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Trump was largely expected to remove government minders from business activity in conjunction with a massive reduction in corporate tax rate. This principally caused the market to become significantly overheated. As any investor with even moderate experience can tell you, a rapid rise is surely followed by a rapid descent otherwise known as "going parabolic". We experienced a taste of the descent already with a reversal in prices down to November levels. Currently institutional investors are busy selling back shares to corporations in one of the largest buybacks ever seen due to the misguided corporate tax rate cuts (did you folks really think it'd trickle down?). When the buybacks dry up I strongly suspect we'll see a much deeper correction in share prices. Strangely a certain group of people will still be singing his praise all while calling for Hillary's impeachment.

I've got your random wild fluctuations right here. That chart shows the value of the US dollar measured against a "basket" of other currencies. As you can see, the dollars in your wallet fluctuate every day, sometimes wildly, even though you can't see it.

The ratio of CEO compensation to average worker compensation is now approximately 10 times its value in 1950. This is approximately commensurate with the average increase in the Dow average adjusted for inflation.

Right; and one should hardly be surprised by this since our government continually passes more and more regulations that generally only benefits big businesses. The barrier to entry for a small or medium-sized firm to get on a public stock exchange is enormous. When competition is limited, one should not be surprised when the market can no longer efficiently remove wasteful players. Paying prices vastly more than necessary to secure a proper executive is, of course, very wasteful. But this is not a fundamental issue with CEO pay, this is an issue with regulation that keeps smaller firms out.

But why should CEOs receive the entire benefit of a growing economy when all actors have contributed to that growth? CEO compensation has no correlation with company performance.

As I see it, the problem has nothing to do with a free vs. a coerced market. The problem is that the market of executive compensation is entirely divorced from the market at large. "Stockholders... vote... for whatever the management recommends no matter how poor the management’s record of accomplishment may be". This is what I mean by oligarchy: a few privileged elites have control over this smaller market without the essential feedback cycles that stabilize prices in the larger economy.

Yes, and this smaller market is much easier to manipulate when it remains artificially small due to artificial barriers to entry. That said, your definition of oligarchy is quite arbitrary; even if you could absolutely measure the power the "privileged elites" have over a smaller market, at what ratio of power to size does it constitute an oligarchy? I do agree with your sentiment, and I think my paragraph above speaks to it.

The issue is that the market value of labor has plummeted in relation to productivity and in relation to the value of top earners. In the 50s one could work part time at a minimum wage job and pay rent and college tuition and walk away with a degree free and clear. Today, just to pay rent, one needs roommates or more than one part-time minimum-wage job, let alone any ability to pay for education in order to get a better job.

1950: $0.75/hour * 20 hours * 50 weeks = $750 wages $42 * 12 months = $504 rent $35 * 4 quarters = $140 tuition

2013: $7.25/hour * 20 hours * 50 weeks = $7250 wages $602 * 12 months = $7224 rent $3917 * 2 semesters = $7834 tuition

How do you measure productivity? GDP is a pretty useless measurement. Also, there is this silly notion that public sector consumption should actually be counted as production. Since there is no objective way to measure public sector "productivity" (since it is not part of a market), it should not be included in aggregates; also it is quite common for the public sector to be horribly inefficient with its "funds". Government makes up

The ratio of CEO compensation to average worker compensation is now approximately 10 times its value in 1950. This is approximately commensurate with the average increase in the Dow average adjusted for inflation.

But why should CEOs receive the entire benefit of a growing economy when all actors have contributed to that growth? CEO compensation has no correlation with company performance.

As I see it, the problem has nothing to do with a free vs. a coerced market. The problem is that the market of executive compensation is entirely divorced from the market at large. "Stockholders... vote... for whatever the management recommends no matter how poor the management’s record of accomplishment may be". This is what I mean by oligarchy: a few privileged elites have control over this smaller market without the essential feedback cycles that stabilize prices in the larger economy.

The issue is that the market value of labor has plummeted in relation to productivity and in relation to the value of top earners. In the 50s one could work part time at a minimum wage job and pay rent and college tuition and walk away with a degree free and clear. Today, just to pay rent, one needs roommates or more than one part-time minimum-wage job, let alone any ability to pay for education in order to get a better job.

1950:
$0.75/hour * 20 hours * 50 weeks = $750 wages
$42 * 12 months = $504 rent
$35 * 4 quarters = $140 tuition

2013:
$7.25/hour * 20 hours * 50 weeks = $7250 wages
$602 * 12 months = $7224 rent
$3917 * 2 semesters = $7834 tuition

I believe that raising the average wage will have a better impact on the economy as a whole than raising executive compensation. I believe that income inequality is a social ill that should be addressed through policy -- not by Marxian state capture of the means of production and not through Randian private hoarding of the means of production, but through a hybrid realistic approach like "all employees should receive stock options or profit sharing if executives do".

Might wanna check your graph, you are reading it wrong http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=AAPL&p=W&b=5&g=0&id=p11011415654

I'm pretty sure (s)he does know what it means:

http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=AAPL

The wages dropping has nothing to do with people coming to America to work, and everything with moving jobs out of America to countries with much cheaper labor.

The wages dropping has nothing to do with people coming to America to work, and everything with businesses not increasing wages.

Over the last 40 years, the average inflation-adjusted wage has barely increased.*
The current $7.25/hour minimum wage is actually less than the average wage of 40 years ago.
And yet, in that same period of time, the Dow Jones avg went from ~735 to ~13,500**
(actually, it peaked at 14,100 in late 2007. Then crashed to 6,500 in 2009 and recovered extremely rapidly)

TLDNR: Massive amounts of wealth have been generated and almost none of it has trickled down to the working class.

*Be careful which graphs you look at, not all of them are created equal.
**You can look up the S&P 500 if you prefer, they're the other market index that's existed before the 60s

It's not liquidity if you can't trade with it.

Though I assume that if you threw in an order of a billion (oh well..) shares at 100 dollar higher than the current price of Apple maybe you'd get some from them.

It just take a simple look at the volume charts to see that the volume of the markets are falling and have been for a long time:
http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=$SPX

Change to weekly.

Over here in Sweden we've got multiple exchanges and then I suppose one should get the numbers for all of them.

The reason they aren't banned is likely because it's not illegal :), or hard to prove what the intention was.

And you can be rather anonymous by trading through an insurrance.

Make it so an order can't be cancelled within the first hour and watch the change.

Also when these algoritms screw up they managed to get the trades cancelled. When a regular person is fooled by them and screw up.. Well. Good luck! (They are likely cancelled due to the effect they had at price and trades in general rather than compensation but it's still a safety network and protect the losses of the big players but the smaller ones just got to accept the fact.)

I didn't just say corporations. I listed a number of culprits. Corporations, lawyers, lazy cops...I've got a list.

As to your question though - nobody likes doing business in dangerous surroundings. It's bad for business. That's why we have to have these draconian anti-terrorist measures that trample our rights.

Here, check this out.

Notice the dip down to 7200 right after 9/11? That's why big business wants the government to trample your rights. Spending is based on consumer confidence. That's where the money comes from. When confidence is low, people don't spend and the stocks tank. Business benefits if the government can prevent another 9/11. That means Carnivore, warrantless wiretaps, GPS tracking people who are Arabic. You know, crap like this.

Well, taxes on the wealthy are at pre-Depression era lows

Well, the wealthy already pay most of the taxes in the US. How much do the rich pay? The top 1% paid 28% of all federal taxes and the top 10% paid 55%. Here's a webpage with links to IRS spreadsheet tables "by Tax Rate and Income Percentile".

Social Security (which does not add a single penny to the deficit) and Medicare are on the chopping block

Two things about this, one is what is true today will not be true in the future. Today there are something like 3.3 people working and paying into Social Security (SS) for every person collecting SS. In 1950 the ratio was 16 | 1 By 2025 it will be 2 |1. If you take the last Baby boomers as being born in 1964, they will retire in 2029 if the retirement age is not raised. The second issue is that if the money workers had paid into SS had been invested in the financial markets, yes Wall Street as well as other places, those workers would have come out ahead. Looking at the historical data for the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1900 only once has there been a 10 year period in which the average low lower at the end, during the Great Depression. Social Security was created as a consequence, as a safety net. People were still expected to invest while they worked. And with Medicare, I'd rather the government give people money to buy the health insurance they want in a free market than how it is now.

rather than say even one damn dollar of the out-of-control defense budget. If you wanted to talk about "runaway" programs, that is.

I have advocated cutting defense spending too. There isn't a place where the feds spend I have not advocated spending cuts. Hell I've advocate abolishing entire agencies, bureaus, and departments. Not only have I advocated getting rid of the office of the Drug czar, Drug Enforcement Administration or DEA, and others I have advocated legalizing and taxing marijuana and other illegal drugs.

And no, I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh. I used to, I got a kick out of the lies and distortions he told. I don't support any of the Tea parties either, they don't want to be told what to do but they sure want to tell others what they can and can not do.

Falcon

Worth noticing is that it they had also gained around:
75.5 / 63 = 1.1984127
(if I remember correctly.)

19.84% from the bottom at the Q4 report with Q1 forecast until two days before the strategy day on NASDAQ (ended at 74+ SEK here.)

Since the value raised up from the dip before NASDAQ opened this wasn't much noticed on NASDAQ charts.

NASDAQ:
http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=NOK

OMX Stockholm Xterna listan:
http://tinyurl.com/5rvlt43

At the strategy day price fell straight to 63 sek again, recovered somewhat but then broken through it.

Open around 69.5, dip 63, peak 71.1, close 68.2 or where about on report day.

Peak 74.8 or so two days before.

Open around 66.8, dip 60.5, close 61.3 or where about on strategy day.

So most likely lots of speculation and hope for the strategy day. If the stock had traded for what? 64-65 sek and then had fallen to 62-63 before the strategy day the fall would probably not had been as big.. or hard.

~ 18% speculation, ~ 21.5% fall. No free lunch.

Or well. Unless you reacted and in the right direction that is :)

Rates just increased today in Stockholm so the USD will most likely keep on falling against the SEK now. Which obviously will make things look even worse here, again.

USD was 8.1 SEK early summer or so, it's most likely below 6.5 SEK now.

Yes, there are a number of reasons why this could reasonably be the case, particularly though we've had a couple of years of slow economic activity which has certainly had an effect on corporate upgrade cycles

The economy has had less of an effect on some computer companies than others. In fact, some computer companies with the ticker AAPL have enjoyed massive GROWTH, despite the economy, which others, with the ticker MSFT have had to write off entire products, to the tune of hundreds of millions after just six weeks on the market.

Guess that's why Monkey-Boy got a pay cut, eh?

The "scam" here is the massive one where America thought the purpose of the market was to provide retirement savings- Thus people dumped all their money into the market in hopes of having big retirement payouts...

Anyone who "dumped all their money" into the market for retirement purposes is a complete moron. Just like anyone paying attention to the snake-oil adds for gold that have plagued TV recently. I've been a market investor since '82, and been through several rough times. Take a look at the long term charts below, and you'll notice that the major downturns were from the internet bubble, and the latest housing bubble/recession.

Conventional wisdom for investors has always been that at younger ages (where you can handle more short term risk), you invest heavily in securities, and as you get nearer to retirement, you shift toward less risky (although generally lower rate of return) investments. The same is true if you are expecting to need liquidity for high dollar items (a home, tuition, retirement, etc.).

http://stockcharts.com/charts/historical/djia1900.html
http://stockcharts.com/charts/historical/spx1960.html

The "scam" here is the massive one where America thought the purpose of the market was to provide retirement savings- Thus people dumped all their money into the market in hopes of having big retirement payouts...

Anyone who "dumped all their money" into the market for retirement purposes is a complete moron. Just like anyone paying attention to the snake-oil adds for gold that have plagued TV recently. I've been a market investor since '82, and been through several rough times. Take a look at the long term charts below, and you'll notice that the major downturns were from the internet bubble, and the latest housing bubble/recession.

Conventional wisdom for investors has always been that at younger ages (where you can handle more short term risk), you invest heavily in securities, and as you get nearer to retirement, you shift toward less risky (although generally lower rate of return) investments. The same is true if you are expecting to need liquidity for high dollar items (a home, tuition, retirement, etc.).

http://stockcharts.com/charts/historical/djia1900.html
http://stockcharts.com/charts/historical/spx1960.html

Even since Reagen the real wage of the middle and lower classes has actually *decreased*,

Citation needed

It was *because* of the labor unions' strength pre-1980 that increases in wealth in the US were equivalently distributed across all income groups.

It is unfortunate that people forget that the US economy stagnated during the leftist craze in the 60s and 70s and took off again with the deregulation of the Reagan years: http://www.stockcharts.com/charts/historical/images2/DJIA1900.gif

Profit Margins, Revenues, Market Capitalization, Earnings, P/E Ratios, Earnings per Share, Revenues Per Share, Cash Flow, and most other measure of the "success" of a company are all significantly higher for Oracle (ORCL) than they are for Red Hat (RHT).

Unless you are a shareholder.

Try zooming out to something longer than 200 days. Over the last ten years (over two bubbles) Oracle is up 150%, and Red Hat is up 5%. There are other times (like the 200 days in your 'base' link) that Red Hat is ahead.

Generally speaking, I'd go with Oracle--at least while Ellison is around. He's taken the company from from a $4000 seed in ~1974 to $130B market cap. He's proven he can run things over a period of decades. If you're investing, and not speculating (to use the Graham & Dodd phrases), you're better off with ORCL (and no, I don't own any).

Unless you are a shareholder.

No, then it's still irrelevant. What's relevant if you're a stockholder is its share price relative to what it was offered or purchased at. Stock ABCD, initially offered/purchased at $10 and trading at $15, is doing better than stock DEFG, purchased at $20 and trading at $16. Absolute price is meaningless. A billion-dollar company can have ten shares outstanding (well, that might be ridiculous, but it's hypothetical) at $100M each, and another billion-dollar company can have ten million shares outstanding at $100 each.

Profit Margins, Revenues, Market Capitalization, Earnings, P/E Ratios, Earnings per Share, Revenues Per Share, Cash Flow, and most other measure of the "success" of a company are all significantly higher for Oracle (ORCL) than they are for Red Hat (RHT).

Unless you are a shareholder.

As is common, the government (i.e., FBI) is behind the curve.

Copper price chart at http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=%24copper

get "cvs" stock data from a site (like yahoo.com), download that to a file (.txt typically) and then open or import into OO Calc. You'll probably be asked by OOCalc to parse the columns where it already selects "," comma as parsing tool.

Harder though is to use a browser bookmark that grabs the stocks data you want from Yahoo (like just the end of day) for a "dozen" stocks at once that prompts for save to cvs file, then launch Calc and have a macro that pulls in the download file data and pastes it all as a new line. Then I had charts set up to track trends. Been a while since I did this (and it had to be done every day). I just installed grism and it does raw data reviews for stocks, pulling in fresh data so might be a solution (however I saw no technical indicators, may need more testing/review on my part to find it). For the most part I just use StockCharts.com for rough technical analysis.Example:

http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?c=goog,uu%5Bh,a%5Ddaclyyay%5Bdd%5D%5Bpb50!h.02,.20%5D%5Bvc60%5D%5Biuf!ua12,26,9%5D

just bookmark the above line in your browser and change the company in the bookmark line and re-bookmark for each security you want to save for daily review (if you use default site you don't get the flexibility of this line option). For most "what's this stock and what has it been doing" type of questions I use the "google" bookmark above and then enter in the new stock id and press enter.

http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=AAPL&p=D&b=5&g=0& id=p81573909572

It's just popping up through resistance at 72, where it was before the market tanked in May.
Enough to make someone betting against it nervous, and a nice time for convenient bad press.

Not that they should. Nothing is known about the direction the stock will take post-IPO. It could easily drop 25-50% in the first few days. The market for technical issues is negative right now.

There are different approaches to timing entry into a stock. Technical analysis assumes that all information about a stock is factored into the price. Indicators based on prior price history are used to determine trend. Proponents of the method say the price movement is a manifestation of crowd behavior.

Fundamental analysts study the companies financials, such as trends in earnings, price to sales ratio, profit margin, return on equity, etc.

Another approach is to find companies that are likely to profit from long term major trends in technology and/or society.

As for the Google IPO, there is no stock history on which to base a technical analysis. One might argue whether the fundamentals make the investment worthwhile, and the third approach takes a very long term view, so there is no good reason to jump on board immediately.

Lastly, if you are considering buying this IPO in speculation of it going up significantly in the next few days, have the mental fortitude to set a stop loss below your entry point and get the hell out if it drops to that point, or you stand to lose a lot of money, fast. This is no market for amateurs.

Now's certainly the time. Take a look at SCOX recent history.

If you know how to read stock trends, you can see this one is headed for the tank unless something very unforseen happens.

I mean, here we are in the second leg of the double dip recession

The economy grew at 4% last quarter. You do realize the '01 recesion was the shortest in 20 years right?

we've got at least 10 years of ever escalating budget deficits ahead

So? The absolute size of the defecit isn't important, it's the size of the defecit relative to the size of the economy. The current estimates are much smaller than the defecits of the past. Look at the bond market, ie the market where this debt will be traded. The yeild curve has hardly budged.

the main reasons that the unemployment rates are lower now are that a) a large number of people have given up, which takes them off the list

And you know this how? And how do you know that this is different than in the past?

a larger number of people are employed at lower paying service jobs that require both spouses to be fully employed to make a percentage of the money that one alone used to make

Wrong median income has been consistently rising.

Oh, and the ruling Party is planning on giving the richest 1% of the population more money

Actually they are letting them keep more of their own money.

Did I mention the upcoming war, which will further deplete the economy

Deplete it of what? And what will be the benefit of a larger supply of oil?

Look I'm sorry if your career dot bombed, being poor sucks, I know, but try to keep some perspective.

People focus way too much on returns in the short term. My IRA cash value took a nose dive, so what? I don't plan on retiring for another 30 years. I'm betting I'll gain all these short-term losses back, plus much more. You have to look at long-range returns, not just a few years.

Here's a chart that shows the Dow Jones Industrial average since 1900. Note that the scale is logarithmic. There are a lot of short-term (under ten years) losses, but look at the long term.

If you had a large amount invested and were planning on retiring right now, you'd be in trouble. However, as you near retirement you should begin shifting money from stocks into low-interest low-risk investments to protect yourself from that very thing.

We just went through this at my company, StockCharts.com, with an established internet venture fund.

Their base valuation was based on the number of page views per month, X 20 to 50 cents.

Then they applied a multiplier from 2x to 10x, based on their view of our future marketability. A concrete list of subscribers or members was a big plus, in their eyes.

But you can see there's a lot of room for play here.

Anita of Anita's BOD and Anita's LOL

Or I should say I don't yet. I have been looking for a 'one stop shopping' alternative myself and haven't seen much. It looks like one is best off to pick the best alternative for each area of financial services (bank, brokerage, etc.)

If you need to get education about the stock market along with free stock tracking and some cool Java interactive charting (which costs money anywhere else) you should check out the site my girlfriend works for: www.stockcharts.com. Build up the hits there so she can get rich and take me on a trip!

Jack William Bell