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Strategies & Market Trends : MDA - Market Direction Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dwight E. Karlsen who wrote (32647)	11/7/1999 9:18:00 AM
From: Les H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 99985

The funny thing about it is getting slammed for grammar and for advice by someone who appropriates the name of a famous speculator. Who next? Buffet. Templeton. Lynch.

To: Dwight E. Karlsen who wrote (32647)	11/7/1999 6:53:00 PM
From: Lee Lichterman III	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 99985

Thanks for catching the errors of my ways. You know, before I could not spell GI, now I are one. <g> Found this article on the gold thread. Pretty much says what we have said here but lumps it all into one and shows we aren't the only ones noticing. Wall Street smells fishy WALL STREET - BRIAN HALE NEW YORK Monday 8 November 1999 Plunging bond yields, an outbreak of global "goldilocks" fever, the biggest contested takeover bid in history, and another wave of gains for technology stocks are causing ructions on Wall Street. It looks like a rally and it sounds like a rally, but it smells like a rat to many Wall Streeters. Others think it looks and sounds like a huge bubble, or at best a bear-market rally. While the Nasdaq Composite Index soars beyond 3000 for fiery 41per cent gains for the year, after six consecutive closing highs, and the freshly tech-boosted Dow Industrials heads back to 11,000 points, many on the Street have grown more worried rather than less. Worry one is that the bond market overreacted to Friday's October jobs numbers by further slashing the benchmark long bond's yield to 6.04per cent as the previous week's outbreak of "new economic paradigm" enthusiasm took hold. The bond market threw away news that the unemployment rate had fallen to a 29-year low of 4.1per cent, that payrolls grew by another 310,000 jobs and that the previous two months' figures had been revised upwards simply because the Labor Department's report also revealed that average hourly earnings rose just 0.1per cent. That, for the bond market, is the only news because they expect subdued wage pressures to keep Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan on the back foot and away from interest-rate hikes. This is in spite of the fact that he (and market economists)had warned that the slowing in payroll growth reflects a drying up in the pool of available workers rather than any slowing down in the US economy, which is still driving strongly ahead with consumer spending accelerating. Worry two is that it might look and sound like a sharemarket rally, but again it's a very narrow advance by the usual suspects - the "magnificent seven" supported by a handful of other big capital technology stocks. That is not a concern for index watchers worrying about a bear trap. They know the most-watched indices are unrepresentative; they just think the recent surge in the indices fits all the requirements of a bear market rally - violent, suddenand repairing months of damage in days, turning skeptics bullish. But the narrowness of the advance matters to the experts worrying anew about a bubble. Friday's gains looked a little broader, with the big financial and retail stocks putting on gains and investors eyeing the drug sector in the wake of Pfizer's $US80billion ($A125.2billion) takeover bid for Warner-Lambert just as it declared its impending nuptials with American Home Products. However, the already richly priced techs provided the drive again. It doesn't take many stocks to make all the most-watched indices shine. Just five stocks - Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Systems, MCI and Dell - constitute 35per cent of the market capitalisation-weighted Nasdaq Composite Index. They also represent a fair swag of the SP 500 Index (where they're joined by IBM, AOL, Lucent, Compaq and Hewlett Packard), while Microsoft and Intel have just ended their first week in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. When they started it, the Nasdaq Comp was ahead by 35per cent for the year to date, the same amount as the decline from 52-week highs for the average Nasdaq stock. The SP 500 was up 11per cent for the year even though the average share price in that index had dropped 22.6per cent, with more than half of them down by 20per cent or more. And the Dow was ahead by almost 17per cent despite a 28.4per cent decline from 52-week highs for the average New York Stock Exchange share. While the indices set records, the NYSE advance/decline line's ongoing deterioration has not only set a record for declining longevity, but the contraction from last year's peak has been the greatest in 17 years. Largely thanks to the techs, you couldn't get indices that are more unrepresentative of the plight of the overall share market, which gets us to Worry Three: Where do the techs go from here after a spectacular performance over the past two years? Salomon Smith Barney strategist L Keith Mullins said he is checking the exit signs in case there's a stampede out of techs. He added, "although I'm not ready to yell `fire', I clearly smell smoke and the theatre's bursting from an overcapacity (because) the lure of untold riches from tech stocks is packing them into today's investment theatre". "We've all seen this movie before and it never has a happy ending. A couple of investors move toward the exit and the investment wildebeests begin to charge. Greed quickly turns to panic and it takes weeks to clean-up the mess," said Mullins. Barton Biggs over at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter is even gloomier. While endorsing investors' patron saint Benjamin Graham's view that the market is manic-depressive, Biggs thinks the market borders on the psychotic right now. "I think Mr Market is on drugs, maybe even heroin. There is some serious craziness going on," said Biggs, who pointed out that just 5per cent of the 1,200 technology IPOs since the personal computer's debut in 1980 have created 86per cent of the wealth, with only one of the early PC boom stocks, Apple, surviving today (Dell and Compaq came later while Microsoft floated in 1986). Which gets us to Worry Four: Is it a new paradigm economics or madness and will Alan Greenspan decide it is time to evacuate the theatre before it all goes horribly wrong? theage.com.au Good Luck, Lee