Bearish News

TradeKing’s $4.95 trade fees have attracted a lot of attention in the e-brokerage world, allowing them to steal customers away from competitors. Compare their pricing to $9.99+ at Etrade and Ameritrade, and it’s easy to see why.

Fees and Pricing

Say you make 100 trades per year. Switching to TradeKing would save you $500/year, assuming you pay $9.99 today. That’s $500 more to put to work in the markets every year, money that will compound and grow over time. Investors who trade more often will see even bigger savings, of course.

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Pricing Comparison:

As you can see, trading is much cheaper on TradeKing. Their $4.95 price includes broker-assisted trades. I’ve had to use this option before with Etrade, when my internet went down. It wasn’t cheap. If you get in a similar spot, it’s nice that TK doesn’t charge a ton.

Official TradeKing site here:

Options pricing: Trades are $4.95  plus $.65 per contract. Compare that to $9.99 and $.75 per contract with Etrade. Big difference, especially when you trade volume.

Savings like that can make a huge difference for options traders. TK also offers options price calculators and options screening tools, allowing you to search for options that are fundamentally cheap (or expensive) depending on whether you’re looking to buy or sell.

Mutual Funds: Transaction fees also beat rivals by around 25%. They’re $14.99 vs. $19.99. These small savings make a big difference over time, especially in retirement accounts where your portfolio has decades to grow.

TradeKing is the cheapest online broker I know of. I can’t see fees going much lower, as TK’smargins must already be thin when you factor in exchange fees and business overhead. I assume TradeKing must be relying on some more advanced offerings to pad margins.

Drawback – Not Ideal For OTC/Penny Stocks

One potential drawback is TradeKing’s $.01/share fee on shares priced less than $1. For dumpster-divers and OTC gurus, this is not ideal. Those fees can really add up over time, when you’re doing transactions with 100k or even 1m shares at a time.

Charts and Technical Analysis Review

TradeKing offers some nice technical analysis tools, which are powered by Recognia. You can set up email alerts to notify you when breakouts or other events are happening.

Charting is pretty standard. Pattern-recognition, tons of TA indicators you can add, comparisons, etc. Like research, most investors can find the charts they need for free these days.

Margin Rates

TradeKing’s margin rates are slightly cheaper than the competition, at 6.5%. That compares to ETrade’s 7.99% and TD Ameritrade’s 9.00%.

Research Reports

TK offers MarketGrader fundamental research reports to clients. These look solid, but don’t boast the same big-name appeal that firms Etrade pay for. But to be honest, I find very little value in reports from companies like Standard and Poors.

All these ratings agencies have fee-based relationships with the companies they cover, and that creates a bias problem. I was an Etrade customer for 8 years, and found most of those reports to be useless. Better information can be found for free on the web, in my experience. I’d rather not pay for pricey research that I never use.

Customer Service

TradeKing offers phone support with minimal wait times. They also offer online chat and email support. I made a call to test their claims, and got a real person on the line within a minute. Not bad, considering how cheap the trades are. They also received Smart Money’s #1 in Customer Service award in 2008.

Tax Reporting

Review Conclusion:

Controlling costs today is more important than ever. TradeKing is a good way for investors and traders alike to cut their brokerage fees in half. I’m currently in the process of moving my old Etrade account to them. I make about 120 buys a year, so this should save me $600 in the next 12 months alone. Not bad.

Here’s a link to signup:

Feel free to share your own review of TradeKing in the comment section. I’d like to hear all experiences, good and bad.

Occasionally I write about what I’m buying on this site, so thought it would be worthwhile to review my picks and the reasoning behind them.

Note: Performance %’s are from date of post to 03/05/2010. In many cases, I stopped out earlier on losers or sold winners. I provide additional color when possible.

The Bad

Long Gamestop (GME) @ $24.50: Down 26%. A devious value trap, which still looks cheap to me at 7x trailing P/E. But it gets no respect on Wall St. Everyone’s too busy speculating on BAC and the TBTF mafia, over-leveraged REITs, etc. I am still long GME, but it’ll probably be even cheaper soon.

Short Simon Properties (SPG) @ $51: Down 54%. I’ve traded around this position a few times, with total losses of around 25% on it. I didn’t cover my initial $51 short in the $20′s when I had the chance. Got greedy, figuring they were headed to zero just like GGP. Then the Fed/Gov stepped in with more liquidity than God, and raising capital became much easier, especially for a well-connected REIT like SPG.

Expensive lesson learned, covered that $51 short in the high 40′s. I’ve re-shorted since and been stopped out for losses a few times (and am still stubbornly watching for signs that the inevitable and long-awaited CRE shoe is finally dropping).

Long GRZZX (May 2009): Down 49%. I sold this short-only mutual fund for a 20% loss, as the bull market picked up steam and bailout bonanza really got under way. Theory was that it would be nice to have a diversified basket of shorts for the inevitable double dip.

At that point the market had already bounced 28% from lows. The world was ending, and this little bounce was dead-cat in nature. Boy was I early. Not to mention generally naive about the effects of government-mandated recklessness. A few days after I bought GRZZX in May, I wrote The Deck is Stacked Against Shorts. A month earlier I warned bears that More Bailouts and Inflation Loom. Shoulda been bargain hunting or speculating on garbage stocks.

The Good

Long AAPL @ $81 (Jan 2009): Trades at $218.95: Up 168%: Apple was a lesson in how to trade the next panic. When that crazy growth-monster momo stock you lust after (but don’t want to pay a premium for) crashes, BUY IT. Other examples: VMW, GOOG.

I bought more AAPL at prices ranging from $81-$93, and ended up with quite a large position (for me). If I remember correctly,  Apple was trading at around a 16x P/E with screaming earnings growth and $30/share in cash. There really were some bargains there for a while… Still holding around 1/3, house money. Sold the rest from $160-$194. The stock is a beast, no telling where it’ll stop.

Long Palladium bullion @ $250/ounce: (June ’09) Now trading at $470/ounce – Up 88% (June 2009). I think my thesis was solid, and appears to be playing out. Back then I said, “It may prove to be a good hedge against an inflation-fueled recovery. As the world continues to print money in an attempt to stimulate industry/consumers, demand and inflation could increase dramatically. This may in turn cause commodities like palladium to rise significantly, as governments artificially goose the markets.”

Long PGJ @ $13: (Jan ’09) Trades at $24.21 – Up 82%. My favorite China ETF. It has minimal financial sector exposure (unlike FXI, where the index is 40%+ finance stocks). Still holding most of this.

Long TRAMX @ $5.66: (May ’09) Now trades at $6.99 – Up 23%. Africa and Middle East mutual fund. If traditional emerging markets aren’t risky enough for you, you can buy this fund and get exposure to these politically volatile but fast-growing markets. Still holding.

Long EKWAX @ $45: (Jan 2009) Now trades at $73.29 – Up 58%: I love this gold fund. These guys know how to pick winners in the mining space. It’s up 602% over the last 10 years. I agree with George Soros here. Gold may eventually be a bubble, but it’s one that I want in on. And it has not come close to peaking yet, with countries around the world engaged in a currency race to the bottom. Still own it.

Morals of the Story, Lessons Learned

Overall I’m happy with the picks I’ve posted here. They either crushed it or bombed, not much in the middle.

I didn’t have enough long equity exposure in ’09, but the ones I did have made up for it. I also own gold and silver, which have done well.

One of the biggest lessons for me was the difficulty of shorting in an environment like this. The Fed has been pumping liquidity into the system like mad, and outcomes depend more on the actions of a few questionably-motivated creatures (who have abysmal track records) than actual fundamentals. Nothing to be done about that though, from an investing perspective anyway.

In hindsight, it was clearly better to bargain-hunt and speculate than short in ’09. My best gains of the year were pure speculation or value plays. I didn’t publish two of the big ones here, but I did post them on my old Motley Fool CAPS blog. One was CROX at $1.20 (trades at $7.49 today, 524% gain).  The other was Men’s Wearhouse @ $11.20 (trades at $25.17 today).

Reading hedge fund veterans like Bill Fleckenstein was quite helpful. I’ve been subscribing to his service for a while, and he closed his short-only fund near the market bottom, after a hugely profitable year. His short positions have been burnt by Fed Chairmen past, so he knew what effect all that Fed liquidity would have. He told readers he’d rather be in precious metals and cheap stocks than short.

I learned a lot about government intervention in general, and its impact on markets. Next time it looks like the world is ending, everyone should buy horrible pig stocks that will  benefit from the Feds’ clumsy/corrupt attempts to “stabilize the markets”, AKA bail out politically-connected mega-firms.

The latest sentiment reading by Investors Intelligence shows a disturbing trend. Only 15.6% of financial newsletters are currently bearish on equities.

Last time the bearish indicator was this low was April 1987. A few months later (Black Monday) the DJIA dropped 21% in a single day:

In other words – when everything seems peachy — watch out. Turns out that peaks and troughs in investor sentiment are pretty good contra-indicators. Bullish sentiment tends to peak as bubbles are near their top, and vice versa.

From the revamped and newly Bloombergesque Business Week:

Pessimism about U.S. stocks among newsletter writers fell to the lowest level since April 1987, six months before the equity market crash known as Black Monday, following the biggest rally in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index in seven decades.

The proportion of bearish publications among about 140 tracked by Investors Intelligence fell to 15.6 percent yesterday from 16.7 percent a week earlier. Sentiment has improved since October 2008, when the financial crisis drove the figure to a 14-year high of 54.4 percent. After plunging 38 percent in 2008, the S&P 500 has risen 25 percent this year.

This is not to say markets wont’ run again in 2010. Irrational bull markets can last much longer than you’d think. The momentum they build up is impossible to fight. Gotta wait for that to break before getting seriously short. Example – After the bearish-sentiment index bottomed in 1987, the market rallied another 14% before crashing.

Smart investors like Bill Fleckenstein have been highlighting the credit bubble since the mid-1990′s. And today markets are more irrational than ever. Government intervention is preventing market cycles from proceeding like never before.

Industries like housing, banking, and commercial real estate have become completely dependent on government support. Their future (and that of our currency) depend on whether our leaders will extend or end this support. It’s a ludicrous, manipulated market.

So far America’s leaders have repeatedly demonstrated that they have zero tolerance for economic pain. Their support for the financial markets seems unlimited, no matter the long-term cost. I don’t see that changing without something drastic hapenning – another huge round of bailouts, a shift in the political landscape, or something else.

Earnings Distorted, Bloated

Earnings, as officially reported, are less and less reflective of a company’s real income.. Today’s earnings are nothing less than a rosy version of what they “should of been, had not X happened.” X represents the bad stuff that constantly happens to businesses, but currently they are treated as one-time events, no matter how many quarters-in-a-row they occur. One-time transactions that are profitable, however, are included in “headline” earning numbers, of course.

This is a different breed of bubble. On top of creative income interpretation, asset losses are being swept under the rug with an impressive array of accounting gimmicks. Changes to rules that govern loan valuation, and the continued allowance of off-balance-sheet vehicles are examples.

Related:

• More Bailouts and Inflation Loom
• David Tice Sees S&P at 400

Overvalued companies are everywhere these days. Gamestop (GME), however, is not one of them. It looks like a good deal to me at these levels. Disclosure: I recently bought GME.

If you aren’t familiar with the company, they operate a huge chain of retail video game stores. And they just reported a solid quarter, beating expectations. They were able to buck the market’s down-trend late in the week.

A particularly profitable part of their business is used games. Games have a limited shelf-life for individual players. When they get bored, GameStop offers a convenient place to sell them. But the store only pays $3 to $15.

GameStop can turn around and sell the same game at a $5 discount to new ones. Used games in high demand fetch $45+ retail. There’s no real risk to buying used games, other than scratched disks. But GameStop offers refunds for bad games.

This part of their business is the fastest growing, and has the highest profit margins. It grew 19% YoY in their latest quarter.

The used game market is clearly a good place to be during a recession.

Call of Duty Boost

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold a mind-blowing $550 million in the first five days after release. GameStop stores all over the nation held midnight release parties. Safe to say, GME will be a big beneficiary of this release.

Q4 is always a critical one for Gamestop. The majority of their yearly profits come during the holiday quarter. Many worried that consumer spending would punish retailers like GameStop. But consumers seem to be spending as recklessly as ever, and it could go on for a while.

With the boost from Call of Duty, I think Q4 will be a good one.

As I’ve said here many times, being short is dangerous in markets like this. And yes, I realize the irony of Bearish News doing a piece on long stocks. Such is the crazy world we live in.

Though the market fundamentals look bad, fighting the strong forces pushing the market up is silly. See May’s Deck is Stacked Against Shorts piece. It’s important to not fight these moves (for long at least). I hold short positions, and try new ones out every so often — but always with stops in place.

I also try to find longs with a good risk-reward, and think GameStop is one such stock.

Gamestop Stats:

Trailing P/E: 11.02
Forward P/E (estimate): 8.7
Cash: $197m
Debt: $495m
PEG Ratio (5 yr expected): 0.68