Quickly- Barrons articles bullish on CPB BAC HES but the most interesting articles cover other topics;
Mike Santoli on everyone craving a correction and even sited the blogger sentiment poll:
The blogger sentiment poll on Birinyi Associates' Ticker Sense blog last week showed 50% bears to 33% bulls -- almost as many bears as at the early-March lows. In late January, just as the market was ready to roll over hard, 65% of the bloggers were bullish.
Note that the poll keeps losing participants and it is kind of useless now as there are too few participants.
Strategist Jason Trennert of Strategas Partners sums up a common stance: "Simple valuation analysis leads us to be skeptical about the potential of the market to rally from these levels. The problem, it seems, after spending the last week on the road and looking at recent short-interest data, is that we have a lot of company -- very few of our clients believe the rally is real."
Trennert was always a bull until the market crashed and he has been bearish since.
John Roque, the technical strategist at Natixis Bleichroeder who has been in synch with the rally and the preceding collapse, detects an upside "breakout" on the chart of investor frustration, because they have doubted the rally and owned too little of the stuff that has run the most.
He has been excellent- period.
A fine article about the auditors- hate to say it but this fish in a CPA and did work at one of the firms mentioned in the article-
In investor lawsuits filed in recent months, BDO Seidman and McGladrey & Pullen stand accused of shoddy audits and signing off on the books of fraud-ridden businesses and investment funds. The cases, together with a string of earlier ones involving the two firms, raise unsettling questions about the level of confidence investors can put in financial audits.
The two audit firms say they stand by their work, and there is, in fact, some murkiness about auditors' responsibilities for detecting fraud. The firms are supposed to "obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free from material misstatement, including misstatements caused by fraud," according to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the federal entity that supervises auditors of public companies. The gray area centers on what is reasonable, an issue that often plays out in the courts because accounting firms can be one of the only solvent players left when a company goes down.
OK -breaking news- accountants like most people depend on a continuing stream of income from clients who pay lots of money to have their books audited- Yes - kind of a conflict of interest to pay some one to tell the world that your books are clean- so of course the accountants bend over backward to find reasons to justify what is in your financial statements- if firm X won't give you a clean opinion - generally firm Y will.
Auditors are supposed to have professional skepticism and a stream of income - and when the two meet which one do you think wins- and that is why they have liability insurance.
And Rosie back in Abelson's column - after he just wrote his last piece for BAC- as mentioned he is skeptical of the green shoots:
Looking ahead, David scoffs at the idea that the "jobs data are about to get better because the markets have enjoyed a nice two-month rally." Among the reasons he's skeptical: the still record-low workweek, at 33.2 hours; the 66,000 downward revision to the back data (which, he avers, tends to feed on itself); the 63,000 slide in temp-agency employment; and the high levels of both initial and continuing jobless claims.
All of which, he believes, foreshadow a further 550,000 payroll plunge when the May data roll out early next month.
To David, as to us, the present buoyant mood on the Street is obviously more the result of rose-colored glasses than of green shoots
