TheMarketTone.com

Diageo’s stock has struggled along with the overall market this year. The concerns surrounding the stock (strong GBP, weak consumer, and rising input costs) should have been eased after last week’s conference call. If anything, Diageo’s H2 earnings reaffirmed the long case for investors.
The long case:
o Cost Control
o Demand Growth Continues
o Very Attractive Valuation
Cost Control
By [...]

Half a million jobs were lost in the US economy over the past 2 months, driving the unemployment rate to a 14 year high. Even though October non-farm payrolls fell short of our -300k expectation, the 240k drop and the revision from -159k to -284k for the month of September is just as pessimistic. The US labor market is in a recession and the latest numbers confirm that. However equities actually rallied on the bearish report as investors interpreted the data to mean that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates by 50bp next month. The sell-off in the US dollar against every major currency pair except for the Japanese Yen indicates that it is the rally in equities that is driving currencies. Trading will be interesting in the week ahead with the lack of any major US economic data until Thursday. Retail sales are due for release on Friday and the expectations of a sharp decline in consumer spending could send investors back into the US dollar and Japanese Yen.

Oil / Gold ratio chart is pointing down.

To tap on this trend, I had executed an inter-commodity spread trade: Short oil and Buy gold. Details .
To execute this trade, you need to sell oil contract that trade in multiple of 100, which is same as gold.

To do that, you need to open account at FXYard which allow you to do so (supermini oil contract). Click here to open account.

Half a million jobs were lost in the US economy over the past 2 months, driving the unemployment rate to a 14 year high. Even though October non-farm payrolls fell short of our -300k expectation, the 240k drop and the revision from -159k to -284k for the month of September is just as pessimistic. The US labor market is in a recession and the latest numbers confirm that. However equities actually rallied on the bearish report as investors interpreted the data to mean that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates by 50bp next month. The sell-off in the US dollar against every major currency pair except for the Japanese Yen indicates that it is the rally in equities that is driving currencies. Trading will be interesting in the week ahead with the lack of any major US economic data until Thursday. Retail sales are due for release on Friday and the expectations of a sharp decline in consumer spending could send investors back into the US dollar and Japanese Yen.

Many of us including myself have decided to raise cash during these volatile markets. I have put together a few pointers for the best cash management:
 

Spread your money around

It’s safe to put up to $100,000 in a single FDIC-insured bank account. To protect yourself, spread your cash around several institutions, not all of which need [...]

For the second day in a row, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and US Treasury Secretary Paulson pleaded to the power players of Washington to pass their request for $700 Billion to implement their Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). However if we move the letters around a bit, TARP becomes TRAP and that is [...]