that was last year's classic....this is today's classic <gg>
the flagrant pumping and misrepresentation of bove's calls is just amazing.....this kind of cognitive dissonance in the internet age is actually pretty disturbing,imo:
Posted by Karl Denninger in Musings at 08:58
Oh Dick Bove! Remember Me?
Yesterday I was infuriated with both Bove and the stock-pumping media, which has done nobody any favors during this crisis, and still continues to attempt to retrospectively rewrite history.
Bove was back out there crooning about Bank America, and he now has a $14 one-year target on it according to Bloomberg, with a claim that "eventually" it will go back to its all-time highs. (When, exactly, is "eventually" Dick? Five years? Ten? Fifty?)
Second, The WSJ covered him again yesterday, and they said this:
Rising star Dick Bove - the Rochdale Research analyst who foretold much of the banking crisis - couldn't disagree more with Mayo. In restarting his coverage of Bank of America Corp. (BAC), he called the economy's bottom. (Bove, like Mayo, recently changed firms.) "My belief is that the economy has turned," Bove said in a note to investors. He said Bank of America's stock price will ultimately "return to its all-time highs."
He foretold much of the crisis?
I was going to be nice, after promising a bit over a year ago to hold his feet to the fire if his call from then proved wrong, but this is too much chest-puffery for me.
Here is what Dick Bove said a year ago:
"This is a generational opportunity to buy (bank stocks) on the cheap."
It was, huh?
In addition:
In fact, on the phone with me, he admitted that he expects a "mild to moderate" recession - remember that while I (and many others) believe we are in one right now, you can't call a recession until you are deep into the middle of it, and often they are not officially called until they are over!
Mild to moderate recession eh?
On March 18th of 2008, about a month from the end of a bear market rally that Mr. Bove called a "generational buying opportunity", BAC closed at $38.93.
Yesterday it closed at $7.48, for a loss of eighty percent from the date of his "generational buying opportunity" call, and he now has a $14 one year price target on the stock, a one-year forward target of less than half of where it was when he issued his "generational buying opportunity" call!
If that sort of performance is a "generational buying opportunity", I (and those who listened to this guy) would like to know what constitutes a reason to sell.
By the way, that's not an "outlier." Wells Fargo has lost half its value, Wachovia no longer exists, Washington Mutual no longer exists, Lehman no longer exists, Citibank went from $20.71 on 3/18/08 to $2.72 last night (a near-90% loss!) and more.
Every one of these stocks above, with the exception of Wells Fargo, has lost more than the broad S&P 500 index, which on 3/18/08 closed at 1330 - a loss of 39%.
And before someone claims that I am "cherry picking" bad banks to make Bove look bad let me point out that the broadest based bank index, the BKX, stood at 81.31 on 3/18/08. Yesterday it closed at 29.61 for a loss of nearly sixty four percent, much worse than the broad S&P 500.
To put this in perspective I issued a long-term SELL on the entire market in February of 2008, with the S&P 500 at about 1350.
If you sat in cash from that point forward to today you avoided a loss of 39% in your portfolio. By the way, my long-term investing signal remains on a sell and while my favored indicator for that has narrowed somewhat in the last month, it remains very close to its widest level in this Bear Market.
I called <insert bullshit icon here> on Dick Bove's "generational buy" based on that long-term indicator, which at the time was widening (that is, strengthening its "sell" indication) along with my personal analysis and view of credit quality, expectations for unemployment and my outlook for the economy in general forward over the next two years.
I believed at that time Dick Bove's call was just dead-flat wrong and, if followed, was likely to lead your portfolio to ruin.
Dick Bove, in a very long phone call I had with him at the time, argued that one had to give his call a full year to play out before judging it.
Ok Dick, you got your year. Remember Dick, you and I started our email and phone calls over your Bear Stearns opinion - a piece that I wrote and you believed was "unfair".
How did it all work out for people who listened to you a year ago?
Still think I was "unfair" in going off on you for potentially leading people to ruin with what I believed were just dead-flat wrong calls on the direction of the banking sector in the market?
An investor's portfolio, invested per your call last March, has risen or fallen by how much? And how does that compare to my call that the market as a whole was a "sell" (and the banking system was REALLY a sell - call that a SHORT if you want; I did, even though "the street" never uses that term) and therefore the long-term investor would be best off sitting in cash or equivalents (e.g. short-term treasuries or actual FDIC-insured cash.)
Let's also remind readers that one of the outcomes of our conversation back then was that you did not believe the S&P 500 would fall by 25% (or more) forward from that date. I was calling for a sub-1000 SPX, which at the time was a roughly 30% decline.
I was wrong on that call - I wasn't bearish enough. You on the other hand were ridiculously bullish, measured against actual results one year hence.
Where is the media's "white-hot spotlight of truth"? Where is the media's responsibility to properly indicate the accuracy of one's prior calls when putting someone on the air as a person with a claim that they have the ability to make reasonable forward predictions?
None of us get it right all the time, myself included.
But the scrutiny applied to one's claimed prognostications should scale linearly with the audacity of one's prognostications when viewed in the historical light of fact.
Rising star?
From my perspective Dick Bove is more like a "shooting star" - two seconds before "Deep Impact".
Oh, Mr. Bove promised, after our previous altercation on the phone a year or so back, to contact me and go over our respective prognostications one year hence.
Time expired on that promise March 18th and neither my phone or email has seen incoming traffic from him.
Why not Dick?
PS: I'd have emailed you Dick, but you're not where you were a year back. You still have my email Dick, and likely still have my phone number. Feel free to ring me any time. |
