Thomas J. Gordon

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    • SEC's Meagan Chung Pleads Innocent
      This seems easy to catch, if you have the Markopolos lead. You say, "I don't need to know how you do what you do, just show me (with the phone numbers so I can call and verify you have the assets you say you do) that you have the 30/40/50 billion net assets that your customer statements say you do. Or send in big 5 and say prove to them you have 50 billion. Seems really elementary when someone's saying it's a ponzi scheme, ?do you have the assets".
      I think Markopolos should get the SEC whistle blower award. He did his part in a very timely manner.
      Those who advocate greater regulation have to show that they can build the gov't organization that can execute the enforcement. Here they had the lead and they couldn't even find the fraud. We had all kinds of regulation and it didn't save Madoff investors or fannie mae and freddie mac.
      Jan 07 15:48 pm |Rating: +1 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Returning to a Gold Standard Is a Bad Idea
      The Author is well aware that excess gov't spending is "monetized" by the Federal Reserve. One can ask for a limit to gov't spending without being labelled a "hard money" advocate. The Author seems uniquely well qualified to make some suggestions in this regard. I think the Author is also saying the profligate gov't spending is leading to the decline of the U.S..
      Dec 30 16:20 pm |Rating: +1 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Portfolio Preservation in a Down Market
      I wanted to add one quick comment for anyone using this as a reference article. I have learned something since I wrote this article concerning the "Ultra" short funds I mentioned. I know that Proshares and possibly Rydex 2* suffer from "Index Fatigue". The ultra short funds are not using real shorts. They are using swaps and possibly puts to short. These contracts expire. That means they don't have a clean, consistent double inverse of the index for as long as you hold them. They suffer from "Index fatigue", in other word they may perform your short for 6 months to a year (some people are saying the timing is shorter than that) but eventually, even if you are right with direction they will only be short from where the index is currently, not from where you bought in to the ultra in the first place. In case this is hard to understand, I'm going to give you a concrete example. srs a year and a a half ago was 75. Even though the index it was based on has dropped by half in the year and a half, srs was selling in the 60's last week. srs is "fatigued" and is only working from where the index is right now.
      Dec 21 19:40 pm |Rating: +1 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Ultrashort Real Estate Drop Demonstrates Unlimited Faith in a Recovery
      I don't buy the tax explanation. I've seen mutual funds do big capital gains distributions. They make the distribution and the share price drops accordingly. I just checked my holding of srs and there has been no distribution from proshares in either cash or shares in the last month. The seeking alpha article says the double inverse funds have to pick their time period to attempt their investment goal, daily, weekly, monthly. If they pick one time period, you aren't going to get your investment goal for different time periods. That makes some sense. I hope Proshares told people what their time period goal was somewhere.
      Dec 19 13:09 pm |Rating: +1 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Ultrashort Real Estate Drop Demonstrates Unlimited Faith in a Recovery
      the other thing I'm saying about srs is that the index that srs is shorting is about 15% higher than when srs was selling above 200. Something very extreme is going on here. I'm guessing it's investor psychology, not anything Proshares is doing.
      Dec 18 21:53 pm |Rating: 0 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Ultrashort Real Estate Drop Demonstrates Unlimited Faith in a Recovery
      toomuch... I asked on the yahoo finance board once what srs uses to beneift if reits go down. The person said "swaps", not puts, not shorts but swaps. So srs is probably not paying shorted dividends. I'm not sure how a swap would let you short something but that's what the person said. The person also claimed it is explained on the proshares web site.
      Dec 18 19:06 pm |Rating: 0 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • The Madoff Affair: Were His Sons Actually Responsible?
      robinjoe: the sec had this one handed to them on a silver platter and they missed it. Markopolos was begging them take the case. How hard can it be? You go in and say "I don't need to know how you do what you do but I want you to prove to me or an independent auditor that you have 50 bill of net assets". That would have unmasked him right there. And today Obama said the Madoff case proves we need more regulation. I don't think Obama can change the dna of a gov't employee and unless he can he can turn us into the soviet union and all it will get us is .... the soviet union.
      Dec 18 16:50 pm |Rating: +1 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Ultrashort Real Estate Drop Demonstrates Unlimited Faith in a Recovery
      Is Cool Beans saying that SRS closes out it's positiions every day?
      Dec 18 14:30 pm |Rating: 0 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Salesforce.com Unlikely to Sustain Its Current High Multiple
      Zach, two things. 1) They have a decent technical relationship with google and any time an announcement is made people think goog is going to buy crm above the current price. 2) also I think a lot of people are short this stock relative to the float. When the price goes up a bunch of shorts get out quickly. You don't have any patient shorts here.
      Dec 17 21:41 pm |Rating: +1 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Ultrashort Real Estate Drop Demonstrates Unlimited Faith in a Recovery
      do people think there is "market psychology" pricing in srs? When it was above 200 that was just because everyone one thought for a while that no reit in the country was going to be able to refinance their loans? The market is buyers and sellers and the buyers of srs when it was over 200 were not reacting to the fundamentals of what proshares was doing for srs?
      Dec 17 21:21 pm |Rating: +1 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Ultrashort Real Estate Drop Demonstrates Unlimited Faith in a Recovery
      Good article. I have owned this for a long time too. There is something funny about srs. I bought it a long time ago. It's underlying reits are half or less from when I bought srs. but srs is below where I bought it. srs is buying its swaps or whatever and they are expiring and when they expire, you start over again. You do not get continuous performance from when you buy vs. the index you are trying to short. I'm not mad. srs did very well for a while and did what they said they would. I may write an article on this. Do a yahoo finance compare on srs vs. spg and you'll see what I'm talking about. But people investing in these ultra short vehicles have to understand these limitations. On one board this was stated as what srs was shorting against:

      Top 10 Index Companies1 Weight
      Simon Property Group Inc. 7.37%
      ProLogis 5.23%
      Vornado Realty Trust 4.65%
      Boston Properties Inc. 3.94%
      Public Storage Inc. 3.81%
      Equity Residential 3.81%
      General Growth Properties Inc. 3.23%
      Annaly Capital Management Inc. 3.06%
      Kimco Realty Corp. 2.78%
      HCP Inc. 2.74%
      Dec 17 20:13 pm |Rating: +2 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Bernie Madoff Comes Out of the Closet
      does anyone know how Madoff lost 50 billion when he only had 17 bill under management? Did he owe a bunch of banks/investment banks a lot of money?
      Dec 15 16:49 pm |Rating: 0 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Fiat Money and a Profligate Congress: A Bad Combination
      this is the author (pretty soon seeking alpha is going to make it so I don't have to say this)

      B. Goode: I made the comments about the algorthm because I'm pretty sure Milton Friedman once said the fed could be replaced by a computer. Obviously I meant an algorthm and the will to stick with the algorthm. FOMC sets their growth rate, the Fed buy Treasuries from banks (increasing the money supply) or sells Treasuries to banks (decreasing the money supply). And you have to take into account the "Reserve" currency aspects of the global market that Lehrman and Meuller were talking about. I'll write the code if someone gives me the formula. If you had the will to stick with the algorthm then Treasury borrowing would be "genuine" and would put constraints on Congress.

      nova: interesting comments. The fed chairman has the bad end of the bargain when the president/congress overspends. One can see politically why they don't complain openly, but you seem to know of some cases where the fed chairman did push back.

      general: Many people on this board felt I was naive for suggesting a balanced budget law. When our side gets it's next Reagan I would argue that a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution should be their primary strategic objective. If they accomplish this they help their own time and all future times. I don't mind if Obama wants to subsidize GM's corporate jets and highly paid workers for the next five years, or give everyone who currently doesn't have health insurance the same health insurance gov't workers have, if he's willing to give up something else to get it. The current budget environment in Washington seems to say that there's no limit, and that's scary. The federal budget was already in a deficit before all these bailout's and yet almost no one in Washington is saying "we can't afford this". On the other hand people don't really seem to vote for people if they promise to balance the budget, and that's a big part of the problem too.
      Dec 15 15:56 pm |Rating: 0 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Calculating Country Risk Observed by Betas
      this is an interesting article and the author clearly has training in formal financial theory. I question her "country correlations" though. I find all world markets for the last year or more to be highly correlated (I would guess .9 or greater). If I believed this chart, I would invest in czech republic and I wouldn't get creamed when the u.s. markets go down. But for the last year all I see is everything moving together and no where to hide. I'm not offering any computed data to prove this, but this is what I observe.
      Dec 12 18:14 pm |Rating: 0 0 |Link to Comment |View article
    • Fiat Money and a Profligate Congress: A Bad Combination
      user318271, Seeking Alpha does a nice job of setting up links. In the 2nd paragraph the word "article" is blue and if you click on it, you will be taken to the article. If that's hard to see on your browser for some reason the url is: www2.nationalreview.co...
      Dec 12 11:51 am |Rating: 0 -1 |Link to Comment |View article

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