1. Companies and analysts use chat boards both to gather information and, in the case of small companies, promote their stocks.
I know news people monitor some of the chat rooms and the boards on SI and also I have seen the management of larger companies view links from various post I've made. Not sure about the promotion, but I wouldn't be surprised.
2. Online investors, by the end of the year, will be able to see ALL bid and ask prices instead of being limited to the price of the last trade only. They call this LEVEL II trading.
Level II trading requires some fees and is usually kind of steep on a per month basis unless you have a pretty fast paced trading requirement. I've heard some firms offering this if you trade 50 times per month, but I have my doubts that it will show up by the end of the year. You can now view Island trading bids/asks from their website. (sorry I don't have the URL, it comes through a piece of intraday tracking software I use).
Right now I can see bid/ask in real time and also the bid/ask volume on each side, last trade and trends in bid/ask prices (Datek). It would be nice to see the depth of the volume on each side per Level II, but I don't think this would be of much use for the majority of the public.
3. Last year 1/2 of new money flowing into mutual funds went into equity funds. Currently, most new money is going into money market funds.
This percentage moves around quite a bit. I guess it depends on what you mean by "currently". Typically there is a lull in new money going into the market after tax season is over and IRA's are fully funded and refunds are put in. You might want to take a look at TrimTabs if this interests you. (again, lost URL). I had a subscription last September through November and found that money flow was not really a good thing to predict where the market was going.
4. Currently, interest rates are following the markets rather than leading them.
I don't know about that. Seems like we see the 30 year bond move up and the market hesitates or drops. To me that is the rates leading, not following. FWIW, I think we are nearing the top in interest rates for a while unless oil prices move higher again. If you also think that, this is a great time to pick up some of the money center banks. I'd suggest Citigroup (C), Chase Manhattan (CMB) and Bank of New York (BK) as possibilities. I have a research report that you might be interest in from ML on banks in general. It goes with this link.
biz.yahoo.com
Obviously financial stocks are hit when interest rates rise, but technology stocks are often impacted severely because analysts use a discounted cash flow model to make some guess on an appropriate price of a tech stock. These models are very sensitive to interest rates whcih are considered the "riskless retrun" part of the equation.
5. PC stocks are now trading like commodity stocks. Their high speed growth days are behind them.
Agreed. PC expansion is more likely to be in the 15-20% range in growth with shrinking margins vs. the blistering growth in the late 1980's. I'd bet this came from Kevin Landis (possibly others).
That's the other half of the "It's the Net Stupid!" slogan.
Think about this. I'm using one CPU to write this, you are using one CPU to read this. There are probably 20-100 communications chips that are used to get my message to the server and from the server to you depending on the amount of nodes they pass thru. The growth isn't in those 2 CPU chips or the PC's that connect to the net, but the chips, hardware, servers, storage and fiber optics in between my sending the message and you reading the message.
Landis talked a bit about DSL, but the most striking thing I took away from an hour of mostly platitudes was when he talked about the second buildout of fiber optics once the broadband to the house was well underway. Makes me want to rethink the sky high UNPH price again.
6. A bear market is not likely to last more than 6 months.
A bear market that starts NOW is unlikely to last more than 6 months because the backdrop of the world economy is relatively good and we will likely be in the depths of a pre-y2k jittery market 6 months from now. After that (hopefully) we can get on with "normal" life.
Overall, that's really too broad of a statement. 10 years from now as boomers pull money out of market, I think things will be different.
7. The recent rise in the small caps has been due to a very small amount of money going into those companies. If they really do come back into favor, the growth will be explosive.
The flow of money into the small caps I look at has been relatively small. On a typical trading day they trade 100,000 to 200,000 shares and move fractionally so the comment is correct that if a Fidelity starts to try to accumulate one of these it explodes. That's why AMAT moved first and ASYT is still a relative bargain. Once they try to buy ASYT and find no sellers, the asks move up quite dramatically. For example 1 week ago I tried to buy ASYT for $19. It traded perhaps once every 1/2 hour with the bid and ask at $19 1/8 and $19 3/4. Tuesday and Wednesday this week some large block shares came in (greater than 10,000) and the stock moves to $22 or more than a 15% move on relatively little volume or money.
Aside: Did you catch the guy who wrote a book on Dow 40,000 by 2030 (or something like) that recently? Sounds amazing doesn't it? Reality is if the DJIA returns a "normal" 8-10% and the p/e goes back to a high normal 20, you get there quite easily. Acampora pulled the same trick on his 10,000 by 2,000 prediction. Compounding is a wonderful thing if you are on the right side of the equation.
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Dave |
