LPS Poised to Profit As Housing Market Continues to Worsen (Transcript)

(This is an excerpt from an article I published on Seeking Alpha. Click here to read the entire piece. Full article includes extensive notes from LPS’s last earnings conference call.) For two weeks, I have tried to post my notes from the first quarter earnings conference call for Lender Processing Services, Inc (LPS), a major … Read more

Greek Debt and Mortgage Fraud Keep Deutsche Bank In A Downtrend

(This is an excerpt from an article I published on Seeking Alpha. Click here to read the entire piece.) It has been a while since I last looked at Deutsche Bank (DB). At that time, I was focused on a pairs trade strategy versus Goldman Sachs (GS). So when I noted last week that GS … Read more

Searching for A Corral for the Silver Stampede

What has changed in the two months it took for silver to stampede its way up $15 (a 43% gain) and back? Did the Federal Reserve raise rates? Did the Federal Reserve threaten the market with rate hikes? Did the housing market rebound sharply, generating an expectation for higher rates? Did inflation expectations adjust sharply? … Read more

links for 2011-05-05

CNBC Realty Check Blog — Diana Olick: National Home Prices Double Dip Home prices have double dipped nationwide, now lower than their March 2009 trough, according to a new report from Clear Capital…Sales of bank-owned (REO) properties hit 34.5 percent of the market, according to the survey, resulting in a national price drop of 4.9 … Read more

TBT Finally Breaks Down, TIP Continues to Grind Upward

I thought TBT’s (ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury) successful test of the 200-day moving average (DMA) back in March would mark the beginning of a fresh extended run higher. Instead, the declining 50DMA marked the true short-term trend, and, for the second time in a month, TBT failed to break that resistance. At the end … Read more

links for 2011-05-04

Euro Debt Crisis – Greek 'Soft Restructuring' to Precede 'Hard' One – CNBC A request for an extension to the repayment period on Greece’s bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union could be a precursor to the full restructuring of the country’s debt, analysts say. (tags: Greece debt default restructuring govt_spending … Read more

BTU International Warns As Solar Inventories Grow

BTU International (BTUI) is a global supplier of advanced thermal processing equipment and processes to serving markets in solar cell, nuclear fuel and fuel cell manufacturing as well as electronics assembly and semiconductor packaging. Before reporting disappointing earnings Tuesday evening, BTUI had a market cap of $117M. This small company caught my big interest after … Read more

Pan American Silver Confirms No Need to Despair About Its Mine

Today, Pan American Silver Corporation (PAAS) issued a press release confirming my earlier assumption that its mining operations in Bolivia would not be impacted by the Bolivian government’s efforts to further nationalize its resource industries (see “Despair Deep in the Silver Mines: Another Opportunity to Buy Pan American Silver“). “On May 1, Bolivian President Evo … Read more

Buy First Solar On the Other Side of An Earnings Disappointment

Famous short-seller Dick Chanos visited the CNBC set on April 14 and talked about his expanding list of targets that includes alternative energy, especially First Solar (FSLR). In response, the stock dropped 2.7% that day and did not stabilize until the stock lost almost 10% over the course of a week. Directly ahead of another … Read more