Week #1 Report

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Bill's Portfolio: Until my programmed trading models are working, complete with auto reporting of holdings and P&L, this part of my report will focus on selected stocks.

Week #1 saw Taser (NDQ: TASR $22.72) continuously in the news. TASR has been under distribution on the Street since about the time I issued a warning seven weeks ago at $30 (post-split).

Until the U.S. equity market's short-term cyclic bear phase is completed in a few weeks, possibly months, investors are going to hear all about Taser's negatives (and this will go on and on until certain people on the Street decide it's in their interests to see the stock go back up).

The price of TASR has quickly reached my re-entry point ($22.50), a target I published Nov-16, and the short-term technical indicators now look excellent. But I wouldn't be quick to act; you might get a jolt.

Because the overall market is shaky here, and there may be more downside, a good trade would be a put write to take in premium income, and to allow TASR to be put to you at cycle bottom prices. Alternatively, if you can watch the market trades like a hawk, the purchase of calls on every down spike will also likely result in extreme profit after TASR goes into the next bull phase. Still, TASR now trades at under a PE of 80, which meets my criteria (barely) of a max PE of 4x S&P pe, for rapid growth stocks.

The fact there are reports this week the SEC is investigating (i) Taser management's claims of product functionality, and (ii) a large Dec-31-dated sale, prove yet again how corrupt the U.S. equity market is. Firstly, what kind of a scientific authority is a securities commission? Given that the SEC is not a product standards testing lab, since when does this group of lawyers get into issues of whether the Taser gun works or not? Well, I'll tell you when: it's when their friends on Wall Street want the stock to go down. This is just another example of how the law is used as an instrument of abuse.

Use your common sense here investors; about 4,500 U.S. and Canadian police forces plus others from across the world, are clamouring for these Taser guns " precisely because the product works.

On the other issue, I just shook my head watching a Wall Street "reporter" on CNBC saying he doubted the legitimacy of the Taser $1.5 million Dec-31 order, saying it was contrived to enable management to meet their 2004 guidance. Did this reporter actually audit the order book, inventory, shipment and invoicing process, or did he just take money from somebody to make this ridiculous assertion on international CNBC?

Why did nobody on CNBC demand this TH (excuse me, reporter) explain his sources? For the record, CNBC's Larry Kudlow interviewed management on Friday evening, where they stated the products had been sold and shipped in calendar 2004, and that's all I (or you) need to know. If management's lieing, the CEO knows this isn't a monopoly board game and he goes straight to jail.

SEC filings of this company continue to reflect a solid business plan that is being executed to a high degree of perfection. The stock, as well as the overall market, must find a cycle bottom before moving higher. I suspect TASR will do it before the market.

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ETFs: As you know, I recommend ETFs for most investors and most ETFs are traded on the AMEX.

In the words of AMEX: "Each ETF is a basket of securities that is designed to generally track an index—broad stock or bond market, stock industry sector, or international stock—yet trades like a single stock." Moreover, many of them are options traded. There is absolutely no need to purchase mutual funds because the all-in cost of ETFs is a small fraction, and the performance is far superior. If you need help choosing ETFs other than SPY, DIA or QQQQ, then go to an independent fee-based advisor (either flat-fee or percentage-of-profit based).

And btw, this week's SEC investigation into the line between advisors and sales persons is yet another spectacle. The issue is not, and I repeat not, a problem with hidden incentives because I happen to believe almost all fee-based advisors are straight-shooters. The problem goes right to the Security Industry Association's complaint's expressed Friday on CNBC by their representative: "Broker-Dealers are adequately regulated by SEC, NASD, and state regulators. We have enough regulation." Yes, that statement by SIA proves yet again that a blind man can't see.

The fact is that the regulations are there to protect the sell-side industry, not the public. The issue has little to do with regulations; it has everything to do with the structure of the financial services industry and the built-in conflicts of interest. We need conflicts of interest removed; not less or more regulation. All fee-based analysts and advisors need to be licensed as being 100 percent independent of any sell-side organization.

That would mean that if, for example, Citigroup (NYSE: C) is going to be in the business of selling you products like mutual funds, insurance, etc, they cannot also own any percentage of a company that is paid in any way to advise the same people they are selling to. It also means they cannot trade proprietary capital against the same people they are selling to.

The problem isn't at the bottom of Citigroup " and other financial services companies like it " it's at the top. The present system is corrupt " it's broke " and until it gets built anew, taxpayer-paid agencies like the SEC are just diddling themselves as well as the taxpayers when they talk of fixing it. SEC Chairman Donaldson, a career Wall Street sell-sider, is part of the problem and is not a solution. He is just part of the continuous wealth destruction and transference process that started with the 1933-34 Securities Act that apparently permanently enshrined the rights of the sell-side.

Coming back to the subject of ETFs, the AMEX web site, within the ETF category, has an ETF screener that can point you to the list of ETF offerings by (i) Investment Style: (a) value, (b) blend (quality), or (c) growth, (ii) Category: (a) International, (b) Sector, or (c) Broad-based, (iii) Expense Ratio: less than 0.31%, up to less than 0.99%, and (iv) whether or not the ETF is Options Traded. I recommend it.

With ETFs, you don't need sales persons. You might need advice, but not sales persons to sell them to you. And if the advice you purchase comes to you free & clear of any sales agenda, then you are already a step ahead of the game.

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Bonds: The bond market will have a difficult year this year I suspect. Pundits like me have been too early in calling for its demise however. I believe our problem had a lot to do with expectations for stronger economic growth, which didn't pan out. We should have been paying more attention to the "living" yield curve.

The iShares Lehman 7-10 year U.S. Treasury Bond Fund trades as an ETF (AMEX: IEF) and is options traded as well. Since early November the IEF has been falling in price, which reflects the sell-off in bond markets as interest rates are picking up. Higher interest rates (reflected by bond yields) in the U.S. will exert downward pressure on U.S. equities at this point because there are large parts of the equities market with inflated PE multiples that will fall as interest rates rise. But there is not a 1:1 correlation between stocks and bonds. Bond prices fall as rates rise; but falling bond prices (rising rates) do not always mean falling stock prices. Stock prices can in fact rise as rates rise " if investors are prepared to assume greater risk. That's the difference between a bond and a stock. Bond investors have a fixed return, and no equity in the corporation, hence no opportunity to profit by taking on more risk. Bond prices are set by the bond investor's forecasts of interest rates and tight/loose money conditions in the marketplace.

The IEF is a popular instrument for bond trading:

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Commodities: Commodity prices have been traded for many years directly in commodity cash and futures markets, and indirectly for many more years in the commodity price sensitive equity markets, e.g., goldminer shares reflect corporate profitability that is heavily influenced by rising prices of the commodity they produce. Also, there are companies that are major consumers of commodities, like the airlines that need fuel oil to operate their planes, and that profitability is impacted by fuel oil price changes. Recently there has been the introduction of a commodity price securities instrument that trades on the NYSE, which is gold bullion represented by the ETF that trades with the ticker symbol GLD. The same type of product has been trading on the London and Sydney exchanges, and a similar one (gold and silver) has traded in Toronto for several years. In future there may be more commodity-price securities that trade on the major exchanges.

I continuously monitor all the commodity price screens not because I trade commodities -- I do not -- but because these commodities significantly impact on the revenues or costs of certain corporations.

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Gold: Gold, as you know, is my favorite subject. I've done a lot of gold research, investigation including being underground in mines from the Colorado mountains to the Arctic Circle, from Vermont to British Columbia, attended gold shows in a lot of cities, and helped finance prospectors in many countries from Russia Far East to Atlantic Canada. The dream of catching a shooting star by the tail " of uncovering the motherlode " is enough to drive those in the gold industry, in the face of the slimmest of odds, to work so hard under extremely harsh conditions, to refuse to have their spirit broken, is what always attracted me to these people. They are so much the salt of the earth, so wrongly portrayed, that it amazes me how those in society caught up in their big cars, latte bars, health and golf clubs and other aspects of conspicuous consumption, are so negative to these people, and consider their own lives so "real".

I once hired for my securities firm in Toronto the daughter of a friend and associate who was in her early 20s. I thought her father had broken the mold " a real character -- but she sure had his spirit. As she was from Timmins in northern Ontario, she often told me how things in her life were so different from what other girls in the office were experiencing, which she didn't think "real". She would tell me about how this one was off for weekends to Las Vegas with a boyfriend, and that one had vacations on a huge yacht of a boyfriend, etc, but that she would be backpacking with her father in bushland and swamp in northern Ontario, where there were no washrooms and you made do, and so forth, as they tried to find gold. She started on the reception desk and a couple months later moved into the back office and then got fully licensed.

Nothing stopped this young woman from achieving her goals. She really didn't need to work because her father, a simple gold prospector who worked hard at his trade, had staked all the claims on the $6 billion gold find that became three separate major gold mines at Hemlo, near Lake Superior. His overriding gross revenue royalty was something in the order of 5 percent of all production. But just like her father who subsequently went on to develop gold properties in the U.S. and Scandinavian countries, she was driven to achieve her goals.

Nothing, it seems, stops people in the mining exploration business from wanting to add value, and these are the kinds of people we in society should be supporting.

I wrote in my TW blog at the very peak of the previous cycle that gold was headed for a rest (i.e., a brief pull-back) because the U.S. Dollar was about to rebound (i.e., a dead cat bounce) in its longer downward pointing price trend:

Dec6/04 6:50 AM "As to gold bullion spot and futures prices today, I am expecting weakness. The price bug on the TV monitor shows down 20 cents to $457.60, but I see the USD is relatively strong this morning, and the goldminer share prices have been coming off under the pressure of profit taking. On Friday the terrorist bombings in Spain were timed with the $5 rally in gold. This morning in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the U.S. consulate, there were more bombings, which ought to support the high gold price for an hour or so. But unless the goldminer group reverses their short-term downtrend, I expect to see gold (NYSE: GLD) down on the day, and probably this week and next. If I had a crystal ball, I'd say GLD, presently at $45.60, will be in the 44's by the end of the day. That would be a major drop. Remember, GLD trades at precisely one-tenth the price of gold bullion."

Later, with GLD still in the 44's, I said I believed that it would fall to 42.5 and may trade in the 41.5 to 42.5 range for a while, and this guess has come true. To determine where GLD will go from here, I'd look at the hourly data charts of the senior goldminers plus the forex charts of the EUR and USD pair.

I don't think gold bullion or the goldminer stocks group will start to move into its next cyclic bull phase until the Euro starts trading above 1.325, up from about 1.305 today. But I think that will start happening this coming week, despite what Larry Kudlow and friends are telling the CNBC audience.

A good trade to accumulate gold stocks when you are uncertain as to when a bull cycle is to start, but where you believe that they are trading in a cycle bottom range, is to write put options and take in the premium. If the stocks do happen to move a little lower, you get the stock put to you at a lower price (and your cost base is further reduced by the premium income), but if they trade sideways you get to earn the premium income.

I can't tell you when to buy or sell because we all have different interests and resources, but I can say that the trick here is to watch the technical indicators in the very short time series data of a selection of four to ten key goldminers plus at the same time closely watch the USD to the Euro and also to the Yen. The forex trading gives an indication of money flows, and as money comes out of the USD most goes into other currencies, but a lot of it is unallocated and goes into gold accounts. That gives a boost to the bullion price. But, usually goldminer stock prices take the lead over price cycles in bullion because there is more leverage to the related equities than to the commodity.

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Forex: Unlike some currency traders who see a stronger USD continuing here, I believe the market will soon reverse its short-term move and start to move up to 1.40 and later possibly 1.45 Dollars to the Euro. The U.S. Jobs Report, which the U.S. administration and their friends on Wall Street conspired on Friday to lie and misrepresent the case which is that jobs were actually lost in December, confirms to me the USD is headed further south, confirmed by fact the U.S. economy is weakening as we see by the flattening yield curve.

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Int'l Equities: As to the global stock markets, the relatively strongest industry-based economy is Japan. It has been given a significant boost this past year with the weakness in the USD and the pull-back in the price of crude oil. But just like a corporation's fundamentals is not always an indicator of its stock price, a country's economy is not always an indicator of its currency price. These factors are influential, but not anywhere near being perfectly correlated. Everything is relative; nothing in capital markets trades in its own vacuum.

For a look at how various country markets are faring, here are charts of a few of them:

These ETF charts are of the hourly price data. In future weeks, I will use much longer data series, and I'll try to focus each week on a particular market, like Canada, Brazil or Australia, which btw are much more commodity-price sensitive markets than the U.S. or European markets.

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U.S. Equities: The U.S. equity market is due for a strong pull-back. CNBC ran a show last week with the caption on the screen, Dow 11,000? Meanwhile, as the CNBC TH's were busy promoting U.S. equities, and dissing the markets in China, Russia, and elsewhere, the Dow was tanking. This week the Dow was down 1.66 percent, the S&P was down 2.12 percent and Nasdaq was down 3.99 percent. How about the Russell 2000 small caps, down 5.89 percent on the week! That is a large amount of capital being lost in the space of five days.

I think this short-term down trend has just started for U.S. equities and will possibly go on for a few weeks. A lot will depend on the spin Wall Street gives during the quarterly circus called Earnings Season, which starts in about a week.

The U.S. and international equities markets are classified by an effective database structure called the Global Industry Classification System, which was introduced by Standard & Poor's Corp. I use it because it's good and because most professional money managers use it.

The GICS numbers are by sector:
10: Energy
15: Basic Industry Materials Producers & Processors
20: Industrial/Capital Goods Manufacturers
25: Consumer Cyclicals & Transport (discretionary)
30: Consumer Non-cyclicals (staples)
35: Healthcare
40: Financial Services
45: Technology
50: Telecommunication Services
55: Utilities

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GICS Sector 10: The Energy sector has enjoyed very high commodity prices for crude oil, which should continue in the present $40-45 range. There is some discussion that certain industry groups in this sector, such as oil drillers, will outperform, but I have no position on that here. Stock price weakness caused by profit taking is likely. In addition, investors are concerned that economic weakness may take the price of crude oil down to the mid-30s, which may or may not be. I'm inclined to believe that the crude price (U.S. Light Sweet) is likely to stay in the 40s range this month.

The known world supplies of oil are large enough to take society a couple centuries forward to where hydrogen, solar and wind power will likely be the main energy sources. In the north lands of Canada, there is at least enough oil to supply the world for the next hundred years. The only drawback is that the oil does not flow but must be squeezed out of tar sands, which is costlier than producing an equivalent barrel of oil. But, if the low price limit for oil were established at say US$30 per barrel, the Canadian oil sands operators, including many U.S. companies, and mostly U.S. financed companies, would be immensely profitable. The world would be a better place for it.

What the Saudi kingdom rulers and their colleagues in OPEC feared most when crude oil went north of $50 was a backlash by American legislators that would place restrictions on OPEC oil. These people who lead OPEC are not idiots you know; they have all been educated at Stanford and Princeton. They know the game.

They also know that between Mexico, Canada and the U.S., there is enough oil supply to permanently support the North American economy if oil prices were fixed with a $30/barrel minimum.

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GICS Sector 15: The Basic Materials sector is a $1.2 trillion sector that includes gold, as well as other metals, plus forest & wood products, chemicals and the like. The Gold industry makes up ten percent of the total sector capitalization. In fact almost half the Dow 30 stocks have individual market caps larger than the entire gold industry capitalization.

The Basic Materials sector chart is very similar to the Industrial Products sector. Investors have taken some profits this month in face of a strengthening U.S. Dollar. If there is a slowing of the economy this sector will experience further price weakness. Even if the economy appears headed to 3.0 to 3.1 percent annualized growth in 1Q05, I believe that prices in this sector will generally be depressed. However, before month end I do anticipate higher goldminer share prices.

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GICS Sector 20: The Industrial Products sector has been on a tear for the past nine months, but like many other sectors appears to be headed for lower prices this month. Investors will be closely watching for positive surprises during the rapidly approaching Earnings Season. My belief is that the past quarter was the last of the excellent earnings quarters for this sector, and that most of the recent positive earnings surprises came from "cooking books". There was also a lot of lipstick being applied to pigs in this sector this past month, including announcements of enormous share buy-backs e.g., General Electric (NYSE: GE).

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GICS Sector 25: The Consumer Cyclical sector ought to be getting hammered, but investors are looking out six to nine months for the big industry groups here like the auto manufacturers. If you listen to CNBC you'd think the car sales lots are empty and there is a waiting list of several weeks for the models you want. So Wall Street has moved over to Madison Avenue for a while at least. Still, it was recently that I selected General Motors (NYSE: GM) as one of my picks to accumulate, and most people thought (still think) I was/am nuts. We'll see. I'm not losing anything on my long positions, and my put writes have rung the cash register.

One stock in the Consumer Cyclical Sector is by far the smallest capitalization of all 30 components of the Dow. Can you guess?

Yes, it's GM. Even GE is well over seventeen times bigger. Or how about Google (NDQ: GOOG), which was birthed by twin mothers about six years ago, is already almost two and a half times bigger. Well, for now anyway.

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GICS Sector 30: The Consumer Non-cyclical sector, also called staples, has fared relatively poorly for well over a year, except for two weeks at the end of October and early November. Frequently, there is a listing of the crops, fish/livestock and office supplies industries as the broad equity market leaders, but the total market cap there (all three combined) is under $15 billion. Meanwhile, the food processors ($360 bil), personal & household product producers ($320 bil) and the non-alcoholic beverage makers ($250 bil) haven't had much to crow about in the equity market.

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GICS Sector 35: The Healthcare sector has been in the dumps, but given that Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) and Merck (NYSE: MRK) make up almost 22 percent of the XLV ETF (wrongly labelled on the chart below), it's a surprise that the chart does not look worse.

I have mixed feeling about this industry because I spent eight years of my life in it. Bottom line is that I think the people who lead this industry are mostly good ones when it comes to integrity, and care and concern for society, but the manufacturers are overly protected by legislation, and the service providers under-protected.

I like the U.S. initiatives I hear about regarding tort reform, and if combined with a lot of cutting of the crutches these companies rely upon, the much-needed cost savings could be passed to consumers.

Some of the world's greatest myths are found in this Sector. Contrary to public beliefs, my views are that:
(1) The companies called Big Pharma are mostly brochure manufacturers because most new drugs are discovered by small pharma and biotech firms.
(2) There is no effective business model in the area of family medical practice, and it is wrong to try to force one on society. There are better solutions, including ones that would make doctors themselves a lot happier.
(3) Americans are not the healthiest people in the world in spite of their excellent pharmaceuticals and medical service providers, and they are also not getting good value for the trillions they pay annually for heathcare.

The biggest industry lobbies in Washington are (1) Big Pharma, and (2) Big Oil. Why do you think that is?

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GICS Sector 40: The U.S. Financial Services sector is not my favorite, as you know, on account of my concerns that blatant conflicts of interest allow the sell-side to compromise our expectations of independent and objective advisory services.

I think this industry is so smothered in legal help, in addition to the added costs of other unnecessary intermediaries, that the line of demarcation from first serving clients to serving themselves first has been crossed. I mean the fine print and disclaimers around this industry is so burdensome today " and not because its intended to help the client " that the whole sector seems to be sinking under water.

The insurance industry, which Spitzer tells us is so crooked from the ankles up, is trading at a PE of almost 20, for Pete's sake. But are these people working for us or against us? A plane is crashed into the Twin Towers and these insurance people call it an Act of War. Then, when the second one strikes, they say it's all part of the same action, so you can't claim twice. What kind of society does that?

My cousin worked 25 years as a very senior technologist for one of Canada's insurance giants " working day & night, when needed, which, because of her position, was always. Then when her mother " my aunt " developed colon cancer, like my Mom, my cousin took some various days off " compassionate time " to be at her dieing mother's bedside. You guessed it, this company " the blueblood of Canada's insurance industry " showed what they really think of people; they fired her "for cause" " they couldn't count on her working 500 overtime hours a year! As I knew she excelled in her job, like she had in getting her Computer Sci degree from University of Waterloo, my immediate thought was that this corporation was cleaning up its books prior to a merger. It's called " you guessed it again " putting lipstick on pigs. A few months later the news came out " it always does " that this corporation was in fact merging with another. So, management went through the employee lists in search of candidates they could dump on either side, and my cousin became a manufactured casualty of merger wars. Even friendly fire is supposed to be accidental!

Eliot Spitzer ought to be just starting with these people, not winding down.

There are a lot of good companies in this sector, but these are getting scarcer over time. Increasingly, like politics, lawyers are managing them. And, as a rule, what do lawyers know about creating value?

When interest rates rise, earnings of some companies, but not all, in the financial services industry suffer. The trick to trading effectively in this sector is to closely watch changes in interest rates and bond yields and the share prices of these stocks. Don't be a sucker for stories that financial services companies are now so diversified (e.g., M&A, trading, insurance, etc) that they are unaffected by interest rate changes. That may or may not be true, and it's always true to a matter of degree, but my point is that regardless, you are always going to have some TH spin you that line when he or she wants you to buy what they are selling.

The fact is that there is no more integrity in the financial services sector than any other. Just because, for instance, one of these firms tells you they work at the job one client at a time doesn't make it any more true than, for example, CNN (or Fox) is "the most trusted name in news". It's all marketing, and people these days will say anything to get their hands into your pockets, including bankers.

That reminds me of a story a few years ago when my parents were closing up their place in the city and moving permanently to their place in the country. They didn't need an account with one of their banks because that particular bank does not have many rural branches, so my Dad went to see his manager to close out the account. Trying a final time to keep Dad tied to his bank, the manager actually said to him that, at a party downtown with the big bosses, he had heard the stock was going to be split, thus making it supposedly a good buy. When Dad called to ask my opinion, I had two things to say: (i) when you split a dime into two nickels, you still have ten cents, and (ii) my charts indicated that the stock was in a distribution zone, so would Dad please call the manager back and say that the stock was so attractive, I wanted to personally sell him mine. About six months later, the stock had split AND was down about 30 percent, as I recall.

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GICS Sector 45: The Technology sector is huge, with a market cap of $3 trillion, including the software industry that caps out at three-quarters of a trillion, in which Microsoft (NDQ: MSFT) totally dominates at $290 billion. Semi-conductors and communication equipment industries are both well over a half trillion, followed by computer services at $350 billion and computer hardware at $320 billion.

This is one of everybody's favorite sectors, and it ought to be, for here is a true value creator. The only constant in this industry is change itself. What else can you say about a sector that births and grows a new company Google (NDQ: GOOG), that in the space of six or seven years grows to be almost 2.5 times the size in market cap of the world's biggest auto manufacturer.

And not to make light of this accomplishment by a couple of recent university grads, their new company is eight times bigger in market cap than the world's second biggest airline, and four times bigger than the biggest. In fact, the entire airline industry's market cap ($52.7 billion) is actually smaller than GOOG ( $53.0 billion), but who's counting anyway.

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GICS Sector 50: The U.S. Telecommunications Services sector has a market cap of almost $1.8 trillion and a Sector PE of almost 17.5. Boy this sure isn't Dad's plain old telephone service, but with all the dreams floating around you would think maybe it's suited for primary schoolers. All I can say -- when I hear about the convergence of four major residential and business services along one telephone line -- is, "Show me the money!"

The last time I heard this carnival barking was in the fall of 1999 when AT&T's Michael Armstrong was the industry's TH. Seems he (NYSE: T) stumbled a bit. Seems like his suppliers Nortel (NYSE: NT) and Lucent (NYSE: LU) stumbled a bit.

Just in case your money managers forgot about how they destroyed your portfolios with investments in this sector, let's have one more peek at what I call the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world, but hide the charts from your kids because this just happens to be why your kids aren't going to Harvard, and somebody else's (you know who) are.

So, when Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and the rest tell me precisely what they're planning to do for their customers, I just hope all these customers are from Missouri.

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GICS Sector 55: The Utilities sector is loaded with companies that are loaded with debt. As you can tell, I think this is a weighty problem that comes around every couple years when interest rates head north.

With $650 billion invested in U.S. Electric Utilities, this is a big problem. When they have to roll over their bond issues in future years, the interest rates will not be anything like the past many years. And you know what that's going to do to earnings. Not a pretty picture here. And when the U.S. economy is not firing on all six or eight cylinders, top line growth isn't going to be all that healthy either.

With an average Sector PE of 16.9, maybe it's time to start looking elsewhere for capital growth " even capital preservation.

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One final illustration here is the Dow 30 components list.

I am going to change the format of my future Cara Stock Reports to focus on this list primarily. I am going to publish the reports in conjunction with the free Value Line reports that come out each Friday.

I hope you're not bored by this content because I love doing it. As I get my programmed trading models in good shape, I'm going to make even better market calls in the future, and they will help me do a lot more writing.

I'm looking forward to an interesting and successful year. I hope you feel the same.

BCara@BillCara.com