Whenever I see articles published in mainstream media that even remotely hint of an increase in bullish sentiment by retail investors, especially after an extended market rally like we just experienced the March-2009 lows, I almost wince in anticipation of the carnage to follow. (I realize that I just posted a blog report that encouraged many to get over their fears and pessimism and just move forward with their lives, but getting on with life and getting on with the market are two entirely different things. It never hurts to be cautious when new participants enter the market with any sizeable force.)
When it comes to investing, sometimes the public gets it right and sometimes it gets it wrong. John Bogle, founder of Van Guard index funds does not quite see it that way and believes that U.S. retail investors have a penchant for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I guess my real concern is from whom will these new Johnnie-Come-Latelies (and their fund managers) buy shares if they buy into buying the successively higher dips.
What looks like a bull market and smells like a bull market may not always be a bull market. Sometimes it is just plain old bullshit, so be careful not to step in it. Wall Street is notorious for buying weakness and selling into strength. While I am an eternal optimist, I still prefer to buy my bananas when they are green.
For what it is worth, here’s the excerpt from the Financial Times:
Sitting in the corner is miserable while the party is in full swing. Yet, with the S&P 500 up 60 per cent from its March trough, US retail investors have so far watched from the sidelines. Mutual funds dedicated to US equities have seen a net $14bn walk out the door this year, according to Lipper.
Meanwhile, some $3,300bn is still sitting in money market mutual funds that yield virtually no income, down from a crisis-time peak of $3,800bn. Cash leaving the safety of those funds has been put to work in bonds. So boosters for the equity market rally, eyeing still subdued trading volumes, are waiting for the partypoopers to join the dance.
If you are personally responsible for navigating the market condition for your investment portfolio assets, be careful not to drink too much from the punchbowl.
*Disclosures: Hillbent does not provide individualized market advice. The information we publish regards companies in which we believe our readers may be interested and our reports reflect our sincere opinions. Nevertheless, they are not intended to be personalized recommendations to buy, hold, or sell securities. Investments in the securities markets, and especially in options, are speculative and involve substantial risk. Each individual investor should determine their respective appropriate level of risk. It is recommended that you seek personal advice from your professional investment advisor and conduct further independent due diligence research before acting on information published in any of our reports. Most of our information is derived directly from information published by the companies on which we report and/or from other sources we deem to be reliable, without our independent verification.
Therefore, we cannot assure the completeness or accuracy of information contained within these reports and we do not in any way warrant or guarantee the success of any action which you take in reliance on our statements.
Hillbent.com, Inc. or its affiliates may own positions in the equities mentioned in our reports. We do not receive any compensation from any of the companies covered in our reports.
Normally, I reserve such media reports for Hillbent’s Cerebral Detours category, but I feel compelled to share this post in one of the Market Direction’s regular blog categories. This one shares a glimpse of a secular (I strongly emphasize secular for anyone lacking in reading comprehension skills or misintepreting this as a current theme) development and the implications are positively cataclysmic to the global capital markets.
Imagine the geopolitical, economic, and social repercussions due to a newly discovered cheap and inexhaustible supply of energy. Sounds great, right? Too good to be true? Who knows?
The skeptic in me ponders to what depths special interests groups will sink to suppress the commercial development of such a technology. But optimism far outweighs my doubts and sees hope of a brighter future, if not in my lifetime, then for our children.
Days are numbered for greedy oil companies and the military costs of protecting our national interests (which coincide with big oil’s commercial interests) in foreign sovereign locations throughout the world. Change is inevitable and one of the fascinating things about truly innovative technology is its destructive and creative potential impact upon foreign policies, trade agreements, domestic political platforms, and social behaviors and perceptions of others.
The technology displayed in this Fox News video (compliments of YouTube) below may not be the final solution to our independence from fossil fuels. However, it should clearly demonstrate the trajectory towards which our nation should be aiming its energy policy and exemplify the benefits of continually exploring and developing alternative energy technologies rather than subsisting on antiquated views of managing and deploying our natural resources.
I highly recommend viewing this 2 minute and 40 second video and encourage the exercise of mental extrapolation on the future world order. It may be just the sort of thing to lift one’s spirits in a dismal recession like the one in which we find ourselves these days. Enjoy…
*Disclosures: Hillbent does not provide individualized market advice. The information we publish regards companies in which we believe our readers may be interested and our reports reflect our sincere opinions. Nevertheless, they are not intended to be personalized recommendations to buy, hold, or sell securities. Investments in the securities markets, and especially in options, are speculative and involve substantial risk. Each individual investor should determine their respective appropriate level of risk. It is recommended that you seek personal advice from your professional investment advisor and conduct further independent due diligence research before acting on information published in any of our reports. Most of our information is derived directly from information published by the companies on which we report and/or from other sources we deem to be reliable, without our independent verification.
Therefore, we cannot assure the completeness or accuracy of information contained within these reports and we do not in any way warrant or guarantee the success of any action which you take in reliance on our statements.
Hillbent.com, Inc. or its affiliates may own positions in the equities mentioned in our reports. We do not receive any compensation from any of the companies covered in our reports.
>>>Inflection Point Analysis>>> Today’s inflection point analysis comes by way of Dr. Bob Eisenbeis, Chief Monetary Strategist at Cumberland Advisors, which is one of Hillbent’s contributing content partners. Bob takes us to the grid iron to break down government supervision of the financial services industry and draws the "x"s and "o"s in a simplified manner to help one better distinguish the nuances between regulation and interference.
Hillbent’s take on all of this is that the government’s response to this crisis has stacked the "draft" in favor of the "too big to fail" financial institutions and that once the financial crisis has truly ended, these companies will enjoy unfair competitive advantages at the expense of their smaller competitors and consumers. While I am bearish on financials over the short to intermediate term and believe they will endure more losses due to bad loans, the survivors will be all the stronger as financial services remain a vital part of our economy and should be considered for portfolios with investment time horizons of at least 7 to 10 years.
The opinions expressed above are my own (i.e. J Clinton Hill, your editor and publisher) and may not reflect the views of Cumberland Advisors. However, I encourage readers to take a few minutes to digest the article below and draw their own conclusions.
Football and Financial Regulatory Reform
By Bob Eisenbeis, Vice President and Chief Monetary Economist
May 19, 2009
Professional football has a lot to tell us about financial reform, and in particular what we should seek to achieve. A comparison also suggests a way to think about restructuring the financial regulatory system.
In pro football, there are rules and regulations which govern three key aspects of the game. One set lays out the basic parameters and nature of the game, such as the dimensions of the field (100 yards long with 10 yard end zones), the number of permissible downs to gain 10 yards or the ball turn overs to the other side, how points are scored, the number of men on a team, how many men must be on the line of scrimmage, how many men on offense can be in motion at one time before the ball is snapped, etc. They play football in Canada too, but the initial rule parameters are so different that Canadian teams can’t play U. S teams. The field is longer, the end zones are bigger, the scoring is different, there are 12 not 11 men on a team, more than one player can be in motion on offense, there are 3 not 4 downs to make a first down, etc.
The second set of rules ensures safety and permissible and impermissible behaviors that define fair play. This includes the definition of off sides, what constitutes a personal foul, when is a catch a catch, etc.
The third set of regulations are more global in nature and attempt to ensure that over time all teams have a reasonably equal chance to succeed. The league imposes a salary cap which constrains total team budgets to ensure that big market, high revenue teams can’t fully exploit that advantage to buy the best talent. But the league does not set or determine individual player salaries. The draft is structured to give weaker teams priority access to talent, and yearly team schedules attempt to match up weaker teams with weaker teams and stronger teams with stronger teams as a form of handicapping. Together, these regulations are designed to create a more level playing field and to prevent one team from long dominating others.
Over time, all these rules can change, for example, as offensive or defensive innovations evolve to give one a permanent advantage over the other, as certain blocking or tackling techniques threaten player safety, or as other innovations, such as the forward pass come into existence. However, such changes occur gradually.
These three sets of rules are analogous to financial regulations. One set of financial regulations sets up permissible powers for banking organizations, where they can operate, under what circumstances they can merge, coverage limits for deposit insurance, etc. A second set of regulations – fair play regulations - govern primarily what must be disclosed to investors, what information must be given to depositors about the products they are contracting for and what the rights of debtors and creditors are in the case of default. Financial institutions are also subject to anti trust and anti fraud regulations and standards which again define the rules of the game in terms of how they may compete with each other for business. The third set of regulations govern institution safety and soundness to ensure that firms don’t exploit moral hazard incentive in government sponsored deposit insurance.
Once the game begins, in the case of football, it is overseen by supervisors – referees – whose job is to enforce the rules of play and determine when violations of fair play occur. There is not one referee, but four who are located on different parts of the field and specialize in watching the defense and offensive line play, the back field and defensive backfield. In spite of this specialization, however, each can call violations and when two referees see the same play differently, they quickly resolve the issue and play goes on, perhaps with the benefit of instant replay.
In financial services, supervisors function as referees, and institutions’ actions may be scrutinized by more than one supervisor as well as by representatives from the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission. They can specify and enforce the applicable rules and also ensure that the participants are financially sound and can meet their obligations.
In football, the best referees are invisible in that they enforce the rules but don’t participate or interfere with the playing of the game. Teams can succeed or fail, but they can do so on their own, within the rules. It is critical that referees’ decisions not determine the outcome of the game, especially if an important play is either allowed or disallowed in error. This too, should be the goal of financial regulation. Financial institution supervisors should not be interfering with the playing of the game (such as allocating capital within healthy institutions) but instead should simply be determining whether institutions are competing fairly while being operated in a safe and sound manner and reporting their financial performance in a meaningful way. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
In responding to the current financial crisis, the financial services game has now been altered in hurried and ad hoc ways that differ from the ideal just described. Imagine a football game in which the referees can now specify not only who plays quarterback, but also how much he can be paid? This is what the government is doing by dictating executive salaries and determining which CEOs must leave and who can stay in charge of their firms. In some instances, the referees can even call the plays in that government representatives are “suggesting” that mortgage terms be renegotiated, certain business lines be terminated, etc. The government is also now giving some institutions a financial advantage by liquefying illiquid assets, providing capital injections, granting special access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window, and making direct loans to troubled institutions. Over the longer term, should too-big-to-fail be maintained as a policy – explicit or implicit – this will be the equivalent to giving large market teams permission to exploit their financial advantage. Should the present regulatory approach continue, it is also not hard to imagine the conflicts of interest that will confront the regulators. As participants, rather than simply disinterested arbitrators of the financial game, they will inevitably have a stake in the outcome of the institutions that they have supported, be those institutions primary dealers or those in which the government has invested funds.
Given the current regulatory approach, it is also easy to prioritize the areas that should first be the target of financial reform. For example, re-establishing the regulatory agencies as unbiased supervisors and not participants in the game should be a top priority along with removing capital support, government ownership, and involvement in intuition management. Similarly, ensuring that all institutions are adequately capitalized and eliminating the financial advantage that large institutions have over small ones due to implicit guarantees or too-big-to-fail polices are critical, as well. Setting executive salaries may seem like an easy target, but will only get government more deeply involved in the micro management of institutions in an unproductive way. Reforming regulatory structure should also be a lower priority activity compared with changing the underlying incentives to enforce the existing rules of the game, to ensure sharing of information and to resolve regulatory and jurisdictional conflicts promptly. Football has multiple supervisors with over lapping responsibilities, but the referees’ incentives are better aligned. Finally, as financial services have evolved into a global business, we now have firms competing with each other under unequal terms. It is like having professional teams from Canada playing ones from the U.S. but with different rules, scoring and numbers of players. It just won’t work in the long run. Hence, international cooperation and coordination are a must if the financial game is to be played fairly.
This homely analogy suggests a litmus test question for assessing and prioritizing financial and regulatory reform proposals. Would they make sense for football?
Cumberland Advisors is registered with the SEC under the Investment Advisors Act of 1940. All information contained herein is for informational purposes only and does not constitute a solicitation or offer to sell securities or investment advisory services. Such an offer can only be made in states and/or international jurisdictions where Cumberland Advisors is either registered or is a Notice Filer or where an exemption from such registration or filing is available. New accounts will not be accepted unless and until all local regulations have been satisfied. This presentation does not purport to be a complete description of our performance or investment services.
Please feel free to forward our commentaries (with proper attribution) to others who may be interested.
For a list of all equity recommendations for the past year, please contact Therese Pantalione at 856-692-6690,ext. 315. It is not our intention to state or imply in any manner that past results and profitability is an indication of future performance. All material presented is compiled from sources believed to be reliable. However, accuracy cannot be guaranteed.
(Editor’s Note: Dr. Robert A. Eisenbeis has joined Cumberland Advisors as Chief Monetary Economist. In that capacity, he will advise Cumberland’s asset managers on developments in US financial markets and the domestic economy and their implications for investment and trading strategies. Dr. Eisenbeis was formerly Executive Vice President and Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta where he advised the bank’s president on monetary policy for FOMC deliberations and was in charge of basic research and policy analysis. Prior to that he was the Wachovia Professor of Banking at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has also held senior positions at the Federal Reserve Board and FDIC. He is currently a member of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee and Financial Economist Roundtable and a fellow of the National Association of Business Economics. He has a BS degree from Brown University and masters and Ph D degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)
*Note that Hillbent.com does not officially endorse the commentaries of any contributors and its sole purpose of providing such content is for the convenience of our readers and to further assist their research efforts.
*Disclosures:Hillbent does not provide individualized market advice. The information we publish regards companies in which we believe our readers may be interested and our reports reflect our sincere opinions. Nevertheless, they are not intended to be personalized recommendations to buy, hold, or sell securities. Investments in the securities markets, and especially in options, are speculative and involve substantial risk. Each individual investor should determine their respective appropriate level of risk. It is recommended that you seek personal advice from your professional investment advisor and conduct further independent due diligence research before acting on information published in any of our reports. Most of our information is derived directly from information published by the companies on which we report and/or from other sources we deem to be reliable, without our independent verification.
Therefore, we cannot assure the completeness or accuracy of information contained within these reports and we do not in any way warrant or guarantee the success of any action which you take in reliance on our statements.
Hillbent.com, Inc. or its affiliates may own positions in the equities mentioned in our reports. We do not receive any compensation from any of the companies covered in our reports.
>>>Inflection Point Analysis>>>Bill Gross, managing director at PIMCO, shares his insights on the future of capitalism and the impact of the Obama Administration’s policies upon the risk adjusted premium for assets.
Things are what they are for the present moment and stabilizing and preserving the systemic health of the domestic and global economies and will come at a cost. And as always, Bill Gross tells it like he sees it, but ever so elegantly.
A photograph of Bernard Baruch looms ominously on the far corner of my PIMCO office wall. Vested, with pocket watch and protruding chin thrust prominently toward the observer, this well-known financier of the early 20th century at times appears almost alive. It was Baruch who almost schizophrenically cautioned investors during the stock market’s speculative blow-off in the late 20s that “two plus two equals four and no one has ever invented a way of getting something for nothing.” Three years later during the depths of economic and financial gloom he opined just the opposite: “Two plus two still equals four,” he said, “and you can’t keep mankind down for long.” Homo sapiens, as it turns out, stayed on the deck for much longer than Baruch envisioned – some historians having suggested that it was only war and not the rejuvenating economic spirits of a capitalistic peace that eventually turned the tide – but his words, first of caution and then of optimism, typify the way that fortunes were, and still are, made in the financial markets: Get your facts straight, apply them to the current valuation of the market, take decisive action, and then hold on for dear life as the mob hopefully comes to the same conclusion a little way down the road.
I stare into Baruch’s eyes almost every day – not that we are simpatico or kindred spirits of any sort – but when I do, it’s as if I can hear him almost whispering to me over the portals of time: “Two plus two,” he commands, “two plus two, two plus two.” The message – fortunately, I suppose – ends there. If you thought I was receiving market calls from the ghost of Bernard Baruch I suspect PIMCO would have far fewer clients than we do today. But his lesson nonetheless remains clear: separate reality from exuberance either on the up or the downside and you have the ingredients for a successful market strategy.
Through my years here at PIMCO there have been numerous demarcation points where Baruch’s whispers almost turned into screams. Two plus two screamed four in September of 1981 with long-term Treasury yields approaching 15%, and two plus two boomed four in 2000 when the Dot Coms rose to prices that discounted the hereafter instead of the next 30 years. Similarly, 2007 was a screaming mimi with the subprimes – if only because the liar loans and no-money-down financing were reminiscent of a shell game, Ponzi scheme, or some other type of wizardry that was bound to lead to tears.
2009 is a similar demarcation point because it represents the beginning of government policy counterpunching, a period when the public with government as its proxy decided that private market, laissez-faire, free market capitalism was history and that a “private/public” partnership yet to gestate and evolve would be the model for years to come. If one had any doubts, a quick, even cursory summary of President Obama’s comments announcing Chrysler’s bankruptcy filing would suffice. “I stand with Chrysler’s employees and their families and communities. I stand with millions of Americans who want to buy Chrysler cars (sic). I do not stand…with a group of investment firms and hedge funds who decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.” If the cannons fired at Ft. Sumter marked the beginning of the war against the Union, then clearly these words marked the beginning of a war against publically perceived financial terror.
Make no mistake, PIMCO had no dog in this fight, and has infinitesimally small holdings of GM bonds as well. In turn, the rebalancing of wealth from the rich to the “not so rich” is a long overdue reversal, one that I have encouraged in these Outlooks for at least the past several years. But promoting and siding with the majority of the American public in their quest for change does not mean that as investors, we at PIMCO stand star-struck like a deer in front of the onrushing headlights, doing nothing to protect clients. Our task is to identify secular transitions and to preserve and protect capital if indeed it is threatened. Now appears to be one of those moments.
The threat, of course, falls under the broad umbrella of “burden sharing” and is a difficult one to interpret and anticipate, if only because the concept is evolving in the minds of policymakers as well. But clearly, as this financial crisis has morphed from Bear Stearns to FNMA, Lehman Brothers, AIG and now Chrysler, the claims of stockholders and in some cases senior debt holders have suffered. Please hear me on this. That is the way it should be. Capitalism is about risk taking and if you’re not a risk taker, you should have your money in the bank, Treasury bills, or a savings bond, not the levered investment of a bank or an aging automobile company. Let there be no company too big, too important, or too well-connected to fail as long as the systemic health of the economy is not threatened.
Having acknowledged that, however, let me be clear that these risks, long swept under the rug of prior Administrations, are now rising to a boil. The pressure to “survive well” or simply survive period is now clearly shifting to Wall Street as opposed to Main Street. The worm has turned, and our President, whom I voted for and still strongly support, has shed his predecessor’s regal robes for a populist’s cloak.
How does one invest during such a transition? Investors should recognize that this grassroots trend signals – most importantly – an increasing uncertainty of cash flows from financial assets. Not only will redistribution and reregulation lead to slower economic growth, but the financial flows from it will be haircutted and “burden shared” by stakeholders. In turn, the present value of those flows should reflect an increasing risk premium and a diminishing multiple of annual receipts. PIMCO’s Paul McCulley, famous for a catchy phrase or a light-bulb-generating truism, asked a group of clients the other day to compare FedEx and UPS to the U.S. Post Office, if it were a public corporation. “Which one would you pay more for?” he asked. If FedEx deserves a P/E of 12, wouldn’t the value of the Post Office be substantially less? His point, and mine as well, is that as wealth is redistributed, and the invisible private hand of Adam Smith begins to resemble more and more the public fist of government, then asset values should be negatively affected. First comes the haircutting and burden sharing, most recently evidenced by Chrysler and soon to be played out via the stress testing and equity dilution of government ownership of ailing banks. In those footsteps, however, will follow a slower rate of economic growth, not just in the U.S., but worldwide as heretofore libertarian capitalism is bridled, saddled and taught to trot instead of gallop over the investment plains.
This Outlook is not to bemoan this transition, but to recognize it. Slower growth can be a public good if it avoids the cataclysmic effects of double-digit unemployment, escalating foreclosures, and fear of financial insecurity. But the Obama cannon shot will have financial consequences. Do not be deceived by the euphoric sightings of “green shoots” and the claims for new bull markets in a multitude of asset classes. Stable and secure income is still the order of the day. Shaking hands with the new government is still the prescribed strategy, although it should be done at a senior level of the balance sheet. If the government indeed becomes your investment partner, you should keep the big Uncle in clear sight and without back turned. Risk will not likely be rewarded until the global economy stabilizes and the Obama rules of order are more clearly defined.
The ghost of Bernard Baruch still counsels that 2 + 2 = 4, but the repercussions of getting something for nothing should dominate the hopes that mankind will get off the deck and revert to a mean or median standard representative of outdated political and economic philosophies. Mohamed El-Erian’s and PIMCO’s “new normal” should trump green shoot exuberance for years to come.
William H. Gross
Managing Director
Past performance is not a guarantee or a reliable indicator of future results. Investing in the bond market is subject to certain risks including market, interest-rate, issuer, credit, and inflation risk; investments may be worth more or less than the original cost when redeemed. U.S. Government securities are backed by the full faith of the government; portfolios that invest in them are not guaranteed and will fluctuate in value. Corporate debt securities are subject to the risk of the issuer’s inability to meet principal and interest payments on the obligation and may also be subject to price volatility due to factors such as interest rate sensitivity, market perception of the creditworthiness of the issuer and general market liquidity. Mortgage and asset-backed securities may be sensitive to changes in interest rates, subject to early repayment risk, and while generally supported by a government, government-agency or private guarantor there is no assurance that the guarantor will meet its obligations. Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) may involve a high degree of risk and are intended for sale to qualified investors only. Investors may lose some or all of the investment and there may be periods where no cash flow distributions are received. CDOs are exposed to risks such as credit, default, liquidity, management, volatility, interest rate, and credit risk. Swaps are a type of privately negotiated derivative; there is no central exchange or market for swap transactions and therefore they are less liquid than exchange-traded instruments.
(Editor’s Note:Bill Gross is a managing director and founder of PIMCO, a leading global investment management firm with more than $747 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2008 and more than 1,200 employees in offices in Newport Beach, New York, Singapore, Tokyo, London, Sydney, Munich, Toronto, and Hong Kong. )
*Note that Hillbent.com does not officially endorse the commentaries of any contributors and its sole purpose of providing such content is for the convenience of our readers and to further assist their research efforts.
*Disclosures:Hillbent does not provide individualized market advice. The information we publish regards companies in which we believe our readers may be interested and our reports reflect our sincere opinions. Nevertheless, they are not intended to be personalized recommendations to buy, hold, or sell securities. Investments in the securities markets, and especially in options, are speculative and involve substantial risk. Each individual investor should determine their respective appropriate level of risk. It is recommended that you seek personal advice from your professional investment advisor and conduct further independent due diligence research before acting on information published in any of our reports. Most of our information is derived directly from information published by the companies on which we report and/or from other sources we deem to be reliable, without our independent verification.
Therefore, we cannot assure the completeness or accuracy of information contained within these reports and we do not in any way warrant or guarantee the success of any action which you take in reliance on our statements.
Hillbent.com, Inc. or its affiliates may own positions in the equities mentioned in our reports. We do not receive any compensation from any of the companies covered in our reports.
>>>Inflection Point>>> There are some things to which only America can lay claim. Most of them invoke pride, but every now and then some of them do not. For example, consider the large bonuses bestowed upon our captains of the industry in the midst of one of the greatest financial crises in global economic history.
Contrary to popular belief, the disgust and anger towards this irony is not just a populist reaction. A good friend of mine who is a Stanford University MBA and career CEO shares the sentiment of many of his fellow Americans. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone, his anonymity shall be preserved for the following submission:
*Disclosures: Hillbent does not provide individualized market advice. Nor does it officially endorse the commentaries of any contributors and its sole purpose of providing such content is for the convenience of our readers and to further assist their research efforts.
The information we publish regards companies in which we believe our readers may be interested and our reports reflect our sincere opinions. Nevertheless, they are not intended to be personalized recommendations to buy, hold, or sell securities. Investments in the securities markets, and especially in options, are speculative and involve substantial risk. Each individual investor should determine their respective appropriate level of risk. It is recommended that you seek personal advice from your professional investment advisor and conduct further independent due diligence research before acting on information published in any of our reports. Most of our information is derived directly from information published by the companies on which we report and/or from other sources we deem to be reliable, without our independent verification.
Therefore, we cannot assure the completeness or accuracy of information contained within these reports and we do not in any way warrant or guarantee the success of any action which you take in reliance on our statements.
Hillbent.com, Inc. or its affiliates may own positions in the equities mentioned in our reports. We do not receive any compensation from any of the companies covered in our reports.
