The folly continues….

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“CINCINNATI (MarketWatch) — The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index remains precariously positioned near its 200-day moving average.

Technically, this area marks the bull/bear battleground, and weakness elsewhere — combined with complacent market sentiment statistics — improves the chances of an eventual break lower.”

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Gapping up

TCX +19.6%, FRO +10.2%, VIPS +8.6%, CSCO +7.7%, CEDC +5.6%, HMIN +5.6%,

RPRX +4.2%, INCY +3.3%, WWD +3.2%, NOK +3%, MT +2.2%, JNPR +2%,

BRCM +1.8%,  WFT +2.2%,

Gapping down 

ENVI -18.1%, OSG -11.5%, LODE -7.5%, MOS -5.1%, SEP -4.5%, UBNT -3.3%,

IAG -3.1%, AMD -1.9%, SEE -1.7%, POT -1.4%, AGU -1.4%, CF -1.4%, TM -1.3%,

SNE -0.6%,  SI -0.6%,  HD -0.2%,

In Play ,

On the Wires

“The Federal Reserve is inching closer to revamping its communication strategy by stating more explicitly than before what would get officials to start raising short-term interest rates.

Under a new approach being considered by senior officials, the Fed would state how high inflation would have to rise or how low unemployment would have to fall before it would begin moving rates, which have been near zero since late 2008.

“Several of my [Fed] colleagues have advocated such an approach, and I am also strongly supportive,” Janet Yellen, the Fed’s vice chairwoman, said in a speech Tuesday at the University of California, Berkeley.”

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Its all about EPS….

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“BARCELONA (Reuters) – Companies will double or triple spending on cybersecurity in the coming years as attacks grow more sophisticated and frequent, creating a billion dollar business opportunity for U.S. carrier AT&T Inc, it said on Wednesday.

Attacks on AT&T networks have doubled in the past four months and now tend to be more targeted to evade detection, Frank Jules, president of AT&T’s global enterprise unit, said at the Morgan Stanley TMT conference.

“We see them on a daily basis and they are now getting smaller instead of coming in huge waves, which were easier for us to detect,” he said.

“Every chief information officer at major corporations that I meet wants to talk about security. I think this will be a $40 billion market one day.”

Jules said AT&T’s strategy for its global business solutions unit was to accompany big multinationals as they expand overseas to provide them not just with connectivity but new products and services like security and machine-to-machine technology, which puts mobile SIM cards into everything from cars to vending machines.

AT&T said in early November it would boost capital spending on its U.S. network by about 16 percent to $22 billion a year for the next three years to upgrade its wireless and wireline networks.”

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“Reuters) – Advanced Micro Devices has hired JPMorgan Chase & Co to explore options, which could include a potential sale, as the chipmaker struggles to find a role in an industry increasingly focused on mobile and away from traditional PCs, according to three sources familiar with the situation.

Sources said an outright sale of the company is not a priority, and other options for AMD could include a sale of its portfolio of patents.”

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“A rebound in U.S. auto sales has been buoyed by the return of easy lending, even to borrowers with flawed credit histories. Some economists question whether the gains can be sustained without a boost in hiring.

Auto loans were up 5.5 percent in the second quarter from the same time last year, with riskier buyers accounting for 43.9 percent of the total, up from 42 percent in 2008, according toExperian Plc. (EXPGY) By contrast, hourly wages for non-managers climbed 1.1 percent on average over the past 12 months, the least since records began in 1965, Labor Department figures show.”

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“Allianz SE (ALV), Europe’s biggest insurer, said low interest rates have caused a bubble in the government bond market and may do the same to equities unless central banks tighten monetary policy.

“We have a bubble in sovereign debt, looking at German Bunds, with central banks flooding the markets with liquidity,” Maximilian Zimmerer, management board member in charge of finance and global life insurance, told reporters at an event in Frankfurt today.”

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“(Reuters) – Weak foreign exchange revenue persists at State Street Corp , hurting the custody bank’s chances of lowering its high ratio of compensation expenses, top executives said on Tuesday.

Some shareholders, including activist investor Nelson Peltz, have criticized State Street’s compensation-to-revenue ratio, saying it is too high.

State Street’s goal is to keep the ratio at about 39 percent, compared with 40 percent in 2011. But that goal could be hard to meet as foreign currency trading revenue withers from slack volume and volatility while key customers shift away from transactions with higher profit margins.

State Street Chief Financial Officer Ed Resch said on Tuesday he expects the compensation-to-revenue ratio to be pressured, primarily because of weak trading revenue. He made his remarks during a presentation with State Street Chairman and Chief Executive Jay Hooley at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Banking and Financial Services Conference in New York.

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“We exited our short positions in gold for a modest but useful profit when it broke out of its downtrend towards the end of October. It then broke sharply lower on heavy turnover in a move that looks capitulative, but afterwards turned and rose quite sharply over the past week. So the question now is “has it bottomed?” Although the answer to this question is “Yes, it looks like it has”, it also looks like it may back and fill for a little while to complete a base pattern before a sustained advance can get underway. COTs, particularly for silver, continue to give grounds for caution and warn that the current turn may be the B-wave trap of a A-B-C correction. We are aware of this danger and place stops accordingly to protect us from it.”

Full article and charts

” A mere three weeks ago, Nomura’s Bob Janjuah forcefully suggested that complacency warranted a tactical risk-off position given the misplaced confidence heading into the plethora of event-risk ahead. It seems, 60 points later, that he is on to something; but this time he is more critically concerned: “Investment decisions based largely on the greater fool theory and predicated by the assumption that central bankers can sustainably and credibly misprice money, supporting a significant misallocation of capital, without any major negative consequences, are in general not good investments.”

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Gapping up

OXGN +19.4%, CSOD +10.1%, DMND +6.4%, DOW +1%,  GILD +0.8%, FFIV +1.6%,

DDD +2%, ROC +3.2%, MNST +1.9%,  CLNE +2.2%, GNOM +4%,  NSPH +19.8%,

GBX +9.7%, TKMR +37.7%,  NVO +0.9%, AZN +0.8%, NVS +0.5%, CSOD +10.1%,

GALE +10%, NTI +9.5%, MHR +5%, DKS +4%, HD +2.5%, CEL +2.5%, TSPT +2.4%,

Gapping down

NBG -15.1%, WFT -9.5%, VOD -4.1%, MWE -3.4%, RIO -2.1%, BHP -1.9%, MSFT -1.8%,

STO -1.6%, HOLX -1.5%, WX -1.3%, BP -1.1%, LL -4.7%, MCP -2.4%, CJES-0.4%,

In Play ,

On the Wires 

REALLY ?

“Power companies are “regularly” manipulating Britain’s wholesale gas prices, a whistleblower has claimed.

Last night City watchdog the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and energy regulator Ofgem both said they had launched investigations into the claims.

The FSA launched its investigation after whistleblower Seth Freedman told them he saw evidence that wholesale gas prices, used as the basis for domestic energy bills, were manipulated by some of the big power companies according to a report by the Guardian newspaper .

Mr Freedman, who worked at ICIS Heren, a firm which reports gas prices, said he saw what he took to be suspect trading on September 28, which is an important date as it marks the end of the gas industry’s financial year and can influence future prices.”

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A good read to see just how far we have not come in politics.

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“The banks run by executives now in prison for crimes related to the financial crisis had a combined $30 billion in assets. That is just one-tenth the size of the largest bank failure in U.S. history, the 2008 seizure of Washington Mutual Inc.’s WMIH 0.00% banking operations.

The gap is a sign of prosecutorial ineffectiveness to critics such as William Black, a regulator during the savings-and-loan crisis who now teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.”

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$JCP, $AAPL, $CVS, $SVU< $XRX, $CLWR, $ZNGA, $ATVI, $TXN, $INTC, $MSFT, $DELL, $CSCO, $FB

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“President Barack Obama needs to rein in big banks, lower healthcare costs, take on the enormous trade deficit and compromise on domestic energy if he wants to have a successful second term and not be stuck in the morass that marked the past four years, Peter Morici, a professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, told Fox Business Network.

Regarding the fast-approaching fiscal cliff, Morici believes a compromise will be made, but “the question is do we have a bad deal,” he said in response to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who wrote that the country should go over the fiscal cliff.

“Let’s not make a deal,” Krugman wrote. Obama must stick to his guns and demand tax increases on the wealthy, which Republicans, who control the House, adamantly oppose, argued Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist. ”

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