everything: December 2009

Celebrate Fireworks New Year's Day in Spain, Friday, Jan. 1, 2010.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Fireworks explode over Madrid's regional government building in Puerta del Sol square to celebrates the starting of the Spanish European Presidency on New Year's Day, Friday, Jan. 1, 2010.

A general view of the Tendillas's square during the New Year's celebrations in Cordoba, southern Spain, early Friday, Jan. 1, 2010.

photo: AP

Celebrate New Year on December 31, 2009 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Fireworks explode in the sky above Edinburgh castle during the Hogmanay 2010 celebrations in Edinburgh, Scotland, January 1, 2010.

Video: Celebrate New Year on December 31, 2009, click here..

Revellers gather in Princes Street during the Hogmanay 2010 celebrations in Edinburgh, Scotland, January 1, 2010.

EDINBURGH, UNITED KINGDOM - JANUARY 1: New Year revellers enjoy the firework display above Edinburgh Castle on January 1, 2010 in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is expected that around eighty thousand people will attend the festivities in Scotland's capital

EDINBURGH, UNITED KINGDOM - DECEMBER 31: New Year revellers gather on Princes Street during the Hogmanay party on December 31, 2009 in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is expected that around eighty thousand people will attend the festivities in Scotland's capital.

EDINBURGH, UNITED KINGDOM - DECEMBER 31: New Year revellers gather on Princes Street ahead of the party to celebrate New Year on December 31, 2009 in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is expected that around eighty thousand people will attend the festivities in Scotland's capital.

EDINBURGH, UNITED KINGDOM - DECEMBER 31: New Year revellers gather on Princes Street ahead of the party to celebrate the New Year on December 31, 2009 in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is expected that around eighty thousand people will attend the festivities in Scotland's capital.

photo: Gettyimages

TIME WARP.

Discovery Channel is the fucking shit & they have this show that plays every Wednesday at 8pm called Time Warp. This show takes your normal, every day activities and video tapes them with a very special & expensive camera that plays the recorded footage back in super slow motion to show you what actually happens. You'd be very surprised to see how some things really work out.

Jane Hill outs herself as gay in BBC's in-house magazine

BBC newsreader Jane Hill has outed herself as gay in the Corporation's in-house magazine.

The 40-year-old presenter revealed she was living with her partner Sara and their dog Mavis in an interview with Ariel.

The couple have been together for about a year.

'Everyone has known for years that Jane is gay,' a colleague said.

'She hasn't made a secret of it at the BBC and although she has had other girlfriends over the years, this one seems to be the one.'

More...Jonathan Ross angers BBC bosses after slamming television schedule

Described by one male TV critic as 'severe but sexy,' Miss Hill is much admired for her presentational and reporting skills.

At one point, she even had her own unofficial internet fan club.

According to Richard Kay, Miss Hill dated Strictly Come Dancing winner Chris Hollins in the past. The pair split up some years ago but remain good friends.

Miss Hill started working in BBC local radio at 16 before taking a politics degree at London University.

After graduating from the corporation's regional news trainee scheme, she worked as a producer at Five Live before moving to television.

Miss Hill is now an anchor on the BBC's News Channel and presented Christmas Day lunchtime bulletins.

She has worked on many high profile stories including Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 and the inauguration of Barack Obama.

However, she describes her hardest job as dealing with the Madeleine McCann case.
'I was there the day after she disappeared and ended up being there for the whole of May,' she told Ariel.

'It was emotionally draining, that lack of resolution.I'm not a parent but I don't need to be one to know how absolutely horrific it must be.'

Miss Hill's lists her interests as the theatre, food and wine and going to the gym.
She admits to being an Archers addict on her BBC profile.

Respected: Miss Hill on the BBC News set with co-presenter Matthew Amroliwala

source: dailymail

More Eliza Dushku

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Eliza Dushku

Actress Eliza Dushku of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Tru Calling" is 29 today.

Sake, Sake, & More Sake!

Santiago, also known as "Mr. Nice Guy"

Mmm-mmm, nothing better than some Hot Sake and ice cold Sapporo's @ 3 in the afternoon.

... & we are on our way.

Sake Bombing, Pt. 2

Exactly where you end up when you are Sake bombing all night long.

Kristin Kreuk

Kristin Kreuk

Actress Kristin Kreuk from "Smallville" is 27 today.

Eric Sprott Reckons SP 500 Could Plunge

Well... here's a 'bearish' outlook for twenty ten.

Ah.. if you do not wish to continue reading, perhaps clicking away is the best solution. :D

On Bloomberg News Sprott Says S&P 500 Index Will Plunge Below March Low

Sprott Says S&P 500 Index Will Plunge Below March Low (Update3)
By Matt Walcoff

Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) -- The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index will collapse below its March lows as an expected rebound in economic growth fails to materialize, according to hedge fund manager Eric Sprott.

The Toronto-based money manager, whose Sprott Hedge Fund returned about 496 percent in the past nine years as the S&P 500 lost 32 percent in Canadian dollar terms, said the index’s 66 percent rally since March 9 reflects investors misinterpreting economic data. He’s predicting the gauge will fall 40 percent to below 676.53, the 12-year low reached on March 9.

“We’re in a bear market that will last 15 or 20 years, and we’ve had nine of them,” Sprott, chief executive officer of Sprott Asset Management LP, which oversees C$4.3 billion ($4.09 billion), said in an interview Dec. 18.

Investors in Sprott’s funds have been rewarded by his holdings in gold, which has climbed 48 percent since the S&P 500 peaked in October 2007. The stock has since fallen 28 percent and declined 0.1 percent to 1,126.20 today for its first loss in seven sessions.

Sprott said the Federal Reserve has kept bond yields and interest rates artificially low through its program to buy agency debt and mortgage-backed securities. The central bank expects the securities purchase program to finish by the end of March.

Expiration of the program would reduce demand for fixed- income securities, forcing up bond yields and interest rates and hurting economic growth, Sprott said.

Loss of Faith

Should the Fed renew the programs while the U.S. government continues to run record deficits, investors will lose faith in the U.S. currency, he said.

“If they announce another quantitative easing, trust me, the gold price will go up another 50 bucks that day,” he said. Gold futures fell 0.9 percent today to $1,098.10 an ounce in New York.

Sprott has been bullish in gold and gold stocks, which are used as a hedge against inflation, since at least 2001, when the precious metal was trading below $300 an ounce.

Gold futures have slipped 7.2 percent this month in New York as the U.S. dollar has rebounded on data that signaled a recovery in the U.S. economy.

American payrolls fell by 11,000 in November, the fewest since the recession began, while retail sales gained 1.3 percent, twice the rate forecast in a survey of economists by Bloomberg, according to government reports released this month.

Unjustified Optimism

Sprott says investors have been too eager to see the data as signs of recovery. While the S&P 500 added 0.6 percent on the day of the employment report, a 23rd consecutive month of payroll contraction was no reason for optimism, he said.

“We don’t have employment gains,” he said. “We have less of a decline. That’s a sign of weakness. The data is weak.”

Sprott said gold is the only asset about which he remains positive in the short term. His C$1.42 billion Sprott Canadian Equity Fund -- which is up 23 percent in five months -- has 34 percent of its portfolio in mining stocks and another 39 percent in bullion as of Nov. 30.

He said though he has no target price for the metal he doesn’t think it has reached a ceiling after quadrupling over the past eight years.

“If you get into this thing where you’ve got to keep printing more and more and more, who knows about the price of gold?” he said. “It will be the new currency in due course.”

Growth Potential

Within the mining industry, Sprott prefers companies with smaller market capitalization, which he said have greater potential to grow.

Since last year, Sprott’s firm has become the biggest shareholder of Avion Gold Corp., which mines in Africa, and East Asia Minerals Corp., which explores in Indonesia. Avion is undervalued for its projected 2010 production, he said. According to a Dec. 16 note from analyst Eric Zaunscherb of Canaccord Financial Inc., Avion was trading at 2.9 times its estimated 2010 earnings, compared with a multiple of 10.5 for its peers.

Regarding East Asia Minerals, Sprott said, “I just get the feeling that these guys could find a multi-double-digit-million- ounce property.”

East Asia completed a 2,000-meter, 14-hole drilling program at its largest Indonesian property that Canaccord analyst Wendell Zerb called “encouraging” and indicative of a large zone of gold mineralization. Over the next two quarters, East Asia is to drill 45 more holes at the site and begin drilling in four more locations in the country, Zerb said.

Outside of the gold industry, Sprott owns shares of Wavefront Technology Solutions Inc., a TSX Venture Exchange- listed company whose products are meant to increase oilfield production. Its technology could be used on at least two-thirds of the world’s oil wells, he said.

Sprott, 65, founded his current firm in 2001 after divesting Sprott Securities, now Cormark Securities Inc., to its employees.

This is the link to Sprott Asset Management's December newsletter, in which Sprott is effectively asking "Is it all just a Ponzi scheme?"

And of course this newsletter was featured by Jesse Who Is Buying All These US Treasuries (And Can They Keep It Up in 2010)?

So what does all this mean?

The bottom line is that the data seems to indicate that the foreign sector traditional buyers (at least for the past 20 years or so) of US sovereign debt are walking away from the market as they had said they would do, and are moving their reserves into other instruments.

This may not be such a great problem if the US trade balance continues to narrow, but it certainly is not healthy to see the Fed and the US household sector as the major markets for US sovereign debt.

If 2010 is not a year of recovery for the average American, the ability of the Treasury and Fannie/Freddie to keep expanding their debt offerings is going to become quickly constrained. How can Joe Sixpack keep saving and buying Treasuries, and at the same time consume at a rate sufficient to grow GDP? All on a stagnant median wage and a contracting housing market? Think the rest of the world is suddenly going to grow a taste for US exports? Will the US retreat into isolationism and trade barriers? That might not be Price Index friendly.

The US is marshaling its ratings agencies and multinationals to cast doubt on the European union, their currency, and their solvency, and threaten to take them down first to maintain an equilibrium of failures.

But in fact, the US is much closer to the point of a serious debt crisis than one might imagine from what is being put out by most US based financial analysts. There is a nasty convergence of constraints bearing down on the Fed and the Treasury that look to push the ability to market dollar debt to the breaking point. If a couple big States go under next year, the dominoes may start falling very quickly.

I see the problem, but I have to confess that I do not yet see how the Bernanke Fed intends to dodge this collision. And I know that they must see this as well, and have a game plan. Could counting on an exogenous event that would provoke an artificial demand and neo-isolationism (something like a regional war, or at least a trade war) be called a plan? Can they possibly be in denial, and just looting the capital before the Empire falls? It is hard to see how the resolution of this will unfold just yet, but I am pretty sure that many of the simple scenarios that people are laying out so nicely with such fine rhetoric are more fantasy than probable outcomes. This is going to knock our socks off default-wise.

If you think that this crisis will be deflationary, then you might be a bit surprised to see what happens if and when a US sovereign debt offering fails in the market. It will not be pretty. And it will not be dollar friendly in the longer term. But who can say what will happen, when there are so many possibilities.

The market may likely reveal to us what is coming, if we are observant, and lucky, and have the willingness to listen to what we may not wish to hear.

There are some definite gaps and assumptions in the case that Sprott makes, raising more questions than providing answers. It is possible that Americans have shifted an enormous amount of capital out of consumption and stocks into Treasuries. It is also possible that this is just masking something else, as Sprott suggests. But this does not affect the argument we make, that something has got to give, as the US consumer is tapped, and cannot sustain this type of sovereign debt purchasing given the offerings that the Treasury must make in 2010. And if it is something else, then that will be revealed 'when the tide goes out' next year. The Fed and its enablers are the buyers of last resort, increasingly so. And that means increasing monetization, and a stretching of the value basis of the bonds and the dollars.

A Stock Called Ramunia And A Research Report Titled 'The Big IF'

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Ramunia announced its earnings. It lost much less money (previous quarter it had 25 million in losses). LOL! (Why did I LOL?! Err.. sometimes, on any given day, things are weird in the market. like for example, losing less is good, it seems. )

Anyway, this article is not about Ramunia current and future prospect. This article is inspired by what had transpired back some couple of years ago, back in Oct 2006.

It's about research reports.

:D

Now most read the report, just to get the 'recommendation' and 'the target prices'. They read it to gauge the potential of the stock. Sometimes, such homework reading works wonders. Sometimes, it doesn't. In fact, sometimes, such reading could prove hazardous for one's financial well being if the stock tanks!

And some would be real quick to conclude that that there are many ways to fish in the market and research report reading is simply a waste of time.

But some still insist that research reports are essential and they would be real quick to point out that this is, simply is life. This is how the game is played in the stock market.

Without the strong brokerage recommendation, without the much higher target price imposed on the stock, how could the stock move higher?

Surely no stock can move themselves, yes? ( Can 'sendiri jalan' meh? Can 'kaki kia' meh? )

Isn't it true?

No?

And needless to say, some judge the quality the quality of the report based on the stock movement.

No?

What good is recommendation if the stock does not move as per the recommendation?

No?

And this is where it gets tricky. If the stock moves as per the recommendation, doesn't it mean that the recommendation was spot on? But what about the facts? What about the quality of the reasoning behind the recommendation? Does it not count?

6 Oct 2006. Ramunia was 1.23. OSK Research gave it a fair value of 1.51. By 25 June 2007, Ramunia hit 1.68!

How dude?

Would you say that OSK is good? Hey the stock outperformed, didn't it?

Now before I highlight the report, consider the following.

Say a stock was earning only some 9.7 million. The next year, the stock was projected to earn some 22.8 million. And the following year 58.8 million. And the following year, the stock was projected to earn a whopping 100.2 million!!!

Yup, the stock is projected to earn from 9.7 million to a whopping 100.2 million.

How?

When you read a research report with such a wild earnings projection, what does this indicate to you? ( LOL! The quick would be fast enough to point out that something smelly is most likely to happen. :P )

6th Oct 2006, OSK released a 13 page report on Ramunia. (There are colored pictures included in the report too! Incredibly, the stock was not rated but OSK specifically said in its closing statement " Nonetheless, Ramunia is well positioned in the industry to ride on the large number of contracts that will likely be awarded in 2007 and 2008. As such, we advise investors to keep a close eye on this company".

The first arrow on the top left indicates the 13 page report on Ramunia. (Such a long and colorful report but yet, OSK did not state boldly their recommendation on the stock.)

And the report was smartly titled, "The Big IF".

LOL! Nice disclaimer already, yes? If things did not pan out as mention in the report, could the report be held accountable?

At the end of the first page..

Yup, that's OSK projection of Ramunia's earnings back on 6 Oct 2006.

From earning 9.7 million in 2005, Ramunia was projected by OSK to earn 22.8 million in fy 2006 to 58.8 million in fy 2007 to 100.2 million in fy 2008!!!

I guess earnings could grow as rapidly like cow grass for Ramunia.

Now, the earnings projection was not the only issue on that screen shot.

Fair value of RM1.51 derived from 14x PER and 3.0x P/BV on a fully
diluted basis.

With such a massive earnings growth projection, could you see that the analyst, Chris Eng, did not put which fy earnings the "14x PER" is based on. ( And a 3.0x P/BV??? LOL! Was it justifiable to have a 3.0x BV for Ramunia?) (Will get back to this issue later.)

So based on historical and current earnings trend back in 2006, how was Ramunia's performance? Was there any REAL justification for OSK to make such incredible earnings projection?

How? It was only a 'credible' performance as per OSK standard. (ps, yeah, Ramunia's NTA is only 0.66 sen. :P)

Yeah and it was credible despite "..EBITDA margins declined from 20.1% to 13.5% as the mix of contracts varied."

And the nice colored chart showed zero signs of Ramunia's potential explosive earnings growth as suggested by OSK.

LOL! Of course OSK justifies the explosive growth by stating the massive potential from its order book..

Of course, the analyst was quick to point out the risk for such projection in Ramunia.. (yeah.. how could he and OSK be held accountable since the report was already titled "The Big IF"

Nicely put, eh? "Big on promise, uncertainty on delivery"!!!

Does this means that the promise is there.. whether Ramunia can deliver or not, is another story all together.

And of course, there is the dilution in earnings..

It's only a dilution of some 43%.

Yeah, only 43%.

LOL! And yeah, it's a necessary evil.

So despite the massive dilution in future earnings by some 43%, and the risk of Ramunia unable to deliver its promise, this did not stop OSK from making the following valuation.

Quote: "Based on these parameters and a share base of 788.4m to value Ramunia. We value Ramunia with an EPS on 7.46 sen."

Multiplying the earnings per share of 7.46 with the share base of 788.4 million, we get an earnings of 58.8 million.

Which means despite all the risk mention, OSK is basing their valuation on an EXTREMELY optimistic fy 2007 earnings projection of 58.8 million.

Increible since in fy 2005, Ramunia earned only some 9.7 million.

(LOL! See how easy the game is played? Project the earnings sky high, then you will have the much higher target price for the stock! Easy peasy, eh? :P)

And of course, OSK had the nice 'disclaimer'..

Let's fast forward. December 2008. So how did Ramunia do for its fy 2008?

Quarterly rpt on consolidated results for the financial period ended 31/10/2008

Ramunia recorded a whopping 279 million in losses!

And Ramunia today trades less than 0.40 sen.

Ah... but some would say that this is a non issue. Ramunia did move much higher after the research report was published.

Ah... but some would also say that OSK was not the ONLY brokerage that was positive on Ramunia back on those days. Others were just as optimistic.

Ah... but some would also say this 0.40 sen is not a fair reflection because of there's the dilution caused by the conversion of warrants and then if not mistaken, there was also a rights issue back in 2008.

ps... Wishing everyone a happy 2010. :D

Movie Mazzupial's 10 best films of 2009

Last year when I sat down and tried to write a list of the best films of 2008, after about 20 minutes I threw down my pen in defeat. I concluded I couldn’t do it because, put simply, I hadn’t seen enough films to make the call.

This year I feel I’ve seen enough, read enough and written enough about films from a wide range of sources that I don’t feel as inferior when it comes to throwing together my choices of the best in `09. I even put off posting this list to the second last day of the year so I could cram in as many movie screenings as possible, poor me. Basically the titles on this list went beyond the `wow’ reaction; they freakin’ blew me out of the water and most are now permanently embedded on my favourites list. Drum roll please . . .

10. Milk