You are currently browsing the Capital Comments weblog archives for April, 2009.
20. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.
Effective April 17, 2009 Canada has amended the Citizenship Act. The new law will give Canadian citizenship to certain people who lost it and to others who will be recognized as citizens for the first time. It will also protect the value of citizenship by limiting citizenship by descent to one generation outside Canada.
The new law changes the rules regarding people born outside of Canada to Canadian parents. It was possible for Canadians to pass on their citizenship to endless generations born outside Canada. This is no longer the case as the new law will grant citizenship to only the first generation born outside Canada. Children born outside of Canada to parents who themselves were born outside of Canada, will no longer have an automatic right of citizenship. People who have renounced their citizenship or had it revoked will also not become citizens under the new law.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
20. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.
There is a movement afoot that you may not be aware of but you soon will be. E-books are transforming the way we read and write. Two players in this space at this time, Amazon with the Kindle and Sony with with the Sony E-Book Reader.
Expensive toys, maybe, but it is early days and I suspect it will not be long before we are all clamoring for one. Read more here.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
20. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.
At the recent G20 global summit G20 leaders reaffirmed their commitment to fighting economic protectionism. The reality is that protectionism is increasing by the very proponents who claim to be fighting it. The US revived the old Canada/US softwood lumber dispute and new US labelling requirements are derailing Canadian meat product exports.
Russia has instituted 25% tariffs on many products from drugs to farm and construction equipment.
It would appear that forces are continuing to build choking off international trade.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
20. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.
The green revolution has stalled and at $50 oil not many project make sense. See what the Wall Street Journal has to say about ethanol. Another piece on the difficulties biofuels face at Business Week .
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
20. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.
Prof. Daniel Kahneman has dozens, perhaps hundreds, of stories about people’s irrational behavior when it comes to making economic decisions. It’s no wonder, because for dozens of years he and his late colleague Amos Tversky researched human behavior. Many of their studies concerned the making of financial decisions.
According to Kahneman, the moral of the story is that some of our economic models, perhaps those of the investment world, are worthless. But individual investors need security - maps of the Pyrenees - even if they are, in effect, worthless.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
20. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.
Not long with any kind of economic recovery. Ultimately growth will resume and other than T-Bills, which have very short term maturities and where rates are zero, caution is needed. Longer term fixed income investments such as long-dated government treasuries bonds would appear to be priced to perfection and requires a heads-up.
Interest yields on corporates still offer attactive yields vs treasuries but term to maturity is an important consideration here.
The last time U.S. Treasury bill rates headed toward zero percent investors were panicking. Now it’s an indication Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s efforts to revive credit markets are starting to work.
Rates on three-month bills turned negative in December for the first time since the government began selling them in 1929 as investors sacrificed returns to preserve principal. After increasing at the start of the year, rates have dropped 0.20 percentage point since the beginning of February to 0.13 percent April 17.
Stuart Spodek, co-head of U.S. bonds in New York at BlackRock Inc., which manages $483 billion in debt. “You’re going to invest in very short-term bills because you absolutely need not just the quality but also the absolute liquidity.”
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
19. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.
Should you index your retirement program or have it actively managed. This rousting clip articulates the pros and cons.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
14. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.
Financial turmoil, economic weakness and widespread deleveraging in global markets over the past year have raised some historic opportunities in high-quality corporate bonds for investors that know where to find them. In the following interview, PIMCO managing director Mark Kiesel outlines PIMCO’s views on credit.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
13. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.
Petrobras’s offshore bonanza may transform the country — if oil prices hold and the company can extract the crude from beneath kilometers of salt and rock.
As they say if the Brazilians can overcome the technological challenges extracting the oil and gas from the newly discovered offshore fields it will be a game changer for Brazil and investors alike. Bloomberg covers the story here.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
12. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.
As playwright Arthur Miller once observed, “An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.” And most of the illusions that defined the late global economic boom—the notion that global growth had moved to a permanently higher plane and housing prices from Miami to Mumbai would rise indefinitely—are now indeed exhausted. Yet one idea still has the power to capture imaginations and markets: it is that commodities like oil, copper, grains and gold are all destined to rise over time. Lots of smart people believe that last year’s swoon in commodities prices represented a short pause in a long-term bull market.
According to an article in Time magazine the bull market that ended last summer saw oil prices rise tenfold over nine years, mirroring the duration and magnitude of the previous bull market, which ended in 1979. That was followed by a bear market that lasted 20 years. If history is any guide, we’re only at the beginning of another long one.
My comment, as always commodities and commodity stocks are meant to traded.
Posted in Precious Metals | No Comments »