How Do You Spell "Relief"?

M-F-I
Pretty clear looking at the action these past two days that this market will not be having any "relief" rallies any time soon. I don't try to "time" markets and I am not good at seeing the macro picture. But it seems to me that until Bernanke makes it clear that the rate hikes are over we will be trading sideways to moderately down. Bernanke has been taking a lot of grief lately, seems to me to be a little unfair. I think inflation, with emerging markets bidding up the prices of raw materials, is a real possibility. And then BB is also in charge of cleaning up the mess that Greenspan (The Maestro) made where he gave approval to the massive Bush tax cuts and increased Govt spending which have created an unwieldy deficit. Enough rambling about things I don't understand.

I have decided that I am going to take a good chunk of my investments in US financial institutions and move them abroad (India, Japan & Canada). I fully expect that after the tightening is complete that the US dollar will weaken against other currencies... so I'd rather be in foreign banks (MTU, IBN, RY).

My MFI stocks wandered upwards a little bit today.

• PGI had some good news (PGI New Stock Repurchase Program for up to 7 Million Shares) .
• IVII went up for no apparent reason except that it had perhaps been oversold.
• TGIS continued to move higher and has now become my "best" stock, up 16%.
• PACR paid a dividend

On the bad side, TBL continued to fall off the table, down another 3% and 24% to date. Please gentle reader, go out and buy some shoes, boots, anything.

HW dropped further proving that you have never dropped so much that you can't drop further. Good old HeadWind is now down 35%. Please write your congressman and tell him/her to begin subsidizing this poor company again. Where are my Utah voters when I need them?

Hey, I read Jubak's article today (Jubak's Article) and I was very happy to see him agreeing with me (well technically he isn't "agreeing" with me as I doubt he reads my blog, but rather we're on the same page). In his article about ideas for pessimists he talks about buying Berkshire Hathaway as people are too pessimistic about hurricanes and rates have gone up a ton. I think I said that about AXS. Then he says to buy MTU as they have cleaned up their balance sheet. Not exactly the reason I was going to buy them, but we're in the same book, if not on the same page! Footnote to my footnote: I just saw where Cramer gave a thumbs up to IBN. Of course Cramer and Jubak liked HW...

Of my 28 stocks, a mere 7 are in the black. Counting my gains on NCOG I am now 6.3% in the hole. Hmmm, where did I put those antiacid pills? Final two words... Go Mavericks!