Saturday Rock Blogging: Wrong Place

Last week my friend Matt brought to my attention yet another big drop in CROX, the ugly rubber shoe company and I was thinking about when I tried shorting it a while back. I first took a position against the stock in late 2006 with the CROX October 30 strike puts ($15 split adjusted). Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This trade reminds me why charts are so important, I was dead right about the over valuation and the future of the ugly rubber shoe fad. If I had gotten short the stock I'd be up now as it made a new all time low last week. That would have been being in the right place at the wrong time. But with options its all about the timing, if you have the timing wrong you have it all wrong.

Earnings Season Turns Violent

Its been a rough earnings season thusfar despite today's headlines about INTC and JPM barely beating Wall Street's dramatically lowered earnings estimates. There were really ugly quarters at a few banks and a horrendous report from an ugly rubber shoe company just to name a few. But the earnings that got the most attention was the huge miss by the conglomerate GE last week.

That situation was taken to a whole new level today when GE's former CEO, Jack Welch, made some rather reckless remarks about the current ruler of the GE empire, Jeffrey Immelt. Something tells me you won't be seeing these quotes on CNBC. Here are a few of the highlights of Jack's comments I took from this article:

"This was a bad miss. This is a credibility crash. He's got to earn it back. He will earn it back. But to take GE apart, what's wrong with the company, it's falling apart, blow up the model, sell NBC, sell real off estate, let's go out of business because we had 24 hours of a mess?"

"Here's the screw up: You made a promise that you'd deliver this and you missed three weeks later"

"Jeff has a credibility issue. He's getting his ass kicked."

"I'd be shocked beyond belief and I'd get a gun out and shoot him if he doesn't make what he promised now"

Who says we aren't in a bubble? (1.5 yr weeklies)

Here was my favorite chart in the blogosphere this weekend.

Nightmare on Wall Street 2: Credit's Revenge

Scary stuff was going down today, I hope everyone was being safe. Rather than talk about it, I've just got a few charts for you that are simply breathtaking. For commentary, I think Tim brings up some excellent points today.

Lets start with the Dow Jones etf over the last two days (5 min time scale):

Then CROX over the last five days on a 15 minute time scale:

My goodness, MBI over the last two months:

Then theres DSL, a "savings and loan" corporation over the last two months :

And the current king of carnage is bond insurer ABK on a six month daily time scale:
With people focused so much on tech stocks these days its easy to not notice the recession/bear market already occurring in some sectors of our economy.

Disclosure: I own DIA puts
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