Fund positions of 1.0% or greater can be found each week in the right margin of the blog, under the label cloud and recent comments areas; I highlight weekly the larger position changes.Being a long only fund, via
Marketocracy rules, the only hedges to the downside I have are cash or buying short
ETFs. I cannot short individual equities.
To see
historic weekly fund changes click here OR the label at the bottom of this entry entitled 'fund positions'.
Cash: 31.3% (vs 31.9% last week)
51 long bias: 59.4% (vs 47.2% last week)
9 short bias: 12.2% (vs 20.9% last week)
60 positions (vs 59 last week)Additions:
Intrepid Potash (IPI)Removals:
N/A
Top 10 positions = 31.4% of fund (vs 28.2% last week)
31 of the 60 positions are at least 1% of the fund's overall holdings (52%)
Major changes and weekly thoughtsAs we near the beginning of the 2
nd half recovery (only 3 weeks away) the market faltered under the clouds of "no 2
nd half recovery" - irony is a wonderful thing. As always, the news flow today or this week is not very different from what it was 4 weeks ago or 2 weeks ago or 6 weeks ago, but sometimes bad news is cheered, and sometimes bad news is feared; this week bad news was mostly feared. The dollar's nascent "recovery" (ahem) was torpedoed by
our friendly European central banker who declared he'd pull a Volcker and actually potentially raise rates into a slowing European economy. Making things more complicated for him is he oversees 15 economies, all at different parts in the cycle. Not a fun job, but inflation control is the sole mandate for the
ECB, so from that perspective one could understand.
After pulling back to the low $120s, crude staged a staggering 2 day rally of $17. We've been saying for a few weeks now that we see a lot more risk in Asia as we saw the potential for demand destruction finally coming there when/if the Asian economies started cutting back their subsidization of energy; at some price point it just becomes too expensive for every country not named China. In short order from that point,
the smaller Asian economies buckled and this week
India buckled. These still are not full scale subsidy removals, just incremental increases and even that set off (lightly/not reported in US)
drama in the streets of India.
- Angry consumers blocked rail tracks and roads and shut down businesses in several parts of India for a second day Friday, protesting a hike in fuel prices by the government.
- The federal and state governments scrambled to contain the protests. India's federal petroleum minister canceled a trip to Japan for the G-8 summit, The Press Trust of India news agency reported.
- The Indian government hiked gasoline prices by 5 rupees (US$0.13) a liter and diesel prices 3 rupees (US$0.08) a liter on Wednesday to partially offset soaring international oil prices. Fuel prices vary between states, which also impose their own taxes.