Bookkeeping: Weekly Changes to Fund Positions Year 3, Week 22

By IBTimes Staff Reporter | January 04 2010 9:30 AM

Year 3, Week 22 Major Position ChangesTo see historic weekly fund changes click here OR the label at the bottom of this entry entitled 'fund positions'.Cash: 63.0% (v 42.1% last week)29 long bias: 36.3% (v 57.2% last week) 2 short bias: 0.7% (v 0.7% last week) 31 positions (vs 30 last week)Weekly thoughtsA very late day selloff on the 31st caused a bit of a havoc in the chart of the S&P 500; moving the average back below S&P 1120 which is a level many professionals are using as a pivot point. It is hard to read anything into stock movement the last 10 minutes of a day, when almost no one is around, so we'll see how quickly that selloff is erased. The past 2 months have been like moving through quicksand; almost no movement in the general indexes for 6 weeks followed by a Santa Claus rally of nothing more than 9 S&P points that was erased in the last 15 minutes last Thursday. And almost all of that rally was done in premarket/first 15 minutes of the day - making for sleepy daytime sessions. Without any velocity in this market - either up or down - it is very difficult to make money on a sustained basis.

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Strangely, all economic news was essentially ignored during the Santa Bernanke rally - good news, or bad ... didn't matter. Very little reaction either way. Things should change with the return of actual humans from the holidays - this week is packed with market moving data.

Monday - ISM Manufacturing, as always this is only about 10% of our economy but people treat it as if the US is in the 1960s and manufacturing still is dominant. Construction Spending.

Tuesday - Factory orders, Pending Home Sales

Wednesday - ISM Services, a report that I find much more relevant to the new age economy the US has developed - as it represents the majority of the economy.

Friday - the monthly jobs report... will America show the first positive* job growth in a couple of years?

* positive = using government statistics which add tens of thousands if not 100K+ jobs through the birth/death model which is simply a guess by statisticians, who have claimed the US has been adding millions of jobs in small businesses throughout the Great Recession. Not to mention figures which are revised downward, once attention is elsewhere - months after the fact.

As one takes the holidays to reflect, it truly is amazing what has happened in this country. Millions of Americans who no longer are paying their mortgages, which is ok as it creates a permanent backdoor stimulus of.hundreds of millions of dollars. A government who in the darkness of the Christmas Eve holiday decides to allow unlimited losses in Fannie, Freddie for the next 3 years - all without Congressional approval. The same organizations, who along with FHA (which is headed down the same path as Fannie, Freddie) now support 90%+ of the entire US housing market (speaking of socialized) And a Fed Chief who has deemed the policies of Alan Greenspan's easy money - the nexus of this financial crisis - as the holy grail.

All these are great things if you are a stock market speculator who only cares about the near term, because stimuli are coming from every direction, even by Americans themselves, many of which are using their former mortgage payment to help get these economic data jumping (while the losses can be eaten at Fannie, Freddie) - but as an American you can only shake your head at what it has all come to.

Please listen to the 1 voice of reason on CNBC.... skip right to minute 2.

And with that, we're back to the fully subsidized US economy / stock market, 2010 version. Brought to you by your sponsors, the Chinese government & your grandchildren.