Markets Not Liking These Soft GDP Numbers

These markets continue to remain confused by the GDP number which was reaffirmed as very soft this morning (down -.7% in the first quarter).  This is spite of all the ‘smart people’ on CNBC saying things like ‘we continue to expect a 2.5% increase in GDP this year’. Knowing what I know at this very moment I say ‘baloney’.  With the strength of the dollar hurting all the multinationals and layoffs occurring in basic industries such as steel and energy it is hard to understand where this 2.5% growth is going to come from.  We continue to hear the smart folks say that employment is good–we don’t buy it. Wall Street money has totally screwed up their ability to see all the people flipping burgers who would rather being doing something requiring their higher skills. Oh well nothing really changes on Wall Street so we will have to do our best to ignore them.

This morning we have put a sell order in on Premium Brands Holding (ticker:PRBZF) our Canadian food company in which we have a great 20% gain. Volume is extremely thin on the OTC pink sheets for these shares so we will see if our shares move.  In a move to raise a bit of cash and ‘harvest’ a profit we have sold 50% of our MLP Alliance Berstein (ticker:AB). We were torn with selling all of it as it has performed so well–we prefer to ride the gainers and sell the losers–but there is a point where it is reasonable to harvest some gains.  This moves our cash position up to 14.35%–heading to 20%.