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Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Is Deutsche Bank The Coming Black Swan?


Today we hit an all time high for the S&P and the Dow. Every thing looks hunky dory. The S&P is up almost 4.5% for the year, and I am up around 9.5%. That happened solely because I was paranoid of a looming recession coming into 2016, and stayed with bonds, gold and gold miners, utilities, and municipal bonds with very few stocks until the S&P bottomed around 1825. I then SLOWLY added a small amount of stocks not  to  exceed 20% of my holdings. So today I sold some winning stocks and some bond ETF's. The 10 year treasury bond is back around 1.5%, and will go up if the U.S. economy improves substantially, and if bond buyers around the world stop running to the  U.S. because their bonds are yielding negative rates or near negative rates. Oil and the XLE oil company ETF may be a place to put some monies if oil just stabilizes. Silver looks more attractive than gold. So, with stocks being crazily expensive and probably in bubble territory due to all these central bank interventions, how much risk exists in this market. Sure we can melt up, but how much risk are you willing to take for a few more percent. Any stock I would buy now, I would hold a stop loss limit just because I am worried about one of those darned black swans. The one I am most concerned about is  Deutsche Bank. The chart above is an overlay of Lehmans going into it's collapse. DB is approximately 4 times the size of Lehman Brothers before it's contraction and collapse. DB has failed it's stress test for the 2nd time in two years. All banks world wide  are struggling to make money in this low to negative rate environment. As usual, the risk of any of  them making  some bad investments  to obtain yield is high. One bank is creating CDO's out of cell plan insurance like they did with mortgages. So the failure of DB could cut the value of the S&P in half in a month. I am just too damn old to see the market cut my investments in half and wait 5 years to get my monies back. I am hoping for 10 more years or so on this planet, so that  is my real investing horizon......

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