Monday, May 23, 2011

Israel and the Arabs

Obama told Israel to pull back to its 1967 borders, and Palestinians continue to demand their "Right of Return." And so the conflict between Jews and Arabs has continued to blaze across headlines.

Below is a brief 90-second history lesson that puts it all in perspective. I sent this research document to Ariel Cohen, a professor at the University of Jerusalem, and he verified the accuracy of the facts.

It's amazing how blind the world is to the PLO's outrageous and vicious attacks on Israel. Consider these facts...


Nationhood and Jerusalem

Israel became a nation in 1312 B.C.E., two thousand years before the rise of Islam.

Arab refugees in Israel began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the modern State of Israel.

Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 B.C.E. the Jews have had dominion over the land for one thousand years with a continuous presence in the land for the past 3,300 years. The only Arab dominion since the conquest in 635 C.E. lasted no more than 22 years.

For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital.

Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity.

Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem, they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders did not come to visit.

Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in Tanach, the Jewish Holy Scriptures but Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran.

King David founded the city of Jerusalem. Mohammed never came to Jerusalem.

Jews pray facing Jerusalem but Muslims pray with their backs toward Jerusalem.


Arab and Jewish Refugees

In 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews. Sixty-eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier. The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is estimated to be the same.

Arab refugees were intentionally not absorbed or integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own peoples' lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel, a country no larger than the state of New Jersey.


The Arab - Israeli Conflict

The Arabs are represented by eight separate nations, not including the Palestinians. There is only one Jewish nation.

The Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost. Israel defended itself each time and won.

The P.L.O.'s Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. Israel has given the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them with weapons.

Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were desecrated and the Jews were denied access to places of worship. Jewish cemeteries were defiled and the tombstones uprooted and used to build lavatories and to pave roads. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian sites have been preserved and made accessible to people of all faiths.


The U.N. Record on Israel and the Arabs

Of the 175 Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel. The U.N was silent while 58 Jerusalem Synagogues were destroyed by the Jordanians. The U.N. was silent while the Jordanians systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. The U.N. was silent while the Jordanians enforced an apartheid-like policy of preventing Jews from visiting the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

You will not hear these facts reported by the mainstream media; it contradicts their fantasy narrative.


Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Are We Going Up?
     …signs of life in the market

Nobody can call a bottom to the market with certainty, but smart analysts can sometimes recognize signs of life. I don’t present myself as “smart,” and I can’t prove there’s permanent bullish life in the market as of this moment; but many people—much smarter than myself—are acknowledging new reasons for hope. Maybe the recent multi-day rally is just a “bear market bounce,” but if it is, this bounce seems to have legs.

A few bright spots: the rise in the market is not just limited to one sector, it’s broad-based. Financials have gained relative stability. Inventories have swung to the downside which is a great setup for an upward trend. Further positives: operating margins of companies are better because they’ve been forced to be better operators. Also, housing starts for February were up 22.2%.

Admittedly, volumes in the market have recently been thin revealing that conviction among buyers is not energetic. However, negative news flashes haven’t had great effect on the market lately because negativity has pretty much been priced into stocks; conversely, even slightly positive news has given good uplift for buyers.

It’s totally possible that the true bottom is yet to be reached in the U.S. market, but there’s a sense of change within the winds of change, and that’s enough to motivate wise traders to sit on the edge of their seats looking intensely for the right opportunity to buy. Likely, it won’t just be an issue of buying on the right week or the right day, but at the right moment. Timing is critical. Here’s an example of how crucial timing is:

If you invested $1 in 1966, and reviewed the results of your investment on January 15, 2008, there are several possible outcomes, depending on your timing and where you put the money…

Scenario 1: if you put $1 into a savings account at 6.7%, it would be worth $16.58.

Scenario 2: if you put $1 into stocks without the 5 best days, it would be worth $ .11.

Scenario 3: if you put $1 into stocks without the 5 worst days, it would be worth $2,520.

So, when it comes to investing and trading, timing is a big deal!

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Market Thaw?
...Cautious Optimism

In the midst of the gloom and doom atmosphere, positive financial indicators are sneaking up onto the stage from behind the curtain. We’ve all been bruised by the economy, and so nobody really wants to get too optimistic. However, wise traders will keep their eyes and ears riveted on the shifting climate. Here’s what we’re seeing:

> Americans are driving again with gasoline demand up 3% from their lows.

> California and Florida house sales are soaring.

> In China, car sales surged 25% in February, which is the first gain in 4 months.

> The banking sector, of course, has been bludgeoned beyond recognition, vilified, spat upon, and forsaken. BUT…even in that deep, dark pit where there’s still downward pressure in the system, better earnings may be on the way. The banking system (pre-provision) earns $220 billion a year. So they could be very capable of digging themselves out from under the soil that’s buried them alive, and emerge back into profitability, even doing so without TARP money…dollars that many banks have resisted. In addition…

Deposits are rising, and that’s where loans come from. Also, there’s a positive slope in the yield curve which means that it’s cheaper to borrow in the money market in order to make loans at a higher rate. Net profits are rising, net interest rate ratios are rising. So there’s a growing cash-to-cash improvement in the banking world.

Meanwhile, stocks are screaming, “buy!” because so many great companies with super fundamentals have been beaten to a pulp, thus, they are extremely cheap.

Nobody can predict a market bottom with certainty. However, the market has always worked on cycles. And the deeper the pit that any given market has fallen into, the steeper the slope there’ll likely be to the upside when life in the market begins emerging with confidence and hope.

Get your money ready, your knuckles cracked, your pencil sharpened, and, for goodness sake, don’t stay asleep under the warm blanket of doomsday pessimism!


Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Reinstate the Uptick Rule

We desperately need the Uptick Rule reinstated to prevent sell-offs from becoming huge sell-offs. Originally, it was adopted in 1938 and provided that a stock “must either be sold short at a price above the price at which the immediately preceding sale was effected or at the last sale price if it is higher than the last different price.”

It may sound a bit confusing, but it was designed to prevent short-selling meltdowns like we’ve been having. This rule was eliminated on July 6, 2007 and ever since that very moment we’ve had wild swings in the market which have been further exacerbated by the unwinding credit market. Go Uptick Rule!

A MUSTARD SEED OF FINANCIAL HOPE
...Intel Could Lead The Tech Sector

Larry Kudlow of CNBC loves mustard seeds and this could be a significant one. News break coming at 10:10 EST / 2-10-09: Intel is investing $7 Billion in new manufacturing facilities. According to reports, they're doing it without government aid. This will certainly create thousands of new jobs, and just maybe it will ignite new confidence among investors and the tech sector. People losing value in their 401(k), Boomers who don't have enough in their retirement fund, and all of us hoping for a turn in the economy need such mustard seeds!
NEW ROMANCE/MYSTERY NOVEL From Bob Anderson
 ...The back of the book tells the story:

From the author who has won two Emmys and forty-nine national and international awards...

Shar Duvall was a sensational hit on Broadway by age eighteen. That wasn’t her only passion. She was about to win the heart of her first love. Suddenly, her storybook life was devastated by an explosive love triangle. In one horrific evening, her dreams were turned to ashes. Her only chance for recovery would hinge on a carefully guarded secret buried between the pages of an old diary... and on the undying tenacity of a new friend who refuses to believe that Shar is a murderer.

"It’s simply excellent and 
emotionally riveting. I score it a 100!"
— Jack Hayford, popular author 

"I hope many people will have the 
chance to read this powerful story of 
love being triumphant in life's darkest hour."
— Stormie Omartian, top-selling author 

Bob W. Anderson is a fifteen-plus-year veteran of the film industry. He has written and co-written nine books.  His writing and film production work has won two Emmys and forty-nine national and international awards.   BUY YOUR COPY NOW!  


Saturday, February 07, 2009

A STRATEGY FOR TRADING STOCK OPTIONS THAT ROCKS
...There are thousands of strategies possible with stock options.

This particular strategy helped me enjoy more than 800% annualized gains for a season prior to the market crashing. I assembled it from an array of sources, philosophies, and mechanisms. I'm making it public so others can benefit, and even improve on it. However, there's still a significant amount of study one needs to do beyond these summary points.

I also suggest you wait until the market heals before taking it for a test drive with real money. Without question, be sure that you've been adequately schooled in trading options, and that you've done virtual trading for at least six months successfully with fake money. Then, and only then, trade real money that you can afford to lose. Your results are not guaranteed, by any means. Invest at your own risk, but have fun as you explore this approach. Customize it to your needs and trading personality.

In general terms, I did the following...

(1) I use Vector Vest (www.vectorvest.com). I think their service is about $60 a month. It's brilliant. They scan about 11,000 stocks each day to discover an array of fundamental factors for each stock, and they rate all the fundamentals combined into one "VST" number. However, there are scores and scores of search filters to configure stock lists according to your approach.

(2) I then scan for the top VST stocks which have taken a brief 10 day bull pullback. I make a list of about 20-30 of these.

(3) I then look up each of the 20-30 stocks (on OptionsXpress.com) and see which ones have the best profit potential on spreads. I usually narrow it down to 1-3 of the top choices of a given week, and I go with a 5-6 month spread.

The reason I do the above three steps and get a longer term option is two-fold...

(a) I want more time to be right (as opposed to most folks who get 30-day options and lose often), and...

(b) that's because of the genius of Warren Buffett's mentor, Benjamin Graham. He's the father of value investing and he coined a crucial concept. He explained that in the short run, the market is like a voting machine--assessing which firms are popular and unpopular. But in the long run, the market is like a weighing machine—truly taking inventory of the substance of each company. So, what matters in the long run is a company's actual underlying business performance and solid fundamentals—not Wall Street’s fleeting fancy it feels for the fickle moment.

(4) Once I select the best of the best stock options in terms of Greeks, price, etc., I take my trusty financial calculator and project the most likely future price of the stock in 5-6 months based on it's past price trend. To get that, I average the stock's price trends over the last 2 years and over the past 6 months.

(5) Meanwhile, as a backdrop to this strategy, I immerse my mind in CNBC, especially Larry Kudlow and Fast Money. Those two TV shows together provide a priceless insight to the heartbeat of the economy, the market, sectors, industries, and trends. If you watch them every day, your neurons and dendrites will eventually vibrate at the same exact frequency of the market. Well, not exactly, but you'll have a keen sense of what's going on and you'll have great peripheral vision as a trader.

(6) To form a final conviction on a stock options trade, I'll study the Candlestick charts. For those of you not familiar with Candlestick stock charts, I'll give a brief summary.

More than 100 years ago, a very successful and wealthy Japanese rice trader named Munehisa Homma developed trading principles that we use today. His principles evolved into Japanese Candlesticks, an array of symbols that pack a wallop of information into a tiny space including: the market's emotion and psychology for the day--or other adjustable time span--regarding a stock, an indication of supply and demand for that stock, and a forecast of where that stock is likely going since Candlesticks are, themselves, somewhat of a "market moving" force.

Steve Nison brought this ancient technology to the Western world and, thus, to Wall Street in 1990. (He's got some great books on the subject.)

It's so cool when an ancient technology, like Homma's 100-year-old rice trading system, is so solid and smart that our high-tech world is illuminated by it, and then depends on it.

To some traders, stock charts may seem like reading tea leaves, but there are plenty of Mutual Fund managers who, after forming decisions based on the fundamentals, wouldn't make a move without a blessing from the stock charts. So, I believe that the best strategy for stock options takes into account both technicals and fundamentals.

With all of these steps completed, I place my trades.

As I mentioned, this entire approach was getting me about 800%+ annualized gain BEFORE the big market meltdown. Until the market heals, I'm very cautious. I'm just now beginning to sneak back in. Commodities are displaying some signs of life, and other market indicators are giving the appearance that a bottom has been reached. But hey! How many times has the market faked us out over the past year?



Have fun! Be safe!
--Bob

Sunday, April 29, 2007

We're taking a deeper dive into the world of trading stock options. In particular, Spreads. Following last year's options seminar, our focus is narrowing to the realm of Spreads because the risk factor is less (compared to conventional options) while the gain factor still remains stellar.

Trading options, in general, is a thrill ride. It's like taking a raft down tumultuous white water rapids. If you don't die, it's an absolute blast! We've made as much as 30% gain in a day, BUT...you can lose money just as fast. The secret resides within having a great system and obeying it.

Thursday, February 12, 2004

We had a great evening with Kristen and TJ! Seated at the table, we all enjoyed Sally's amazing pasta & marinated chicken wonderment along with the company of Hope and Micah, James and Lori Todd, plus Thad & Bea--all of whom were nursing and gestating their own kids right there under our noses in the dining room. It was "baby night". The topics of conversation included dilation, squatting exercises, nursing frustrations and drugs.