David Gaffen posting at MarketBeat had both ends of the daily double.
This morning, pithy:
...That’s what investors had hoped. But hope is a lousy hedge.This afternoon, profound (the fact that it echoed our sentiments* had nothing, nothing to do with the results):
Last week, E*Trade announced a sale of $3 billion in CDO-type debt for about 27 cents on the dollar. In both cases, analysts came out of the woodwork to caution that these sales don’t represent a benchmark for future sales of housing inventory or strange securitized bonds, for that matter, but such an attitude isn’t really the point. “Investors should be careful not to overreact to the pricing of the deal,” intoned analysts at Citigroup. Now, of course they shouldn’t “overreact,” but they ought to consider reacting. Like the recent acceptance of its own SIV assets by HSBC, any additional sale of these assets, regardless of how alike or unalike they are to what’s in other troubled portfolios, gives the market a better understanding of what others believe these pieces of paper are worth. So far, for the optimistic types, they’re not worth that much.
*Earlier today we posted, on the same topic:
No need to email on why ETFC/Citadel didn't set a clearing price. I'm pretty familiar with the arguments having used a few of them myself.
