3 replies to this topic

[milbank]

An interesting article for your weekend reading pleasure...

You need to register to the NYTimes but, it's free and I expect most of you are anyway...or should be.

http://www.nytimes.c...ml?ref=business


Paul Tudor Jones II leans back in his chair and grins. The stock market is going to crash, and he knows it. “There will be some type of a decline, without a question, in the next 10, 20 months,” he says in his rich Memphis drawl. “And it will be earth-shaking; it will be saber-rattling.”

Coming from a financial speculator as prominent as Mr. Jones, a man with about $19 billion of short-term trading capital at his disposal, the words might be enough to send ripples through a stock market that, apparently defying logic, has been hitting new highs each day.

Except that the crash to which Mr. Jones refers occurred Oct. 19, 1987. His prognostication — brazen, and as impudent as the man himself — was made in a documentary called “Trader,” which was filmed in the year preceding that day.

Now, 20 years after the 508-point decline, several strategists are anticipating that the earth will shake again. Valuations are stretched beyond historical comparisons. The market, ever more volatile, is reaching new highs, ignoring a buildup of bad news. Most crucially, the strategists say, the sentiment that the market’s rise is infinite seems to have taken permanent hold....

[dasein]

thanks! another cute one from the NYT, quoted by EWI, is OT, but amusing: October 8, 2007 Don’t Open This Cookie (Disastrous Day Inside) The messages in fortune cookies are typically vague, banal and optimistic. But some cookies are now serving up some surprisingly downbeat advice. “Today is a disastrous day. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” reads one fortune showing up around the country. “It’s over your head now. Time to get some professional help,” advises another. As the messages, contained in cookies made by Wonton Food in Queens, have spread across the country, some diners have registered their reactions online. As a result, the company has a marketing challenge on its hands. One blogger, who got the “professional help” fortune, wrote: “I shot the audacious baked item a dirty look and proceeded to eat it. And I hope it hurt.” Bernard Chow, marketing coordinator at Wonton Food, says he had not set out to insult anybody when he asked his team of freelance writers to come up with some new messages. “We wanted to get some different perspective, to write something that is more contemporary,” Mr. Chow said. Wonton Food, the largest fortune cookie maker in the country, produces about 4.5 million cookies a day. But, he added, as customers requested more fortunes with actual predictions rather than cryptic sayings, the writers removed their rose-colored glasses. Mr. Chow characterized the new fortunes as “cautious” rather than negative. The New York Times

[linrom1]

The article "The Man Who Won as Others Lost" is abased on a presupposition that history will repeat itself except with Tudor Jones being on the wrong side and Pretcher again being correct when market will crash on scale like 1929-32. However, there are no direct comments attributed to Tudor other than a statement made by someone reputed to have contact with him who says that Tudor turned very bullish following 9/18/07 rate cut, which Tudor(like some on this forum) compares to 1998. Also, the writer plays up Pretcher's sway on Tudor's thinking in 1986, while downplaying Pretcher's market calls as merely bearishness without stating that he was bearish for the last twenty years. We are left to believe that Pretcher will be right again, and those like Tudor that do not heed his advice will prove to be wrong because none can remain hot as Tudor Jones was for the past twenty years. I am bearish, but the logic in this article is faulty.

[securelstmile]

The article "The Man Who Won as Others Lost" is abased on a presupposition that history will repeat itself except with Tudor Jones being on the wrong side and Pretcher again being correct when market will crash on scale like 1929-32.

However, there are no direct comments attributed to Tudor other than a statement made by someone reputed to have contact with him who says that Tudor turned very bullish following 9/18/07 rate cut, which Tudor(like some on this forum) compares to 1998.

Also, the writer plays up Pretcher's sway on Tudor's thinking in 1986, while downplaying Pretcher's market calls as merely bearishness without stating that he was bearish for the last twenty years. We are left to believe that Pretcher will be right again, and those like Tudor that do not heed his advice will prove to be wrong because none can remain hot as Tudor Jones was for the past twenty years.

I am bearish, but the logic in this article is faulty.

This article is a prime example of why I stay away from financial reporting. My friend keeps trying to get me to read Barrons but I tell him that if the reporters in Barrons really had a handle on the financial markets they would no longer be reporters, they would be hedge fund managers. I agree that for someone who did not know the full story of Prechter's persistant bearishness for the last 20 years one would think he made a correct call in 1987 with the implication that Tudor Jones made the similar call based on Prechter's input and that Prechter and Tudor Jones have only recently diverged in their opinion.

What is that article about? Is it about Tudor Jones? Is it about Prechter? Is it about people who make calls for crashes? What the heck is the author trying to even say?