Audio File for SEC Bans Short-Selling
(1 minutes 37 seconds)

Last night the SEC put a ban on short-selling 799 financial companies. Read the Official Release Here (PDF).

From my understanding, here is the SEC’s reasoning behind banning short-sells:

Due to a horrible real estate market more people are foreclosing on their homes. This has had a tremendous ripple effect. We have seen financial stocks lose a ton of value.

As traders noticed the uncertainty in the financial markets they freaked out. When people freak out, panic rules the stock market, not fundamentals. Short sellers take advantage of the sell off by selling stocks they don’t own. This causes the stock to lose even more value.

To put a halt on this, the SEC ruled to freeze short selling on 799 companies. This freeze will allow the market to stabilize and THEN they’ll turn short-selling back on.

Although the move by the SEC to ban short-selling has had a positive effect on the market (up over 1,000 points in 2 days), it also comes with some horrible side affects or at least some BIG questions.

1. Short-sellers make money by realizing that stocks are over-valued. If they aren’t in the game, the stocks could be WAY over-valued. What is the real value?
2. When you re-initiate short-selling, there is no guarantee that the market has stabilized. What happens when you allow short-selling?

My Predictions

1. Although short-selling is due to start again on October 2, 2008, it will be extended due to the political effects of a down market (It looks bad on the president if the economy is in the gutter).
2. Stocks will rally and continue to rally until short-selling is allowed again.
3. When short-selling is turned back on… we will see a major sell-off.

Due to surge in stock prices, options have become a very popular investment strategy. View my “Options” post here.

Personally, I can’t wait for short-selling to be allowed again… I’m going to be short a ton that day… I’ve already got my shopping list ready.

      

Audio File for Feedburner, Wordpress, and the RSS Feed
(1 minutes 37 seconds)

For you Wordpress and Feedburner users:

I’ve been a long time fan of Feedburner. But one day, my feed magically broke. I recreated the feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/RjMartinosWebLog) and pointed it (rjmartino.com/wp-rss2.php).

Then, as I started creating new posts, I realized that nothing was being sent to feedburner. When I viewed my feedburner page, it was BLANK. When I logged into Blogline, my feed was blank.

I checked the Original Feed Validity. It checked out just fine…

I checked the FeedBurner Feed Validity. It checked out just fine.

I even re-synced… nothing.

I searched forums and found a guy named Rajasekharan at http://www.mtherald.com. Rajasekharan had fixed the same problem but he didn’t list the fix. So I visited his medical transcription blog, found his email address, and shot him an email.

He was really helpful. He explained that when he setup his feedburner feed, he gave the URL of his original feed (ie http://mtherald.com/blog/wp-rss.php). As he later found out, that was the blunder.

After changing the RSS feed to the correct URL, http://mtherald.com/?feed=rss2. It was solved.

I did the exact same thing. I set feedburner to look at http://wwww.rjmartino.com/wp-rss.php. The feed should have been set to http://www.rjmartino.com/?feed=rss2.

After changing the setting, I “pinged” the page using http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/ping, and a few minutes later, my feeds showed back up!

      

A typical day In our business… Replace “Boss” with “Client.”

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