As I am a trader, I am always interested in both sides, the bullish and the bearish. Funny and interestingly enough, sometimes the bleakest outlook creates the best (buying) opportunities. Today afternoon, I read the title story of tomorrow’s edition of BARRON’S … not really known to the world as a bullish subjective magazine Here [...]

Bond insurer ACA’s rating was slashed by S&P from A to CCC in December, but they gave them a lifeline, which expired Friday. If the CCC rating now becomes effective, it will create the next round of write offs at financials. Friday now, Fitch cut Ambac’s rating from AAA to AA. Moody’s warned last Wednesday, [...]

Situation: U.S. Markets: Sold off heavily after Ben Bernanke hinted at up to 500 bln$ losses on subrime related assets. Adding to the pressure were his remarks that he expects weak housing- and equity markets. Bond Insurers lost around half of their value as Moody’s put outlook to negative, sparking fears of more write offs [...]

How many times will they be able to repeat that? Every quarter a new investor … OMG This time, the FT reports, it will be 14(!!!) bln$ fresh money and the estimates for the write offs are skyrocketing … up to 20bln$ is the guess as it is up to 15bln$ for Merill. Citibank, they [...]

Here we go … – Bank of America buys Countrywide Financial in a stock deal for 4 bln$. – JP Morgan is rumoured to snap up Washington Mutual or somebody else. CNBC says, they want to do something! – Buffett is said to consider buying a troubled bond insurer. Ok, we used to see Asian [...]

NY Times has a story, that Merill Lynch will have to take Q4 write offs of around 15(!!!) bln $ … just double of expectations … AXP takes surprisingly another charge and trades down close to 8% … showing, that subprime really spills over now. As I mentioned yesterday, the BoA story is NOT positive [...]

The story still drags on … but now a decision could be close. Some thing are close to unbelievable, but true. The troubled lender owes 50(!!!) bln $ to the BoE and still has no foot firmly on the ground. (BoA guys, read on ) But it is not the size, which makes me rub [...]

As X-mas comes closer, it gets more difficult to be interested in the markets … Even more as the main themes are still the same … NO CHANGE … and it seemingly won’t change for some time down the road … Housing, subprime and recession on one side … Asian growth, splendid tech earnings and [...]