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April 30th, 2009UncategorizedQuantitative easing in the US has begun. The Fed Buys $7.5 Billion of Debt to Cut Borrowing Costs . The Federal Reserve bought $7.5 billion of Treasuries in the first outright purchase of U.S. government debt by the central bank to keep consumer borrowing costs low since the 1960s. It is the first step in a six-month program to buy up to $300 billion in Treasuries. -
April 29th, 2009Uncategorized
Thinking about paying your taxes online electronically with a credit card?
That might not be the best move. The two major online payment processors, Official Payments (which is not official in anyway, it’s just their sneaky brand name), and 1040.com charge electronic filers 2.49% to make federal income tax payments via credit card. That means a $500 payment could cost you an extra $12.45 just to use your credit card. That’s worse than the highest ATM fees you’ll find in a bar.
That credit card fee also means that the value of any points or miles you might be getting are wiped out too, since most credit card reward programs earn points that are redeemed at about 1%. Most cash back cards pay 1% as well, so paying a 2.49% fee to earn 1% doesn’t make much sense.
The exception to this rule is if you are in some sort of special intro period with your credit card rewards program or cash back program.
For example, if you have a new cash back credit card that pays 3% cash back on everything for the first 90 days, then you can actually come out ahead 0.51%. Not big savings, but you do get the convenience of paying electronically for free. However, if your cash back program has an annual limit and you expect to be hitting it, don’t waste your cash back eligibility on just getting a measly 1/2 percent.
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April 26th, 2009UncategorizedThese days a web business has many excellent tools in the battle to be competitive in their field. One of these powerful tools is the popular Google search engine. Google is successful, so obviously, Google can make your web business a success, as well. It is a fact that 90 million visitors each and every month can pay testament to this reality. Google.com is one of the largest search engines on the web right now. They have tools engaged to ensure this and they have tools to help you succeed too!What Google does, is they take the first few lines of text and put that into the search result when someone punches in your keyword. This is how you develop page rank and popularity. There are traffic monitors available to you when you use the Google service. This is wonderful because then you know when you need to adapt your words to locate additional traffic. When dealing with Google, it is extremely important for you to make the first paragraph of your page the largest impact statement. This is what is going to be seen on the search result by the viewer. You need to guarantee that is what they see, impact! This will motivate them to peruse your site. The more views you have to your site, the higher the traffic volume; the more volume, the higher the page ranking and popularity.A good rule of thumb is have at minimum, 8% of the words you use be keywords, with approximately 300 words being used as the impact paragraph. Because this is what is going to be seen first, you have to make it count! There are what is known as spiders that constantly view sites and record content to use as indexing, however, you never know when they will by surfing your site. It is not always the case that they will index your full site on one trip to it, so you want to ensure that you optimize your pages. They will always start from the top of the page; this is why it is important to have the most impact near the top of the site. The best method of ensuring that your entire site is crawled on by the spiders is to place your site on Google Sitemaps. Automatic updating on the site indexing is one of the excellent perks that come with the Google Sitemaps.The files saved are XML files; this is like having your very own direct link to Google, like a data cable. Generally, Adsense involves third party advertisements rotated on your web sites pages. Every time someone clicks on the site on your page and they leave yours, you get paid for the Adsense transfer. It is that simple.
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April 13th, 2009Uncategorized
In the opening scene of "Iron Man," Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark character is riding in a tank with members of the U.S. military. One guy asks if he can take his picture with Stark, who says sure and jokingly warns that he doesn't want to see the photo on the guy's MySpace page.
The movie was released 10 months ago and obviously filmed prior to May, but already MySpace has moved down the list of relevancy. Today, Stark would more likely warn the soldier not to Twitter about his Iron Man encounter. -
April 12th, 2009Uncategorized
Seeking to find cash wherever they can in this tough economic climate, 34 percent of companies have reduced or eliminated their matching funds to employee 401(k)s, and 29 percent plan to do so in the next 12 months, according to a survey by the Spectrem Group. The Spectrem Group surveyed a cross section of 150 U.S. companies to determine this trend. The survey has an margin of error of eight percentage points.Employers are not the only ones saving cash by cutting back contributions. Spectrem found that 20 percent of employees have decreased the amount they are saving, with another five percent likely to do so in the next 12 months. The survey of employees sampled 400 retirement plan participants and has a margin of error of 4.9 percentage points.
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April 11th, 2009Uncategorized
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who has struggled to win over Wall Street, is having an equally difficult time making new "friends" on Facebook.
Geither's page, which a Treasury spokesman could not immediately confirm was legitimate, lists 718 fans. That's less than the 1,228 people who have told the hugely popular Web site that they like Jell-o, the 5,674 people who back Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, the 22,426 fans of Budweiser and the 28,739 fans of Howard Stern sidekick Artie Lange.
Nonetheless, there are Geithner groupies. -
April 10th, 2009UncategorizedAnother wild ride yesterday on the stock market roller coaster. US indices closed higher, though that was only thanks to a last hour rally that took the S&P from a 1.8% loss on the day to a 0.96% gain by the closing bell. Equities started the session weaker because of a disappointing Treasury auction. But then the big gain came from Bank of America (though with its ratings downgraded by Moody's) after its CEO gave an interview to the LA Times in which he said he wanted to start repaying the government's $45bn of assistance in April. Although Goldman has already indicated it wants to get back on its own two feet already, this is the first of the banks that took significant funds from the Treasury to make that claim.
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April 9th, 2009UncategorizedDr. Raju M. Mathew writes: Following the American lead, lunched by President Barrack Obama, almost all governments, including China, India, Kuwait, the UAE and several other countries have either introduced or are on the process of introducing economic or financial stimulus packages to make an early recovery from the global economic crisis, that they prefer to call ‘Recession’. But they are forced to admit that it is more severe than the Great Depression of 1929. Then, of course, it must be the Great Depression II of 2009, lasting several years to recover. A series of global summits to deal with the crisis are under way.
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April 8th, 2009Uncategorized
Jansen knows what he's doing. He wants -- needs -- to make some money, and reckons he can find 300 people each paying him $25 a month (that's $90,000 a year) in order for him to be able to continue blogging. If he can find 1,000 subscribers, that works out to a very healthy $300k income.
This is the newsletter business model, just a little faster, with lots of intraday updates. It's fed largely by Jansen's own contacts: he has a Rolodex full of bond traders and analysts who are happy to give him the prices and market-insider information that he needs -- and he has the bond-trading experience to be able to understand what it all means.
Jansen's blog has been free until now, going out not only to traders and money managers but to the blogosphere more generally; many of us have been hugely grateful for that. But gratitude doesn't pay any bills, and so Jansen has decided to concentrate very much on the tiny minority of his readers who actually monetize his blog by using it as a trading and investment tool. "I'm giving up the influence and the recognition," he tells me; "It's been fun. I'm rolling the dice."
Even if Jansen gives free subscriptions to key influencers like Krugman and Brad Setser, that wouldn't really help him much, because there's no point in them linking to something that no one else can see. He's removing himself from the conversation -- although there will still be some free posts every day.
Jansen has been blogging for about a year now, and that has given him enough momentum and readership to be able to consider this move. He has no assurance of success, of course, but if he sweetens the subscription deal by telling his subscribers that they're free to call him with questions and requests, he might well be able to tap the middle market of investors who are too small to get lots of sell-side fixed-income research or their own data terminals, yet who can easily afford $300 a year for good information.
It's sad that Jansen is leaving the blogosphere to become a private information provider. But I did tell him that we won't hold it against him if he ever decides to come back.
Meanwhile, I'm going to be moving over to Reuters on April 1, and they have an astonishing wealth of bond-market information at their fingertips. It'll probably be a good idea for me to put prices and spreads in my blog entries which most other bloggers don't have access to -- and in general, as ever, I will continue to take requests. So if there's information you particularly want, do let me know.
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April 7th, 2009Uncategorized
Yesterday, investors got a taste of what a powerful one-day rally looks like. With major indexes up 7%, we hit more than a few historical highs. It was the fifth biggest one-day rally in the Dow, biggest rally in five months, and it capped the best 10-day streak since 1938…
It was big. But why the long faces? Because the market is down… Many are asking why the market is pulling back today.
Profit taking is a natural part of big up days like we saw yesterday. In normal markets, you will see a slight pullback as traders pull some of their gains off the table. This up down cycle happens over and over again during a bull market climb.
It’s the reason why people refer to the market as a roller coaster, and why for ever thrill of victory, there is some agony – and repeat. We’ve seen this before, and we’ll see it again.
But today’s “defeat” doesn’t mean we’re done with our bull market.
As we discussed a week ago, the S&P 500’s (.INX) bull market point is 811.81. Once passed, we are in a bull market until the index plummets more than 20% – from the high. So even if we pull below that mark today, we’ll still be on our way up.
Which means that if you’ve been on the fence about getting back in, you’ll have only a few other opportunities to do so before it’s too late.
