Saturday, January 2, 2010

Almanacs “Bullish Tidings for 2010 - Barron's Online” plus 4 more

Almanacs “Bullish Tidings for 2010 - Barron's Online” plus 4 more

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Bullish Tidings for 2010 - Barron's Online

Posted: 02 Jan 2010 04:42 AM PST

NO NEW YEAR IS EVER TRULY NEW. THEY ALL arrive to the echoes and rhymes of past analogous years. The trick is in discerning which template is the closest fit.

The chatter in early 2009 was about 1938, as many readers have tired of being reminded. That was a decent guide to the way '09 unfolded. Beginning a couple of months ago I began harkening back to 2004 as a possible model for 2010. An explosive rally started in March of the prior year, monetary policy was ultra-easy, profits roared back but the market was range-bound and spent much of the year digesting the prior year's gains.

Trouble is, the '04 model is becoming a bit too popular among market handicappers, probably because it's so plausible and allows them to sound prudent and vaguely thoughtful. One reasonable inference to draw from the gathering of opinion about 2010 being a flattish year is that most investors seem not to fear that the market will run away from them to the upside. That's a plus, in terms of market psychology, and might mean the larger surprise would be early-2010 strength, even though anecdotal and survey sentiment, and corporate-insider selling, have been flashing moderate caution signals for the very near term.

Reaching a bit more deeply into the almanac, market historian and author John K. Harris toted up how a new year proceeded when the market's high point for the preceding year was reached in December, as it was in '09.

In the 82-year history of the S&P 500 index, a year's high has occurred in December 25 times, says Harris. For the 24 excluding '09, 18 were followed by positive Januarys, and the average return for those years was 17.2%. Six of the 24 were followed by negative Januarys, and the average return for those years was -3.5%.

The year's high has occurred after Christmas 14 times, Harris says. Again, the most recent case is 2009. The prior 13 years that had a post-Christmas high were followed by nine positive Januarys, and the average return for those years was 19.4%. Four of the 13 years were followed by negative Januarys, and the average return for those years was a mere 0.6%.

This history indicates that the January Barometer -- the notion that January's direction tends to determine the year's course -- has particular significance for 2010, Harris says. The barometer seems even more "reliable" following years when the market reached a high in late December.

Of course, the January Barometer offered a head-fake in 2009. That, as they say, is why they play the games.

THE MARKET SURGE THIS year was so broad and inclusive that the standard indexes were actually quite easy to beat, which is what the stock picks in this column did in 2009.

The bullish items featured here gained about 35% on average, calculated from the publication date, compared with a hypothetical return of 23% had one placed money in an S&P 500 index fund on the same dates. The Rydex Equal-Weighted S&P 500 fund (RSP) climbed 42% for 2009, showing just how well the typical stock did following the first-quarter market panic. I didn't give myself credit for throw-away, cursory stock mentions, but only those given more extensive treatment.

The column's decent results were helped in significant part by white-knuckle bottom-fishing in washed-out names around the March lows, such as Ashland (ticker: ASH), Ford Motor (F) and Allstate (ALL). The most brutalized stocks, those disgorged aggressively in the 2008 collapse, carried the day -- or year. Bespoke Investment Group noted last week that the worst-performing 50 stocks for 2008 in the S&P 500 doubled, on average, in 2009.

Telecom and media stocks -- Verizon (VZ), DirecTV (DTV) and Cablevision (CVC) among them -- were strong contributors. And while the much-discussed and broadly anticipated rotation into quality blue chips hasn't taken root, the likes of Thermo Fisher Scientific (TMO) and Automatic Data Processing (ADP) recovered nicely while letting investors sleep at night.

Perhaps more noteworthy was the fact that the bearish stock ideas nearly all underperformed in a melt-up market, mostly thanks to a skeptical take on the for-profit education stocks last January. The most glaring misstep among the short ideas was one on Best Buy (BBY), which gained 44% since the piece ran in February. It seems every year it's necessary to re-learn the lesson: Don't bet against the best-run company in an industry at a time when consumers are emerging from the bunker.

E-mail: michael.santoli@barrons.com

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Me, my tudung and my 2010 sports predictions - The Malaysian Insider

Posted: 02 Jan 2010 03:37 AM PST

JAN 2 — In a crowd of approximately 8,000 spectators at Colchester United's game against Leeds United earlier this season, I could see fans from all walks of life taking their seats with me. The old, the young, the very young — there was a baby in a Babygro — the ones in a wheelchair, the ones with precariously balancing themselves with walking sticks, the ones with Col U tattooed across their arms.. Yes, you could say there were all sorts. But I dare declare that of the 8,000 odd spectators, I was the only one in the grounds wearing a tudung.

To be honest, this wasn't something I quite noticed about myself. You go to a football game, you want to watch people, not watch people watch you, you know? But I get asked, sometimes, whether I felt out of place at a football ground because I wear a tudung. And I suppose that had I been at a Premiership ground, I would not be all that "unique", as it were.

But while watching football at famous Premiership venues is as much a sporting activity as it is a touristy one, I would agree with my friend's contention that turning up to watch your local team play two divisions below the top tier does require a certain level of football madness. I'd be the first to confess that I have an unhealthy fascination for all things football, and all things sporty. To date there are only three sporting events I would still change television channels for if it came on: horse racing, showjumping and golf. Yes people, I even watch snooker and darts. In my defence, it's an illness.

"Do you find it odd that you are a female football fan who wears a tudung?" I was asked recently by a friend who knew of my football-related exploits. My short answer to that is a simple "no". But if I am to reflect on the question within the framework of social norms and gender roles, perhaps there is space for further elaboration. So if we were to view the whole issue as an anomaly, truth be told I think the oddity lies in the fact that I am a female sports nut.

While women do sports, the bastion of obsessiveness has always been a male stronghold. Men are known for being anoraks, devouring every sporting statistic known to mankind. It is men who get sport almanacs for Christmas or birthdays. It is men who plan their weekends based on what live games are being shown on TV. It is men whose emotions are a function of how well their team fared in a recent match. It is men who include a football match in the itinerary when going abroad for a holiday.

The fact that I do all of the above, I suppose, casts a slight on my womanhood in the whole bigger picture. Add to that the notion that a woman who wears a tudung is generally viewed as demure and dainty, and, to some, backward and incapable of speaking English... well, there are some stereotypes I've missed adhering to, I guess. But all in all, it doesn't really matter to me anymore, not after sitting near the away end when the team I was supporting was playing Leeds United. If I got through that without being abused by drunken Mat Sallehs, then I fail to see how being a tudung-wearing sports fan is an issue. And besides, if anyone questions my womanhood, I am told I make a mean lasagne, and a pretty decent nasi lemak. So there.

But all that aside, I suppose at this conjecture in the Gregorian calendar it is apt to think about the sporting year ahead. As a football fan it feels rather weird thinking of the New Year as the focal point of the year ahead, because the beginning of a football year in Europe is late summer. But 2010 is a special year: it is World Cup year! Barring my former landlords not paying me back some £700 (RM3,580) in deposit, I will be on a plane to Cape Town in July! We have tickets to a quarter-final tie, we do, we do! But the World Cup isn't the only major sporting event of 2010 of course: in January we have the Winter Olympics, and the Commonwealth Games as well.

Still, while 2009 has ended with quite a bang, what with Thierry Henry's hand and Tiger Wood's err... wand, I would like to see a spicier 2010 sporting wise. So here are my sporting wishes for 2010:

• Following in the steps of former Welsh rugby international Gareth Thomas, Cristiano Ronaldo finally admits that... no... cannot be... can it?

• In the spirit of 1 Malaysia Boleh Belaka, former F1 driver Alex Yoong makes a comeback to drive the Lotus F1 car in a bid to challenge Petronas-sponsored Mercedes team driver who also recently came out of retirement Michael Schumacher. Rumours of a Datukship if he manages to finish a race have been quashed.

• Lee Chong Wei gets a Tan Sri-ship for being able to win a badminton tournament and not lose in the first round of the subsequent tournament.

• France fail to win any of their group games at the World Cup 2010 in an act of divine retribution. Whaddya mean that already happened in Euro 2008?

• Malaysia make a surprise appearance at the Winter Olympics in the bobsled event! Frustrated by years of unfulfilled potential, former sprinter Watson Nyambek enlists the help of three friends and a disgraced coach to propel Malaysia to a dignified showing in Vancouver, where their bobsled fails to finish but they all get out and carry their sled to the finish line. No, I haven't heard of "Cool Runnings", why?

• Usain Bolt finally admits that he is part of a secret Hadron Collider-related project which has resulted in the fabric of time being manipulated ever so slightly, allowing him that extra edge in breaking records.

• Malaysia win a gold medal at football. Eh wait. That's happened already.

Or, failing any of the above, I'll settle for England winning the World Cup. Now that would make a good 2010. Altogether now, football's coming home...



busy

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Cold, wet weather in 2009, but plants didn't mind - HometownAnnapolis.com

Posted: 01 Jan 2010 09:32 PM PST

Then they wrapped up this cold, wet year shivering and shoveling as the biggest snowstorm in five years ambushed the East Coast just before Christmas.

Yet area plants didn't seem to mind the weather at all.

"For the most part, the crops were good," said Jeffrey Griffith, president of the Anne Arundel County Farm Bureau. "It was a combination, abundant rains early in the spring that made things grow."

According to the National Weather Service, 2009 came in cold. January temperatures in the Baltimore area were well below normal, and although the spring months were slightly warmer than usual, things cooled off again over the summer.

Meanwhile, a torrent of rain began lashing area homes and farms. By the end of May, precipitation for the year was 2 inches above normal.

April through June had the second-highest rainfall ever measured for that period - 19.74 inches - and after a brief hot spell in August, October tied for the 12th wettest October on record.

Between October and November, 11.18 inches of rain fell, making that two-month period the sixth-wettest of all time.

Then, in December, the snow hit.

"For Baltimore, the 20.5 inches on the 19th will go down as the fifth-highest snowfall on any given day," said Steve Zubrick, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Virginia. "And the 22.2 inches (total for December) makes it the snowiest December on record."

Crops soaked up the extra moisture, especially veggies planted late in the season like broccoli, kale and sweet potatoes, said Brenda Conti, a member of the board of directors of the Anne Arundel County Farmer's Market.

"At the end of the summer when you need the rain, we did get it this year, and the fall turned out pretty good," she said.

But some farmers had a tough time harvesting in the rain, making their way through soggy fields late into the season, Griffith said.

"It was a little stressful on the farms trying to harvest, being wet," he said. "They start in September, and the harvest just got completed a few weeks ago."

Retailers likewise felt the heavy precipitation this year. Sales of sub pumps went up, for example, as homeowners battled flooded basements, said Bryan Davis, manager of the Home Depot on Defense Highway in Annapolis.

Salt and snowblowers also flew of the shelves once the snow started piling up, he said.

"We were going through salt so fast, some places were buying four pallets at a time," Davis said.

And it might not be over yet.

The National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center expects temperatures to stay slightly below normal from January through March. And The Old Farmer's Almanac claims another snowstorm will hit the area in mid-January, followed by more snow in February.

But once again, all that moisture may boost crops by raising the water table and making water readily available come spring, Griffith said. It could be another good year for county farmers.

"We hope so," he said.

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On Native Ground - American Reporter

Posted: 02 Jan 2010 01:57 AM PST

 On Native Ground
MY BACK PAGES: WATCHING MY CRAFT CHANGE OVER 30 YEARS
by Randolph T. Holhut
American Reporter Correspondent
Dummerston, Vt.

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Printable version of this story

DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I got my first job in journalism at the age of 18 in the spring of 1980. I was a freshman in college and landed a night shift gig at WSPR, a radio station in Springfield, Mass.

News came over an Associated Press teletype machine at 65 words a minute. Changing the heavily inked ribbons was always a chore, not to mention making sure the paper didn't run out.

Stories were typed on battered old manual typewriters that dated back to the 1940s.

Computers? Still a new-fangled technology that hadn't yet seeped down to this level of the business.

The Internet? There were only a few hundred people using it. If you needed to look up an address, you got a phone book or a city directory. If you needed to confirm a stray fact, you pulled out The World Almanac.

They were still using reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a razor blade and Scotch tape were your tools for editing audio. It was still an analog world, with dials and meters and black telephones with dials.

In the fall of 1985, when I started working in newspapers, video display terminals were cutting edge technology. Two years later, I went out and got my first computer - a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. With its built-in 300 baud modem, I could file a story anyplace I could find a pay phone.

Cellphones? That was as futuristic as the communicators they used on "Star Trek."

There were still a few smokers in the first city room I worked in. The barroom downstairs was still a place where you could find reporters between shifts. The building also shuddered just a little from the giant presses when they fired up, and the stairwells were coated with a thin film of ink.

That first newspaper company I worked for - the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram and Evening Gazette - had four morning and six afternoon editions and a dozen bureaus in the county it published in. There were two separate news staffs, and even though they worked for the same company, the competition was still fierce.

One of my several jobs was working in the morgue - the newspaper's library - where we still clipped stories out of each day's edition and filed them away in envelopes. When a reporter or editor needed background on a subject, my job was to retrieve the right folders with the right clippings in a room filled with hundreds of cabinets with files that went back decades.

Pneumatic tubes brought pictures up to the composing room, and page proofs came down to the copy desk the same way. The darkroom was just that, a dark room filled with a dozen photo enlargers and photographers rushing make prints on deadline. I eventually learned how to do darkroom work and how to go from taking the film out of the camera to producing a finished print in under 30 minutes. The photos from the AP came one at a time from a LaserPhoto printer, in 8 minute intervals. Waiting for photos was a constant hassle.

The old photographers I encountered then were old enough to have used Speed Graphics - the bulky, hard-to-focus 4 x 5 inch cameras that were the newspaper standard from the 1920s to the 1960s.

The old compositors I encountered then were old enough to remember linotypes and the smell of melting lead.

The old editors I encountered then were old enough to remember pastepots and black pencils and making and remaking a newspaper on the fly with a few written instructions and a lot of teamwork in the mechanical departments.

Pagination - making a pages on a computer - was just starting to creep into use. I remember the first such unit - a Mac Plus - which was used to make graphic. Within 10 years of seeing that Mac for the first time, I would be making pages on a computer. The compositors - the wizards with Exacto knifes that could do just about anything you asked, just don't touch the type, please - were out of a job.

Automation changed lots of things. I was replaced by a computer terminal in the paper's morgue. Indexing was now done with a few keystrokes, not with a heavy steel straight edge tearing pages. Digital photography made the darkroom obsolete. The teletype printers disappeared, and wire service news came flying into the mainframe computers at thousands of words a minute.

And now I feel as ancient as the people I met when I started out, the tribe that started out in the 1940s and 1950s, when newspapers were king and the work that reporters did was the stuff of movies.

Twenty years ago this month, I went through my first buyout. The T & G had been sold two years before, and changes were in the works. Being a junior member of the staff who lashed three part-time jobs into something of a living, I was thrown overboard immediately. But I was struck by how many people, the elders of the paper that I looked up to and learned from, chose to take a buyout and leave than stick around and face an uncertain future. Most of that generation left, and I got my first education on the harshness of the newspaper business.

The morning and evening papers merged the following year. The T & G's bureaus started to disappear. The presses moved out of the hulking old building on Franklin Street and went to a remote site a few miles away. The papers were sold again, this time to The New York Times Co. They eliminated zoned editions this year and the paper is struggling to survive.

Since that bleak Yuletide two decades ago, I've been through three more newspaper sales. I've become an elder, talking about the old days of afternoon papers, pasting-up pages, teletypes and darkrooms to a generation that Googles phone numbers and needs MapQuest to find an address. And I've watched my profession go from fat and sassy to threadbare and dying in one generation.

I'm still young enough to be a bridge between the analog and digital eras, and still looking forward to the shape of journalism to come. The tools we have now to tell stories were barely dreamed of when I started out, but I recognize how important they are and working to master them. We just have to remember that the need to tell stories is primal, and that storytellers will always be needed.

What will the young reporters I work with now be saying when they look back at their careers 20 years from now? Will they be talking about that gruff and crabby gray-bearded editor they had as their first mentor? The rickety first-generation iMacs that they have to use to write their stories on? The lack of reliable Internet and cellphone service? Or will they talk about working in newspapers at a time when they became quaint relics of a bygone age?

My love for the printed page is still abiding, but it's hard to remember what it was like before the Internet, before desktop computers, before digital cameras and voice recorders, before the avalanche of data that pours from the Web each day, before the 24-hour news cycle, before all the changes that I have seen in nearly three decades of broadcast, print and online journalism. The past is a nice place to visit, but the future is still the place I hope to see.

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for nearly 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2010 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.

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Alabama casinos go upscale to rival Mississippi - Montgomery Advertiser

Posted: 02 Jan 2010 01:57 AM PST

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VictoryLand opened a modern casino in 2005 and kept expanding until it now houses 6,400 electronic bingo machines -- more than any single casino in Nevada, New Jersey or Mississippi has slots, according to Casino City's North American Gaming Almanac.

McGregor said he built the hotel -- and has two more in the planning stages -- because visitors demanded VictoryLand be more than a stopover for a few hours.

"In order to be where we needed to be and wanted to be, we had to become a destination point," McGregor said.

So far, it's paying off, he said, with 40 percent of the weekend business coming from out of state. That compares to about 70 percent for Mississippi casinos.

Country Crossing in the southeast corner of the state opened its $87 million first phase on Dec. 1, with more new attractions in the new year pushing the total investment over $200 million.

A country music-themed complex south of Dothan looks very different from VictoryLand.

Country Crossing uses an architectural style that blends TV's "Mayberry" and "Petticoat Junction" into a made-from-scratch small town. This hamlet just happens to offer restaurants named for country singers, an inn called George Jones' Possum Holler, a concert amphitheater, an RV park, and electronic bingo machines.

For now, Gilley, the developer, is hoping to get tourists to stop briefly on their way to and from the beach on U.S. 231. He's expecting that to start changing when he opens two hotels, a water park, a bowling alley and family entertainment center next year.

"We expect in the next five years we will become a destination and the beach will become a day trip," he said.

Alabama's Poarch Band of Creek Indians opened the $245 million Wind Creek complex at Atmore in January. In addition to electronic bingo, it features a 236-room upscale hotel, four restaurants, an amphitheater with major headliners, and a cooking studio directed by award-winning chef Stafford DeCambra, who previously worked at a Mississippi casino.

Wind Creek sits along Interstate 65, a major route to Gulf Coast beaches and Mississippi's coastal casinos, and its 17-story hotel has become a landmark towering above the rural area's vast stretches of pine forests.

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