe oversold? Low P/E ratios

Mastercard Updated Chart

Monday, July 4, 2011

Best of the Worst?

I’ll look at the major banks and try to determine which are the best out of a field of really bad players.

Bank of America: BAC, Citi Corp: C, JPMorgan Chase: JPM,

Card Holders:

American Express: AMEX, Mastercard: MC, Visa: V

BANK OF AMERICA

Pretty bad…

CITI CORP

JPMorgan Chase: JPM

Just a cursory look shows JPM is probably the best of the worst… I figured BAC would be stronger…

Market Update for July 4th 2011

I forgot today was a day off for the markets but will take a monthly look back at this time.

The market looks as though it is making a bounce but with the short week there may just be a bunch of short selling (people trying to get out of their short trades).

Another green day – mostly. Maybe we will start another uptrend but I think the volume may be the problem – a sign of short selling?

Not really sure what a ‘conglomerate’ is but they are doing great!

Industrial Goods are up along with the usual Healthcare.

Basic Materials is getting hammered – maybe due to raw input costs?

Monday, June 27, 2011

Is the PC dead?

I have used PCs for the last 20 years or so – I started back in the early 80’s. I’ve used everything from a 8086 to a quad-processor Intel and even a Mac Lisa (built in 1979-1986) that my Mom bought years ago for around $8000.

Like many technologies, the PC will soon be obsolete except where true horsepower is really needed to run workstation-style applications like CAD but even their days may be numbered.

Remember in the 80’s when the big push was to get away from that giant piece of hardware to a smaller style of machine which could, dare I say, be portable? We saw Compaq laptops with miniscule amber and black screens that were touted as “luggables”.

The 90’s came and went, and the PC lived in glory along with myriad Macintosh computers. Larger hard drives, larger software applications, more storage options, more peripherals to choose from and most importantly, the Operating System. The O/S has grown from a couple of Megabytes to many Gigabytes in size over the years with more features packed in to supposedly make our lives simpler (never happened) and our computers easier to deal with (again, never happened). The push to go from huge servers in a back room serving up text to small amber (or green) monitors in a computer lab to the PC was over and now everyone had a PC. Suddenly from out of nowhere the laptops were getting to a form that was a manageable size to carry around with us and we could use them anywhere. The size was not the only thing that helped the technology, the all-out assault on our daily lives of cellphones and data-capable devices enabled us to use our laptops just about anywhere we wanted.

Enter the Apple iPad and the beginning of a new era in computing. For years just about every major manufacturer has tried to create and market a tablet PC like the ones we used to see Captain Kirk using on the TV show StarTrek while he perused the halls of the Enterprise reading a book or going through his schedule or logs. The iPad brought a device that common ordinary people could afford and was easy to use.

While I am not a huge Apple Fanboy I can appreciate the iPad’s draw – I was one of the early adopters, not having any other Apple products in my house at the time (only PC server, laptops, and desktops). After owning the device for about a week I declared it ‘marvelous’ and soon could not live without it. My iPad sits next to me as I write this and it is being used currently to look up that Apple Lisa that my Mom bought so many years ago (in 1982 or so) – have you noticed how many “all-in-ones” there are on the market now similar to the Lisa?

I have to admit with the speed of change and all the advances in the field of “Cloud” computing that the impending onslaught of even more personal computers in the form of tablets has taken me aback. While this is a good thing as far as freedom to work or play wherever and whenever we want, it looks like we have come full circle to the giant rooms full of hardware serving up pages for our consumption. While this is not a bad thing at all it spells certain doom for a PC that once dominated our lives. With the advent of the tablet form factor (that actually works), the Internet and Cloud computing the PC that I am now typing on may one day (very soon) be a dinosaur in the back of our closets or donated to the local charity of our choice.

Just remember I told you so.

Adrian

Thursday, June 16, 2011

DOWN AGAIN

The market sold off again after a bounce due probably to short selling (when shorts sell their stocks to take some gains on their trades).

I am seeing a support level at 1232 but who knows what the Greek debacle will do in the near future. I believe the Greeks will not give up and the Germans or other EU countries will help bail them out.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

EOG drilling Texas

EOG oil exploration

MRO Marathon Oil

Check out MRO also – just bought 250000 acres in west Texas’ Ford Shale fields… they are betting that oil stays about $60/barrel – I think they are a good bet