



Mr. Meyer, however, said it might be possible that two other huge companies — Anglo American, the diverse South African-founded conglomerate now based in London, or Companhia Vale do Rio Doce of Brazil, which bought the Canadian nickel company Inco last year — may also have designs on Alcoa.
On Monday, the Brazilian company announced plans to build an alumina refinery in the northern part of the country with Hydro, a leading Norwegian producer of aluminum. It said in a statement that it had “strategic focus on bauxite and alumina.”
Representatives of Alcoa and BHP both declined to comment, although reports last week from Australia suggested that BHP was not interested in bidding for Alcoa.
But an executive with knowledge of Alcoa’s strategy, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the company received a buyout offer, most likely from BHP.
The timing remains the unknown.



Crude oil for August settlement rose as much as 45 cents, or 0.6 percent, to $78.02 a barrel in electronic trading on the London-based ICE Futures exchange. It traded at $78 at 3:38 p.m. Singapore time.
Since titanium's initial applications, the number of end-use markets forClick For More Info
titanium has significantly expanded. Established industrial uses for titanium
include chemical plants, power plants, desalination plants and pollution control
equipment. Rapid growth of the Chinese and other Southeast Asian economies has
brought unprecedented demand for titanium-intensive industrial equipment.
In November 2005, Titanium Metals (TIE) entered into a joint venture with XI'AN BAOTIMET
VALINOX TUBES CO. LTD. ("BAOTIMET") to produce welded titanium tubing in the
Peoples Republic of China. BAOTIMET's production facilities will be located in
Xi'an, China, and production is expected to begin in early 2007.

TRIX is a momentum indicator that displays the percent rate-of-change of a triple exponentially smoothed moving average of a security's closing price. It was developed in the early 1980's by Jack Hutson, an editor for Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities magazine. Oscillating around a 0.00 "zero" line, TRIX is designed to filter out stock movements that are insignificant to the larger trend of the stock. The user selects a number of periods (such as 15) with which to create the moving average, and those cycles that are shorter than that period are filtered out.
The TRIX is a leading indicator and can be used to anticipate turning points in a trend through its divergence with the security price. Likewise, it is common to plot a moving average with a smaller period (such as 9) and use it as a "signal line" to anticipate where the TRIX is heading. TRIX line crossovers with its "signal line" can be used as buy/sell signals as well.
World titanium sponge production doubled over the past five years to 124,000 metric tons in 2006, causing major producers Timet - TIE, Allegheny Technologies - ATI, Sumitomo Titanium, Toho Titanium and Russia's VSMPO-Avisma to announce sponge capacity expansions over the next decade. Most market analyses say that's because of the growing demand for titanium metal in new-generation commercial and military aircraft, which use more of this light metal in conjunction with new families of composites. Boeing's new 737 Dreamliner uses 20,000 lbs of titanium in its airframe, while the new 787 will use 250,000 lbs; the Airbus A320 uses 25,000 lbs, but the new A380 will use 150,000 lbs. In military aircraft, the F-15 contains 50,000 lbs of titanium metal, while the F-22 uses 100,000 lbs and the Joint Strike Fighter contains 60,000 lbs. A Merrill Lynch report says that "titanium demand is almost unfathomable" because of a "secular change towards composite aircraft manufacturing." The Merrill Lynch report says that "commercial aerospace is in the midst of a secular shift away from aluminum alloy use in airframes to that of composites. The shift towards composites goes hand in hand with the shift towards higher levels of titanium usage, as carbon-based composite airframe construction requires many of the properties that are unique to titanium." The analysis compares the transition to the earlier shift away from wood and canvas aircraft construction to aluminum. Also, industrial demand for heat exchangers, pipes, tanks and pump components in the power, petrochemical and other process industries also is growing, particularly in China, according to a new Roskill Consulting Group report. The report says the global market for titanium mill products exceeded 90,000 metric tons, with another 45,000 metric tons consumed in the form of the ferrotitanium alloy. World demand for mill products is forecast by Roskill to grow by 6.8% annually up to 2011, resulting in a market for 124,000 metric tons of mill products that year requiring some 230,000 metric tons of sponge. |
Two big hedge funds at Bear Stearns Cos. were close to being shut down last night as a rescue plan developed over several days fell apart in a drama that could have wide-ranging consequences for Wall Street and investors.
Merrill Lynch & Co., one of the hedge funds' lenders, said it would move to seize collateral -- much of it mortgage-backed debt -- from the two funds and sell it, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. At the same time, the funds' managers worked with a handful of other key lenders, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp., to pay off the funds' $9 billion in loans, according to a person familiar with the matter.
As of a few weeks ago, the two Bear Stearns hedge funds held more than $20 billion of investments, mostly in complex securities made up of bonds backed by subprime mortgages -- the relatively risky home loans made to borrowers with troubled credit histories.Additionally: The last minute effort by Bear Stearns to rescue its High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund seems to have collapsed. Moments before midnight last night, the Wall Street Journal’s Kate Kelly reported that Merrill Lynch was going to push forward with its plan to sell at least $850 million of mortgage-related securities it seized from the hedge fund. This morning the New York Post's Roddy Boyd said that end had come for the fund. And now CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino is reporting that JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank have already begun selling collateral they seized from the hedge fund.
The securities were collateral assets for leverage the banks had extended to the debt-heavy fund. The fund has reportedly been battered by bad bets in collateral debt obligations and mortgage securities. The widely publicized trouble in the subprime sector helped make shorting subprime—which hedge funds did through a complex array of swaps and derivative products offered by investment banks—a popular and profitable bet late last year and earlier this year. But when banks reportedly began to ease credit terms on mortgage holders in a coordinated effort to stave off mass defaults and a meltdown in the market, many of these positions went bad for the fund.
[How leverage and bad directional betting crushed the fund, after the jump.]
We’re told that the Bear fund was purchasing credit default options that essentially amounted to a bet that the market would recover earlier this year, and ran into trouble when the ABX, an index for mortgage backed securities, took a nose dive earlier this year. It seems the fund then took the opposite position—so that it was short subprime—just as the market turned around. The fund took its position by buying and selling credit default options as well as credit products that aggregated those options—sometimes called CDO
These somewhat illiquid securities are priced according to complicated mathematical models worked out by guys who would be rocket-scientists if rocket-scientists made more money, and some observers wonder if anyone really has a good way of evaluating their worth.
Ironically, Bear Stearns itself has been accused by some hedge fund managers of manipulating the market in subprime mortgages to prevent defaults and prop up the ABX. The bank is one of the largest players in the market, and hedge funds have accused it of bailing out the mortgage market to avoid paying out on credit default swaps that it sold to the hedge funds.
What really seems to have got the Bear fund in trouble was the massive amount of leverage it was employing in it’s bets. Leverage ratios climbed as high as 10-to-1 and 15-to-1, according to Boyd in today’s New York Post. We’re told that one senior banker at Bear Stearns calls this “a stupid amount of leverage.”
The bear fund, which is less than a year old, was reportedly down 23% by the end of April. The situation looked so bad that its managers suspended redemptions, locking in investors. Because the fund was highly levered, it’s lenders began fearing that they might lose out if the fund collapsed. When Merrill, which is reportedly the fund’s biggest lender, made its move to seize collateral with plans to auction it off, it seems to have set off a chain reaction with other lenders.
Various schemes to rescue the fund seem not to have satisfied the lenders. The fund sold some of its trouble mortgage back securities to another Bear investment vehicle that the bank plans to sell to the public, raising some capital. It’s managers reportedly gained access to a $1.5 billion line of additional credit from Bear, and planned to take in an additional $500 million of investment equity. Blackstone was reportedly advising the fund on how to prevent a total collapse.
The fund’s managers—who are led by Ralph Cioffi—argued that a forced dissolution of the fund and an auction of its positions might lead to a systemic event or domino effect in the marketplace, damaging other market players.
“The bond market's most battered players - the hedge funds and trading desks specializing in mortgage-backed securities - now have to handle a total of $2 billion or more hitting a market that is still licking its wounds from the first burst of sub-prime woes,” the Post’s Boyd writes. “The sales are likely to force a serious re-pricing of billions of dollars worth of highly complex and often illiquid securities called collateralized debt obligations, or bonds made from other bonds. Held by both Wall Street firms and hedge funds, the CDOs stocked with sub-prime bonds have not collapsed in price alongside other sub-prime bonds. This will hurt returns at hedge funds and profits at Wall Street trading desks.”
It seems that the lenders to the Bear fund have decided that this risk is worth taking on. Or at least, that taking money off the table now is a safer bet than going forward with the Bear fund.
A 'Subprime' Fund Is on the Brink [Wall Street Journal]
Bad News Bear [New York Post]
Hedge Fund Sale [CNBC]
Click: Another Bear Stearn's Story - Sub Prime Investments, Not Stocks



When you are looking at gaps on a stock chart, the most important thing that you want to know is this:
Was this gap caused by the amateur traders buying
or selling based on emotion?
Or you migh ask...
Was this gap caused by the professional traders that do not
make emotional decisions?
To figure this out you have to understand this one important
concept first. Professional traders buy after a wave of selling
has occurred. They sell after a wave of buying has occurred.
Amateur traders do the exact opposite! They see a stock advancing
in price and are afraid that they will miss out on the move, so they
pile in - just when the pro's are getting ready to sell.
Look at this example of a gap caused by amateur traders...
See how this stock gapped up after a wave of buying occurred?
Probably short covering? These amateur traders got emotionally
involved in the stock. They piled in after an already extended
move to the upside. They let their emotions dictate that the stock
would continue to move higher and probably bought more and it
eventually collapsed within a few weeks.
These amateur traders eventually lost money as the stock sold off
over the next few weeks. Notice how the stock eventually did go
back up - but only after a wave of selling occurred (professional buying).
We initiated a SHORT on AMZAON after the stock spiked $22 that created the gap like you see in this picture. Usually after a good spike, there is some sideways action and then like 99% of most stocks that spike up in euphoria like this, eventually they will fill the GAP. In the case with Amazon... at or around the $44- $45 level. The market is over heated and without fail, you will see a sell off any day now and this stock will drop too and drop HARD!
