Technically Speaking
South Asia Technical Analysis with Phil Smith
from Africa News blog:
Update on the refugee camp that now lives in the sky
(Updates reaction from ECHO in paragraph 9)
Screen grab of the introduction to the online game "The City That Shouldn't Exist"
A few months ago I wrote a story about a controversial online game posted on Facebook called the “The City That Shouldn’t Exist” that was consequently pulled off the Web days after its launch amid claims it objectified refugees and lacked sensitivity.
The game developed by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) with funding from ECHO, the European Commission’s humanitarian agency, and designed to raise awareness of Dadaab refugee camp on the Kenyan-Somali border, is now back online but with some noticeable changes.
from Africa News blog:
Dadaab Facebook refugee game pulled from web amid claims of poor taste
LONDON (AlertNet) – It’s 3.43 a.m. and you’re fast asleep when a siren on your bedroom wall starts flashing and howling. It’s a red alert from headquarters.
“A crisis?” you say, bolting out of bed. “People in need? Time to suit up!”
from Global Investing:
Solar activities and market cycles
Can nature's cycles enrich our finance and market theories?
Market predictions based on the alignment of the sun, moon and the earth and other cycles could help investors stay disciplined and profit in economic storms, says Daniel Shaffer, CEO of Shaffer Asset Management.
Shaffer writes that sunspot activities show that the sun has an approximate 11-year cycle and as of March 31, 2009, sunspot activity has reached a 100-year low (this, interestingly, coincides with a cycle low in equity markets, reached sometime mid-March in 2009).
But a low in solar activity seems to be followed by a high. Scientists are predicting a solar maximum of activity in sunspots in 2012 that could e the strongest in modern times, according to Shaffer.
"The concern is that something weird is going on and that the current extreme low in the sunspot cycle, similar to the stock market, can be followed by an unusually high sunspot cycle leading to a solar maximum, or in other words, a peak in sunspot activity," he writes in his latest book.
"Our analysis is currently indicating a stock market low in the United States in approximately year 2012, which coincides with either a sunspot low or high depending on the cycle. "
from Environment Forum:
Is Bloom Energy the next GE?
Updated on Feb 24.
The blogosphere is rumbling with anticipation of the "Bloom Box", a pint-sized "power plant" that could change the way we power our homes and offices forever.
The buzz began Sunday when 60 minutes aired an exclusive profile of the alternative energy fuel cell developed by startup Bloom Energy and its CEO K.R. Sridhar (a former rocket scientist) in Silicon Valley. After eight years in the making, the power plant in a box is set to be released Wednesday with California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell on hand.
"You'll generate your own electricity with the box and it'll be wireless. The idea is to one day replace the big power plants and transmission line grid, the way the laptop moved in on the desktop and cell phones supplanted landlines," reports CNet News.
What makes this claim to the perfect, zero-emission energy source different? For starters, backing from Walmart, eBay, Google, Staples, FedEx, and hundreds of millions of dollars in investments.
And, the World Economic Forum names Bloom Energy as one of 26 top 2010 Technology Pioneers: Energy and Environment.
So one thing that I think is missing in the equation is the energy cost of producing the fuel cells. They aren’t infinite, which means they are consumable, which means they need to be replaced periodically. What is going to make these? Unless they’ve come up with a way of getting more electricity out of a fuel cell than it takes to produce them, it is worthless.
SENSEX – Bouncing off the 2006 lows II
The SENSEX is still finding good support at the 2006 post sell-off lows. We could be in the midst of forming a bottoming pattern, possibly a double bottom. It’s vital the supports near the recent lows hold. We are heading into a critical few days/weeks for the SENSEX in technical terms.
Near term technical signals are mixed and you can find a daily update on my website at www.reutersindia.net
On the second longer term chart you can clearly see the support. You can also see on the sub-chart the 10-day close-to-close volatility (see note 1) study is coming off the high very quickly. High volatility coincides with market turning points, note the past price action. Each time there is a peak in volatility the price action turns. Given what is happening now we could be seeing another peak and another turning point.
Now to the correlations the SENSEX has with other markets. The third chart is the SENSEX’s correlation with the Asia MSCI – ex Japan (see note 2) index it is still high as you can see. I’m using the MSCI as proxy but the picture is similar if you use the U.S. S&P 500 or even the Dow Jones vs the SENSEX.
hi phil,a bottom is on for sure, how anout the dow and s and p, only a bottom there will translate into a bottom here, that is the uncertain part for me, too difficult to call a bottom in the US though one may be around in short order.rajveer
SENSEX – Bouncing off the 2006 lows
Markets are driven primarily by fear and greed and we’ve seen both in equal measure over the past few years. Greed as people borrowed money and piled into stocks for instant riches, and fear now everything is lost, and more if investments were leveraged.
It has happened before. It was the same in the 1980s and the crash of 1987 and the NASDAQ bubble of the late 1990s. As a cub reporter in Fleet Street I covered the ’87 crash and investors’ attitude then was exactly the same as it is now and I’m hearing and reading the same reactions.
Boom-bust has happened before and will undoubtedly happen again for similar, or different reasons, but history will repeat itself.
The major lesson a savage market correction has for retail investors, short and long-term alike, is to have sensible timescales and aspirations and take profits when they seem reasonable. If you let your bet ride in a game of roulette, you could get super rich but you could lose the lot.
A professional trader will tell you there is no such thing as a bad profit and banking them, even small ones, is no bad thing. A SENSEX investment in early 2006 at 10,000 had gained 100 pct within two years and by any standards that is a colossal gain for a stock market. Even without the credit crisis the market was anyway staging a much needed correction to a hugely overbought position.
The nice bounce the SENSEX had at the 12,500 level ran slap bang into an unknown in the form of the scale of the credit crunch fallout and the market has retraced back to where it is now, around 2/3 of its entire upmove. (See first chart)
SENSEX – High volatility means…
I’ve been away for the bulk of the excitement but here are some thoughts about the current India stock market charts and the state of things in general. The SENSEX collapsed through some very strong support levels in the face of fundamentals which were dire in the extreme. It breezed through 12,500 and is now sitting close to the 61.8 pct Fibonacci retracement of its entire upmove since 2001/2002. The short-term bearish technical indicators are still in place and the 2006 post sell-off low around 9,700 is acting as support as the chart shows. The 61.8 pct Fibonacci retracement level kicks in around the same area. Short-term indicators like the Parabolic-SAR, MACD and Alpha-Beta trends are all still bearish. We need to watch both closely in the next few days in any case. It is from the MACD and Parabolic-SAR we will get our early signs of a bottoming out. On the second chart you can see the correlation between the SENSEX and the other Asian markets, here measured by the MSCI Asia ex-Japan index. It is positive and high and the India market is being very much driven by what is happening overseas. The decoupling the India markets enjoyed at the beginning of September after the government won the confidence motion has gone as you can clearly see on this chart. The current market declines are a symptom of the economic problems caused by the credit crunch rather than being purely market related. In as much, this is not like the 1987 stock market crash but more like the 1997 Asia crisis and the associated market declines. At the moment the markets may be overacting to the downside but they are struggling to discount economic developments a year or so down the line. Given the outlook is so hazy right now the markets are understandably volatile and incredibly jittery. I covered the 1987 stock market crash when I was based in London and remember at the time that it seemed like the end of the world and things were never going to recover. The authorities reacted, as they have now, by throwing liquidity at the markets and frankly that is pretty much the only policy response that is effective in the near-term. One thing that is very noticeable is that the volatility of the market has increased a lot. If you look at the third SENSEX chart I’ve put on a study of the 10-day close to close volatility. As you can see the volatility is currently getting historically very high. You can see the earlier peaks of this study coincide with the end of the 2006 sell-off, the big turn down in early 2008 and the false dawn turn we had in July. High volatility is associated with turning points…and volatility is currently very high. I publish a daily technical analysis view for the SENSEX, gold and oil at www.reutersindia.net
i have been watching reutersindia.net over a year.
it was very interesting to see the Sensex breaking the level 9700 and going below that level without any difficulty. Surprising ….
from Global Investing:
The final frontier market
The present may be pretty bleak for investors, but that has not stopped one firm from looking decidedly at the future - privatised space travel. Fortis Investments reckons space tourism will one day become all the rage with travellers willing to fork out thousands upon thousands of dollars for the adventure.
In the latest issue of Fund Expert magazine, Fortis looks at the nascent industry and reckons that the price of a space trip - roughly $200,000 to begin with - should come down substantially as a result of competition. There is already some - including Virgin Galactic, which is aiming for launch by next year, and Rocketplane, which should go up the year after. They will start modestly, just sticking their noses out of the atmosphere.
The new industry, however, eventually should mean a boom in new employment, requiring commercial astronauts, flight attendants, tour operators and so on. But the flight operators may also be licking their lips at the prospect of getting government military and scientific research contracts. Fortis - whose Brussels headquarters coincidently is located on Avenue de l'Astronomie -- reckons that a NASA flight currently costs the U.S. government $1.3 billion a pop. So outsourcing would be attractive.
To boldly go, in effect, looks set to become more than just Star Trek's mantra and the world's most famous split infinitive.
SENSEX – Unchanged on week, solid support at 12,500
Despite the financial carnage on Wall Street, the SENSEX ended the week a touch higher after bouncing off the very solid 12,500 support level we have had drawn on the chart for some time. On the face of it, that would seem like a spectacularly robust performance but the Dow Jones has done almost the same thing. While it is still trading as I write this, it looks like ending the week only marginally lower. All things considered, I find that pretty amazing. The U.S. cavalry has certainly ridden to the rescue with the authorities taking on some huge liabilities in an attempt to calm the markets. But it is not clear whether this will work or that we won’t see more huge failures. Early in my career I covered the 1987 stock market collapse and remember well the kind of panic we are seeing now spreading across the globe. The dynamic of the current crisis is very different to that of 1987 but two things never change in financial markets – fear and greed. At the moment fundamentals matter little, the key to the whole thing, and how it unwinds from here, is sentiment. After the 1987 crash the authorities also threw liquidity at the markets but in the form of sharp cuts in interest rates to counteract the negative wealth effect on the economy. This actually led to economic overheating because stock markets recovered very rapidly after the 1987 collapse. The sharp recovery was due to companies which had issued equity to either raise money or for M&A, taking the opportunity to buy back stock at rock bottom prices. A fact well worth bearing in mind given the amount of equity has been issued in the past couple of years. The chart is the same one I’ve been using for a while showing the SENSEX since the end of 2005. All the important support and resistance levels are shown and you can see just how important that 12,500 level is. Another interesting development lately has been the correlation between the SENSEX and the other Asian markets, measured on this chart on the left by the MSCI Asia ex-Japan index. You can see the correlation line is turning positive after being negative for well over a month. The decoupling the India markets enjoyed after the government won the vote of confidence lasted around six weeks, but that premium is now exhausted. The influence of other markets is getting much stronger again.
from UK News:
What’s your gadget of the year?
******For those immune to the charms of the latest gadgets, they are expensive, infuriating and fragile devices that are destined to be lost or stolen or end up languishing in the back of a drawer.******But for gadget-lovers there is nothing better than getting their hands on a covetable new toy that promises to make life easier or more fun.******Readers of Stuff magazine, who are more likely to fall into the second category, are voting for their favourite gadget of the last 12 months.******Here's the shortlist: Apple's iPhone, Sony's PlayStation 3, Nintendo's Wii Fit, Microsoft's Xbox 360, Asus Eee PC and the B&W Zeppelin.******Nominees in the other categories include the BlackBerry Bold, Nokia N96, Creative Zen X-Fi and TomTom GO 730.******Do you constantly upgrade your mobile/iPod/television in a quest for the latest features? Or are you quite happy still using your basic phone and full-size TV?******What was your favourite gadget of the last year and why do you love it so much?*******Click here for full story*
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The Wall
The fighting in Somalia which has left scores of deaths and many more displaced is a tragedy which no one can dare explain to others.However,this latest crisis due to the drought affecting millions of Somalis and has forced many to flee in search of food and clean water has taken another sad events in modern history and the international community who have been so generous are now turning a blind eye to this unprecedented crisis in Somalia.The so called al shabab terrorists groups who at first were not willing to allowing any food aid to enter the areas they control.Even though they know very well that they can not provide food for the people, shows how mentally ill these groups are.They also never realised that no man can live alone and no man is an island.Their aims are to topple the transitional western backed government and the implementation of sharia law through out the country,but that seems to be backfiring quickly.This is now the time for them to ask themselves this simple question:”Does fighting and fighting really worth the suffering of their people who are now desperately in need of food?While aid organisations are calling for help to prevent the massive deaths of the people in Somalia is it not time to down their weapons and work towards peace to rebuild that war torn country for over 20 good years in the making.Obviously the masks of these groups have fallen down and the darkest side of them is being exposed and will continue to do so.I am kindly appealing for the world not to ignore Somalia because of a group of terrorist who donot want peace in the region.Please help Somalia,please.