Michael Covel: News & Info.

From the AP today:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The trustees of Social Security and Medicare are certain to kick off a fierce round of debate when they release their annual assessment of the fiscal health of the government’s two biggest benefit programs. The battle will be waged not only between the Democratic-controlled Congress and President Bush but also in this year’s presidential campaign, where the issue is expected to attract a lot of attention in light of the looming retirement of 78 million baby boomers. All sides will try to use Tuesday’s report to score political points, but that is probably as far as the debate will go — at least until a new president takes office next year. Bush, who had vowed to make overhauling Social Security a top priority of his second term, will almost certainly leave office with that goal unfulfilled given that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, his point person on the issue, has not made any headway with Democrats in Congress in finding a compromise to resolve the pension program’s fiscal problems. Democrats contend that Bush lost valuable time after his 2004 re-election pushing a plan to allow younger workers to direct their payroll tax contributions into private accounts, an idea that went nowhere in Congress. The new report is expected to make only small changes in the estimates made last year for when both trust funds will be depleted. Last year’s report put the date for when Social Security would exhaust its trust fund resources at 2041 with the same date for Medicare put much sooner at 2019. Medicare is facing much more imminent problems because of soaring health care costs.

Why does a so-called retirement plan, an investment fund, exist when it generates 1.2% return? In the real world a trader with that return would be fired.

A nice overview from the owner of the Dallas Mavericks: dos and don’t dos on startups.

An interesting chart listing the odds of dying. I could not help but think of lottery odds when I saw that chart.

Review on Daily Speculations.

More naked self-promotion from me in the form of an excerpt from Michael Nystrom’s review of “The Complete TurtleTrader”:

“Buy and hold is dead! The extreme market volatility over the last decade should make this abundantly clear to even casual market watchers, but it is something that good traders have known all along: You trade securities, you don’t marry them. Buying a stock is not a commitment “until death do you part.” A friend once told me the story of a man he knew who worked at Worldcom during the go-go 90’s and had his entire 401(k) invested in the company stock. He was waiting for his account to hit $2 million, and then he was going to cash out. It was almost there - $1.8m, $1.9m - something like that when the stock began its terminal decline. Instead of selling, he held on until the bitter end, until all was lost. Moral of the story: The market is the utlimate authority. It does not listen to you, nor care about your dreams & desires, so you had best learn to listen to it. Stories like the above are not uncommon - just ask the employees of Bear Stearns. These days buy and hold may as well be called buy and hope, which is definitely not a sound strategy. And while there are a near infinite variety of potentially successful trading strategies (as the book Market Wizards shows), some of the most successful strategies have been mechanical trend following systems. You’ve no doubt heard a bit about Richard Dennis, the trend trading pioneer who discussed his mid-1980’s Turtles experiment in Market Wizards. Now, thanks to Michael Covel, we are lucky enough to have access to the whole story. Continue…

Here is an interview (MP3) from the other day where it is easy to see that the trend/systematic message is not readily accepted. Trying to get people to move away from only worrying about “today” is not easy. I don’t think the female host of this show was on board with my message.

I did a TD Ameritrade Webcast yesterday with 300+ people. Will post shortly.

From the AP:

NEW YORK - Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

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In “The Complete TurtleTrader” one of the two female Turtles elected specifically not to be interviewed. Maybe that interview is closer to reality today as I just noticed that Liz Cheval is paying ad dollars to Google for the term “Michael Covel.” That is a nice endorsement of “The Complete TurtleTrader.”

Almost every commodity market there is fell out of bed today at about the same time MF Global began its 65% share price plunge. Who will email along to me the real story of another firm and or hedge fund who also met their demise today?