Recent content by drsteph

Baby bonds = Exchange traded debt. A notch above preferreds on the debt recovery ranking scale. Sometimes illiquid and very thinly traded. Think of them as preferreds. They do fine, until something happens. Then the bottom drops out of them. And they are callable. That sucks when you...

Yeah, I miss the old ET. That's why I hardly post/visit anymore. Once upon a time there were some real gorillas here... I think they still come around for entertainment /nostalgia value but if they are still here its hard to say due to the lack of discourse. I think it is more of...

Posted in this forum since CEF's and ETF's are kissing cousins. Along with bonds being generally bid, there has been a corresponding run up in the levered national municipal bond CEF’s (closed end funds). Specifically, while national muni CEF’s used to trade with discounts in the low...

Opinions on the stability of this one vs. the other spanish banks? Bankia and the Cajas are one thing - Santander is another. Opinion?

This might be useful: Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off My Parents by Zac Bissonnette...

I was having a similar problem running DDE off TOS into Excel on Win 7 x64 with firefox as my principal browser. I ultimately got the DDE linkage running into excel by fiddling around with the system properties on excel and letting it run as an administrator and trying the compatibility modes...

I don't know Michael, and won't comment on the merits of his business venture. But my wife is a huge TV fan of "The Batchelor" , and something rang a bell... It just turns out that Michael's ex girlfriend was just on the last season of ABC's "The Batchelor". Her name was Casey S. A...

The old XP box with a core 2 duo T8100 (passmark 1362) is getting a little long in the tooth so I was thinking about upgrading. Found this used from a computer reseller: Dell T3500 Xeon W3550 Quad Core 3.0ghz (passmark score 5648) Two 500GB SATA 7200 drives 256MB ATI FireMV 2660 6GB...

Ha. You were lucky to even have the cold stench of death to succor you. On her majesty's service, we had been selected to grass-skate down the mount to impress the locals and bring them into the service of the crown. We also were to bribe them with candy cigarettes. Unfortunately, her...

Point taken, and I did try to pick a bottom today with that in mind. I just didn't expect the 'cliff'. Fortunately tight stops work well in either situation. Maximum pain hypothesis indeed for most I suspect.

Additional Quant Easing will be instituted the minute the economy seems to go into recession again and there are further sell off in asset prices. The devaluation will be in real, not nominal terms. You'll get that 6000 target but via the spoos priced in gold, not USD.

Don't you guys think that this is all Ex-US equity managers selling to square up equity and avoid currency risk? Its what I would be doing if I was in their position. You can manage the currency risk, but less so the counterparty risk so perhaps better to take it off the table for now...

Think that's thin, try palladium! It would be nice to do something along those lines with options, but you'd get eaten alive on entry/exit.