Minyanville: Freaky Friday, 5 October

Freaky Friday, 5 October: [¹]
(What you need to know and what it means!)

By Minyanville.com | 5 October 2007

• Trading Radar


• Week in Review: Market Recap


• Five Themes for the Fourth Quarter


• It Happened Twenty Years Ago...


• Bringing the Summer of 1927 to the Forefront


• Staying Aware of Short Interest in the Market



• $100 BILLION DOLLAR BANK DEAL? The biggest bank deal in history puts the Mmmm back in M&A. This has been a long time in the works (pre-credit crunch) but there are two ways to look at this: the classic Mortimer "We’re back baby!" or through the lens of an AOL-Time Warner (TWX) top tick.


• MORE INCREMENTAL DEAL DATA POINTS? After being below $3 billion for eight consecutive weeks, four deals totaling $11.7 billion were announced during this past week, which was the highest amount since the week ended Thursday, July 26.


• Subprime mortgages written off during the first half of the year went delinquent at the fastest rate this decade.


• That, along with the shock treatment that housing is getting in the press, has all the hallmarks of the "news is always worst at the bottom." I don’t know if this is the bottom but it could, perhaps, provide a (short-term) bottom. At least until HGX 185 arrives.


• So Merrill writes off $4,500,000,000 in bad calls? Why can’t I write down 20 lbs of bad dinners? Or a few hundred thousand worth of bad trades? How 'bout three seasons of bad Raider football. I mean—come on, if we’re all gonna play this game, we should all play with the same rules!


• Speaking of the brokers, do you see the first of three levels of technical resistance is upon us?


• One of my better sales coverage guys— the same bloke who has been begging me to buy Baidu (BIDU) since it was $100— is pushing me on the merits of Taiwan. "As China becomes more powerful," he muses, "doesn’t it seem logical that they would care less about Taiwan wanting sovereignty?" The Taiwan index, which topped at 12,500 in 1990, is trading around 9700 and their average P/E (currently around 9) is 13.8 projected ’08 numbers vs. 44x in China. The US, so you know, is trading at 15X ’08 projections. EWT is the ETF, in case you were curious (I’m gonna take a hard look).

Normxxx    
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