Thursday, March 6, 2008

Ring Ring, Margin Call...

Stories have been told in the past credit crunch crisises that margin calls to Merril were so frequent, that they stopped picking up the phone for three to four hours. You'll get a margin call when the clearinghouse (lender) you owe money to requires raise and fork up more capital to better secure the debt you have. That debt could be "leveraged" against anything, in Thornburg / and Carlyle Captial's case, it could be in the form of mortgage backed securities which is only fortune tellers could only value. Word is that others (Anworth Mortgage Asset, MFA Mortgage Investments, Annaly Capital Management, and Capstead Mortgage) are next on the list to default. As expected, volatility exploded with the DOW down more than ~214 points. Reverse ETFS were the only thing on my screens that was green. Technically, we have taken out the Jan lows on the S&P.





If tomorrow's job numbers are bad, hold on to your seats because "Captain we are going down!". I hope to see a panic tomorrow, wash out the weak holders. If I feel panic is in the air, I will certainly a little bit of profits off the table with SKF (currently up 25%)

South Africa's government announcement of easing miners to work at 95% capacity took Platinum and Palladium stocks (PAL and SWC) down today. It is a matter of time until they these problems happen again. I continue to hold PAL

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