After the previous week's turbulence, market calms down in this week. Many market participants are looking for a sizable pullback for bargain purchase. But investors are not willing to dumb shares. Therefore even though traders are trying to drag down market, any drop in market is quickly bought up by hungry investors despite very limited trading volume.
As market movement remains range bounded, market participants keep the attitude to wait. But since the majority of market participants are expecting for a strong pullback, there is lack of sellers to create panic selling. Market manipulators have not dumped stocks in large quantity for long time since beginning of year. Some investors lose the patience to wait for market drop and move the capital away from equity stock market to other asset class.
Hot money remains a dominant driving force in the financial market. With the symptom of a stable economy, traders hesitate to short sell the market. Trickle buying from cash rich investors have already pushed market near historical top. It appears that market cannot attract either market manipulators to sell down or value investors to buy up.
A strong earnings season cannot boost the market. Therefore market participants should be careful that market manipulators may exploit bad news such as European soverign debt to create market panic. Investors confidence is relatively low. Buyers are very selective and cautious. As market is buoyed at high level, investors with higher exposure in equity stocks may run in a herd to take profit if there is strong selling from traders and market manipulators.
Inventions go on display at Geneva fair
Officials said 789 exhibitors from 46 countries and 60,000 visitors are expected at the fair, which runs until April 22. "We can hardly believe this given the cost of the Swiss franc and the economic situation throughout the world," said the fair's president, Jean-Luc Vincent.
An international flavor and the draw of the unexpected appealed to visitors.
Asteroid Mining: New Company Plans to Dig Off-Earth
According to reports, a company called Planetary Resources is spearheading what's thought be an effort centered around mining near-Earth asteroids for various human-friendly materials. The story is gaining considerable traction on the web, and media outlets far and wide are running with it.
For many of us, logical might not be the first thing that comes to mind -- this isn't digging up diamonds or gold or drilling for oil in ways we can relate to pretty easily. But it is a project that reportedly has attracted the interest of rather serious brain power and financial means. Here's some of who is said to be involved: Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt; Ross Perot Jr.; former Microsoft software architect Charles Simonyi; and movie director turned submarine adventurer James Cameron. The chief engineer is a former manager at NASA's well-known Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
A report in The New York Times quoted Anderson as saying the "collective net worth" of Planetary Resources' investors is around $50 billion, "and they know what they're getting into."
Billions are one thing, but even bigger numbers are being discussed. Planetary Resources believes its work will have the ability to "add trillions of dollars to the global GDP," according to a Wall Street Journal article. Trillions. For reference, the U.S. economy is worth, in total, about $14 trillion to $15 trillion right now.
Housing Declared Bottoming in U.S.
The U.S. housing market is showing more signs of stabilization as price declines ease and home demand improves, spurring several economists to call a bottom to the worst real estate collapse since the 1930s.
Home values in more than half of major U.S. markets will probably reach a bottom by the end of the year, according to Seattle-based Zillow Inc. Signs that the market is close to a trough include improving home sales and rising prices in some areas, said Chief Economist Stan Humphries. The market, which has been bolstered by investors, second-home buyers, and retirees, will need more traditional first-time and trade-up buyers to return for a rebound, he said.
Dumb money still flocks to emerging markets
Sometimes it takes investors a while to figure out that things have changed — and then it takes even longer for them to alter their behavior accordingly.
Until the 2008-2009 crash, emerging markets were among the world’s top performers. These countries survived the Asian financial crisis and their economies boomed in the 2000s. China became a great economic power, Russia surged on higher oil prices, India was awakening from a long socialist sleep and Brazil catapulted to the top of Latin America’s economic pecking order.
So, it would surprise many investors to learn that the much-maligned U.S. stock market has outperformed the MSCI BRIC and emerging-markets indexes for the last three years.
In fact, U.S. mutual fund investors pulled an astonishing $464.9 billion out of mutual funds focusing on U.S. equities from 2007 to 2011, according to the Investment Company Institute. They stashed almost $800 billion into bond funds during that period, of course, but they also poured $73 billion into emerging-market equity funds.
Even in the first two months of 2012, U.S. investors yanked $5.3 billion out of U.S. equity funds and funneled $5.2 billion into emerging-market stock funds.
So, while U.S. stocks were quietly recovering and outperforming, investors dumped them for an asset class that has lagged the entire time.
A farewell to U.S. factories
Manufacturing employment as a fraction of total employment has been declining for the past half century in the United States and the great majority of other developed countries. A 1968 book about developments in the American economy by Victor Fuchs was already entitled “The Service Economy.”
Although the absolute number of jobs in American manufacturing was rather constant at about 17 million from 1969 to 2002, manufacturing’s share of jobs continued to decline from about 28% in 1962 to only 9% in 2011.
Big productivity gains in manufacturing are also a major cause behind the decrease in manufacturing employment in the United States. Higher productivity lowered prices of manufactured goods relative to prices of services. Yet, employment in manufacturing fell because the lower manufacturing prices did not stimulate a large enough increase in the demand for manufactured goods to offset the productivity increases of the manufacturing work force.
A second obvious force reducing jobs in American manufacturing has been the growth in China’s economy and its exports of a large variety of cheap manufactured goods (which are a great boon to American and other consumers).
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