I don’t want to exactly brag about my pumpkin carving skills but, well, I’m really good at carving pumpkins. I spent Friday evening carving this years Hello Kitty pumpkin (without stencils, mind you) and have once again regained my title as Master Carver. I really love Halloween more than any other holiday. That could be reminiscing feelings of a sugar high from last year, but I think it’s still safe to say I likey it even more than my own birthday.
It’s also quite nice to return from the weekend and see the market hasn’t completely been destroyed. The Dow rebounded more than 500 points this morning and is back above 9000. Good news for people who took part in the estimated erasure of $2.4 trillion in shareholder wealth last week. Consumers and investors continue to wait and see where cash will be injected as the bailout plan details are worked out. I wouldn’t break out the party hats and balloons yet. Bond markets and US banks are closed in holiday observance today and Friday most likely didn’t mark a bottom. I would expect the coming week to experience big swings and lots of volatility as the rescue plan is delegated and European governments offer aid to there banks.
Investors and consumers alike seem to be highly optimistic, whether this is “overly” optimistic or not remains to be seen as “buy the dip” continues to ring through the streets. Checking overall index sentiment on PredictWallStreet, I can see that sentiment for DJIA, NASDAQ and the SP500 has become increasingly more bullish. In fact, sentiment for NASDAQ and DJIA has become extremely bullish, showing that investors have become more optimistic after a hellish last week, even if it is only for a day.
After reading about Mitsubishi Bank’s $9 billion dollar investment in Morgan Stanley (MS) I went to check out there stock on PredictWallStreet’s widget. MS has already raised over 70% this morning to 16.72. I predicted up on MS. Looking at 1 month sentiment, I can see its been a wild ride for Morgan Stanley. Sentiment was up for about three weeks, then had a temporary down glitch before moving back up. Then sentiment drastically fell last week. If you overlay the price quote you can see that the price dropped drastically right around this same time. I would assume that as the price slowly moves up, that investors will regain some confidence in Morgan Stanley, especially after Mitsubishi’s investment. The sensitive sentiment shows how emotional behavior has effected this stock.
Because PredictWallStreet is about bringing together the investor community, it is valuable for me to check what other expert investors are doing. There are actually two “experts” on Morgan Stanley who are either 4 or 3 star predictors. The higher the star rating, the more accurate this predictor has been in the past. Right now I’m looking at sharron51, who is a 4 star predictor and expert on MS. Observing successful investors is crucial for a more novice investor like myself because I view it as sort of guideline and I can mimic her style if I wanted too. It’s also valuable in that I can compare my own predictions to that of a more credible predictor. I can see that sharron51 actually predicted down today for MS, while I predicted up. This sort of comparison is helpful for me because I am able to see what other investors think. While my prediction is more of a educated guess, I can assume that perhaps sharron’s is a more credible prediction because of her accuracy rating.
Another stock I want to check out this morning is Apple (AAPL). Because Apple is such a huge player in the public sphere, I always feel like there stock moves on any sort of news or publicity about the company; which is often so I’m always keeping an eye on them. The latest news is a revealing of new Macbooks priced below $1000.00, a first for Apple. Even if consumers are spending less, if anyone is seriously thinking of buying a new computer, I would find this lower price especially attractive. AAPL is up today 8.24% at 104.78. While this price is nothing Apple is used to seeing, it is better than what they have seen in the past week, all things considered. Apple has almost 300 predictions on PredictWallStreet, increasing the chances that more professionals have been drawn to predicting on this stock in turn increasing its accuracy. Looking at 1 month sentiment I can see that Apple has been quite bearish in the past month but is recently becoming more bullish as the price gains. While Apple is not out of the woods yet, they are making a clear trail.
Cbrown1966 is a five-star predictor (wow!) on Apple, making him an expert. He has predicted up today for Apple and so did I! Looking at all his predictions ( there are over 20) I can see he appears to be very bullish today. Looking at his predictions from last week, he appeared to be very bearish. It seems that Cbrown is very consistent in his predictions; when he predicts down, he does so for the majority of his predictions. This method is clearly working for him as his accuracy is almost 50%. Perhaps this is reflective of moods of the greater indexes in times like these- when indexes like the NASDAQ and DJIA are experiencing large downs, all individual stocks will feel that downturn as well. The up’s and downs are directly reverberated throughout the market when they are on such grand scales, like the market has been seeing in the past few weeks. I’m just speculating here, but this what I have drawn from Cbrown’s page. A pretty simple and maybe even obvious conclusion, but useful to me nonetheless.
Happy trading on the rest of this Columbus Day!
Stumble It!
