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Pastimes : The Naked Truth - Big Kahuna a Myth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MythMan who wrote (75892)	11/18/1999 7:53:00 AM
From: John Pitera	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86076

FLeck hits some high notes last night: Qualcomm weak... We had another interesting development with Qualcomm, which has been this rally's leading sled dog. It had a pretty good-sized reversal a couple of days ago and a lot of folks said it didn't matter, and it was weak again today. I don't know whether it matters or not, but you can't have a blow-off end until the stocks leading the blow-off decline and then fail. Whether this is part of that, I don't know. Today Microsoft closed at $85, right around the 200-day moving average. That's an average that this stock has rarely been able to get under, certainly for most of this decade. Oil up, metals weak... Oil continued its slingshot move, up another 90 cents. That puts it at a price of $26.60, double since last February. We had quite a handful of splits today, so that was another reason to celebrate. Crazy over China... To further illuminate the insanity, I want to share with readers some stunning speculative moves we had today. Three stocks loosely related to China went absolutely berserk because China.com has gone berserk. I didn't mention it in the Rap, but the other day China.com went from $60 to $120 in one day. It traded today as high as $140. On the back of that, we had some wannabes go ballistic. China Pacific traded today from between 14 cents and 12 3/8. China Resources traded in the last two days in the range from $5 to $50. China Prosperity yesterday traded approximately from $1-$11 and today traded between $11-$80. But I guess that's not speculation. That's real investing going on, right? Record volume... Volume over the counter was an all-time record, over 1.6 billion. This was a record I think by a couple-hundred-million shares. The fact that we had it on a reversal may mean the exhaustion has been seen. This is potentially a very exciting/ominous development and we'll want to monitor the action in the next few days very closely. Statistics tell story... Yesterday, when I said I thought that day was a big one in volume, I hadn't realized it was the biggest volume day on record for Nasdaq. Here are a couple of other very interesting statistics that I am indebted to Don Hays for: First, the equity put-call ratio dropped down to 33 percent yesterday. That is very, very low. Second, the volume of call options yesterday was about 1.65 million, which is the highest ever, according to Don. The highest before that was just a shade over a million in terms of the S&P on July 16. So there continue to be many signs that the exhaustion that we had thought would happen and we thought had happened many times, is in the process of happening for real and finally. But obviously so far the exhaustion is not complete; we're just seeing more indicators that we're in that phase. Mandatory reading... The Wall Street Journal had an article about the "Bull Market Thins Value Funds Ranks." What should come as no surprise but still is a perfect sign of the times, is the fact that value investors are getting redemptions - even funds that are doing reasonably well. Everyone wants to be a tape chaser and a bettor in this environment; it's just another sign of the madness of this period. The San Francisco Chronicle is running an absolutely spectacular series about the kind of shenanigans that occur on Wall Street, and I strongly urge everyone to read it. (In fact, you can be sure it will be a big essay on the final exam!) Today is the third day in the five-part series, and so far all of the articles have been really well done. The gist of the series will be the subject of many investigations after people get separated from their money when this mania ends. There will be numerous books written about this kind of stuff and who knows, maybe even a movie.