Invest Skeptically

Jonathan Chevreau writes about Dennis Gartman’s presentation at the Toronto Financial Forum on his blog. He reports how the “veteran trader and newsletter publisher” urged investors to “buy what’s already going up, and to sell investments that are going down”.
“[Gartman] also suggested that even top traders like himself will be wrong 60 to 80% [...]

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FT Alphaville presented some scary charts showing that even older vintage (2004/2005) subprime RMBS have experienced noteworthy foreclosures and delinquencies. A commenter on naked capitalism (who covered the FT Alphaville piece) points out that the high loss severity ratio of 35% stated in the article (and attributed to CreditSights) is influenced by the [...]

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Barry Critchley at the National Post reported yesterday, in Who is Sun Life’s seller?, of Sun Life Financial’s strange plan to repurchase shares from “an arm’s-length third-party seller” between December 12, 2007 and December 31,
2007. Critchley quotes one market participant as saying, “here is a clear preference being afforded to the vendor, which [...]

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Some mixed reporting on the China product safety file in yesterday’s New York Times.

China Resisting Pressure on Product Safety
“The ’strategic economic dialogue’ begun by Mr. Paulson was meant to obtain greater access to the Chinese market for American goods, services and investments, as well as steps by China to allow its currency to appreciate in [...]

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Last weekend (Nov. 17, 2007) the Globe and Mail published a good summary of the Canadian ABCP story called, The ABCP black box explodes, by Boyd Erman, Jacquie McNish, Tara Perkins and Heather Scoffield.
The reporters correctly point out that the main “trigger” behind the Canadian ABCP conduit crisis was that “investors were beginning to panic [...]

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