I've been perplexed by the markets crazy triple digit surges days after triple digit declines. Cooked indexes may be the root cause. I guess the financial players are taking a page out of Bush's Iraq playbook. Just move information around til you get the data you want.
The International Harry Schultz Letter's portfolio has gained up 94.9% over the past 12 months according to the Hulbert Financial Digest, vs. 9.8% for the dividend-reinvested Dow Jones Wilshire 5000.
Schultz hasn't always shown up so well in the Hulbert ratings, although over the past five years his portfolio has appreciated at a 21.31% annualized rate, vs. 4.02% annualized for the DJ Wilshire. But he has been around a long time, nearly four decades.
Schultz's latest letter arrived Sunday night. He offers this acid assessment of the recent rally: "There is a paradox in market prices as I write. We have gold, U.S. dollar, oil and most stock market indexes all showing a readiness to move up. It is an illogical combo. It may be a temporary fluke or it may be there's manipulation of the indexes going on."
Schultz, never afraid of a radical idea, takes manipulation seriously. He says: "It is fairly easy to manipulate stock indexes via just three or four blue chips, and the multinationals appear in several indexes. We've seen it before. Most stock markets were in virtual free fall and suddenly reversed into reverse head-and-shoulders buy patterns. This is a rarity. The U.S. dollar index may also be subject to manipulation."
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Oh , and Schultz thinks there's a 40% chance the US will go into recession in early 2007, 50% if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to 6%.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B88655570%2D6211%2D4954%2DB878%2DB86C52BCC3C3%7D&siteid=