Posted March 28, 2012 at 6:19 pm
by Prashant Gopal and John Gittelsohn
Matthew and Carina Hensley offered $10,000 more than the asking price for a three-bedroom house in suburban Seattle, then lost out to one of seven other bidders.
Their $270,000 proposal last month came with a family portrait and a letter introducing the couple, their eight-month- old daughter, Harper, and their desire to build a family in the Renton, Washington, house with a yard backing onto a woody hillside.
Bidding wars, absent from most parts of the U.S. residential market since its peak in 2006, are erupting from Seattle and Silicon Valley to Miami and Washington, D.C. The inventory of homes hovers close to a six-year low, while an increase in jobs and record affordability are tempting more buyers. The number of contracts to buy previously owned homes jumped 14 percent in February from a year earlier, the National Association of Realtors reported yesterday.
“We understand there is going to be fierce competition in the offers made for your house but Carina and I both felt very strong about letting you know what it would mean to us if we were given the opportunity to live in your gorgeous and charming house,” wrote Matthew Hensley, 33, a credit union branch manager whose wife is a dental hygienist. Such letters from eager buyers were common during the housing boom.
While listings will probably rise as banks accelerate foreclosures and sellers gain confidence in the market, the U.S. metropolitan areas with the strongest economies may be ready to [continue]….
Filed Under: Market Bytes
Category Feed:
To get an emailed digest of all posts, join our free Wealth Wire News Feed
Posted March 26, 2012 at 12:35 pm
Via the Mercenary Trader
The whole of the 2000?s as a decade, in fact, was characterized by paper asset inflation (not to mention hard asset inflation) and broad currency debasement, driven by easy monetary policy, aggressive feedback loops and exacerbating macro factors. This was a goldilocks environment for gold.
But how long do such goldilocks environments prevail? All good things come to an end… and most bad things too. Even as the long-term charts have gone from “unquestionable uptrend” to “question mark,” so too have the macro drivers for gold’s bull run become a giant unknown.
To put it another way: As traders who respect price, the charts alone are enough to make us wary of gold. But the fundamentals are a concern too because the conditions that supported gold’s rise may no longer exist. Consider:
Bullish gold and bearish long bonds? Really?
Here is another funny thing: Many of those who are staunch long-term bulls on gold, are also anticipating a ferocious bear market in U.S. treasury bonds. They are rubbing their hands and waiting for the collapse of the long bond market, at which point U.S. interest rates will be forced to sharply rise.
We too like the long bond short trade (and have said as much repeatedly). That is some price action we can get behind!
But can you really expect sharply rising interest rates and rising gold simultaneously? To borrow a British slang phrase, “not bloody likely.”
[ Details / Source: Above is our hand-picked KEY excerpt(s) from this full article: "Gold Looks Terrible Part II: Clarifying Thoughts " ]
Filed Under: Market Bytes
Category Feed:
To get an emailed digest of all posts, join our free Wealth Wire News Feed
Posted February 20, 2012 at 11:15 pm
via NewsMax
International investor Jim Rogers said he doesn’t have U.S. stocks or the British pound in his portfolio, which includes euros, dollars, renminbi and precious metals such as gold and silver.
“Everybody’s having a wonderful time running the printing presses,” Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, said in a television interview with CNBC in Singapore. “The way to protect yourself at a time like that, historically anyway, has been to own real assets. Those are my longs, and currencies.”
The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index has gained 8 percent this year, while the S&P GSCI index of 24 commodities has climbed 6.4 percent and gold 11 percent.
Rogers said he expects more currency turmoil as global central banks inject stimulus into the economy through quantitative easing and investors should buy commodities “when that happens.”
“Probably none of us are going to own any paper money at all ultimately, but that’s later in this decade, because paper money is becoming very suspect everywhere in the world,” he said. “I don’t own any U.S. equities,” he said, adding “I don’t own the pound sterling, although I do love the U.K. a great deal.”
While the pound is up about 2 percent against the [continue]…
Filed Under: Market Bytes
Category Feed:
To get an emailed digest of all posts, join our free Wealth Wire News Feed
Posted February 20, 2012 at 2:16 am
by Christine Hauser
In a Wall Street universe populated by marquee name stocks, the lesser known entities are the stars of the rally so far this year.
The Russell 2000 index, which tracks stocks with a small market capitalization, is nearing its record high with a rise of about 11 percent in the year to date. That outstrips the Russell 1000 index that measures Wall Street’s large capitalization stocks and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index that measures the broader market.
The surge in the so-called small-cap stocks — companies whose total share value is $3 billion or less — indicates that investors’ appetite for risk is growing as signs of recovery persist in the United States and euro zone leaders make progress in containing the debt crisis, market participants say.
After investors drained more than $15 billion out of small-cap stocks last year, the largest amount since 2007, they have sunk about $2.4 billion back into those equities so far this year, according to data provided by Lipper, a Thomson Reuters company.
“It is a decent confidence barometer,” said Scott Wren, a senior equity strategist for Wells Fargo Advisors. “Investors are confident enough to buy some of these small companies, betting that the U.S. economy is going to continue to grow.”
Most of that money poured into the small-cap stocks in the seven days that ended Feb. 8, the last tally by Lipper. During that time, the Labor Department reported a gain of [continue]…
Filed Under: Market Bytes
Category Feed:
To get an emailed digest of all posts, join our free Wealth Wire News Feed
Posted February 20, 2012 at 12:55 am
Via Reuters
* U.S. goal is to create 100,000 new farmers
* $1.8 billion in U.S. loans to beginning farmers in 2011
* Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota top states for new farmer loans
* Specialty crops, organic food a focus
by Carey Gillam
Dan Pugh wishes he had a bigger tractor and his wife Laura worries about their chickens in the winter weather. But as new farmers putting down roots in rural Missouri, the Pughs are counting on more rewards than regrets in trading their city lives for the country.
A better quality of food and life are among the factors that caused Dan, 47, to leave a career in sales last year and move Laura, 48, and their two young children to 50-acres (20 hectares) of rolling pastureland they call Honey Creek Farm.
The Pughs will plant their first crop of organic spinach and lettuces in the next few weeks on ground they tilled behind the barn they converted into a two-bedroom home. They are shopping for sheep and hogs. And though their first hives of bees mysteriously died, Laura is determined to develop a successful honey operation as well.
“The whole food and farming system is so out of whack,” Dan Pugh said. “We want better and we can do something to help other people eat better.”
For those who remember the American TV series, call it the “Green Acres” effect. Fueled by an economic downturn that has curtailed the upward mobility of many corporate jobs, general dissatisfaction with suburban stresses and growing discontent with what they see as the ills of industrialized agriculture, thousands of families across the United States have left suburban cul de sacs and headed to the countryside – forging a new demographic of family farmer.
The U.S. government is not only monitoring the trend, it is [continue]….
Filed Under: Market Bytes
Category Feed:
To get an emailed digest of all posts, join our free Wealth Wire News Feed
Posted February 16, 2012 at 3:41 am
by Paul Novell
I love the online format of this piece, the included audio and the slide presentation format.
This piece includes a lot of valuation data and a lot if information on dividend yields. It also has a great section on economic indicators.
Grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and enjoy [continue]…
Filed Under: Market Bytes
Category Feed:
To get an emailed digest of all posts, join our free Wealth Wire News Feed
Posted February 16, 2012 at 12:15 am
by Tim Reid
The careworn house not far from Santa Monica Boulevard resembles millions of other homes that have been foreclosed on since the calamitous U.S. housing crash four years ago.
Garbage spews from trash bags behind the property. A smashed television leans against broken furniture. A filthy toy dog lies on its side, an ear draped across its face. The garden is overgrown. The house needs a paint job.
Yet the property on North Rexford Drive, Beverly Hills, California, is no ordinary foreclosure.
A sprawling, Spanish-style estate, fringed by majestic pine trees and located near the boutiques of Santa Monica Boulevard, its former owners were served with a default notice in 2010; they were $205,000 behind in their payments on mortgages totaling $6.9 million.
Welcome to foreclosure Beverly Hills-style.
Some 180 houses in Beverly Hills, the storied Los Angeles enclave rich with Hollywood stars and music moguls, have been foreclosed on by lenders, scheduled for auction, or served with a default notice, the highest level since the 2008 financial crash, according to a Reuters analysis of figures compiled by RealtyTrac, which tracks foreclosures nationwide.
As in the default-ravaged suburban subdivisions of Phoenix, Arizona, and Tampa, Florida, plunging real estate prices are [continue]…
Filed Under: Market Bytes
Category Feed:
To get an emailed digest of all posts, join our free Wealth Wire News Feed
Posted February 15, 2012 at 8:49 pm
by Jeff Bater and Alan Zibel
U.S. home builders’ sentiment rose in February to the highest level in nearly five years, a clear sign of improvement for an industry trying to climb out of a deep slump.
The National Association of Home Builders said Wednesday its housing market index grew to 29 from 25 in January. The increase was the fifth in a row and carried the index to its highest since May 2007. The results were better than expected. Economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires had forecast a reading of 26.
Historically, the reading still is low. A reading above 50 in the NAHB index would mean more builders view conditions as good rather than poor. The gauge has not been in positive territory since April 2006 [continue]…
Filed Under: Market Bytes
Category Feed:
To get an emailed digest of all posts, join our free Wealth Wire News Feed
Posted February 13, 2012 at 5:30 pm
by Charles Sizemore, CFA
It seems like an eternity ago, but about four years ago the financial press was abuzz with a new catchphrase: decoupling.
Western economies and Japan were in bad shape. No one yet knew just how bad the 2008 meltdown would be, but at the very least it appeared that growth in the developed world would slow.
Emerging markets, however, still looked healthy. Under the decoupling argument, emerging markets were ready to untether themselves from the debt-burdened West and find their own way in the world. Emerging market stocks would continue their bull market, even if American and European stocks were flat or down.
Let’s just say it didn’t work out that way. Emerging market stocks, as measured by the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (EEM) lost over 60% of their value in the bloodletting that followed (between late ’07 and early ’09 ), falling harder and faster than their developed peers.
There were two major flaws in the decoupling argument.
First, fundamentally, most of the major emerging market economies (and most notably China) depend disproportionately on exports to the West. How, exactly, were emerging markets to continue humming along when their customers abroad weren’t buying?
Secondly, correlations among global equities have risen in recent decades as capital markets have [continue]…
Filed Under: Market Bytes
Category Feed:
To get an emailed digest of all posts, join our free Wealth Wire News Feed
Posted February 8, 2012 at 12:55 am
by Michael Dawson
In January of 2007, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. As we now know, the iPhone wasn’t simply another cell phone. Many now associate its introduction with the dawn of the mobile computing era. Apple really threw down the gauntlet last week as it became the number one PC maker.
Apple reported record quarterly sales of 15.4 million iPads and 5.2 million Macs, giving the company over 20 million sales of dedicated personal computing devices (distinct from its sales of more than 37 million phones). Gartner reported HP’s worldwide sales for the fourth quarter to be 14.7 million, while Lenovo and Dell sold 12.9 and 11.6 million units, respectively. – Apple Insider
A few months after the iPhone’s announcement in 2007 I saw a TV commercial that convinced me that there were dollars to be made investing in this area. The commercial stated that “From Africa to Asia the next billion cell phone users will be here by 2010.” That sounded like opportunity and I began investing in mobile related stocks.
As many people did at the time, I initially invested in [continue]….
Filed Under: Market Bytes
Category Feed:
To get an emailed digest of all posts, join our free Wealth Wire News Feed
Stay connected to the pulse of Renegade Investing & Wealth Generation
Subscribe to our email wire and receive hand- picked DAILY-updated financial, investing, and economic news that is usable, unique, and timely.
Find Out More
or sign up below
Loading ...
Add Your Comment | 0 Comments