Thursday, December 20, 2007

Fertilizer Continues to Rock and Roll

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I don't see any clear catalyst today but the fertilizer group on my watch list is just flying

TNH +7.8%
CF +7.7%
MOS +6.8%
AGU +5.9%
POT +4.7%

In a flat tape, even more impressive. Even MOO is up 3.4%. I can't find any specific reason why - if you happen to know throw a message into a reply to this post.

While I hate the financials, a lot of bad news has been thrown at the market of late and its sitting flattish of late - with Research in Motion (RIMM) coming tonight and I expect good news we might get a quick Santa Claus rally at least to S&P 1490 level or so. Let's see how it plays out. I wouldn't mind a market that rewards winners and punishes losers but it seems for most of the past 4 months its been an 'everything stinks' or 'everything must go up' type of market. The worry is every day you wake up and the next shoe in financials is going to drop everything in your portfolio...

Long CF Industries, Mosaic, Potash in fund; long Mosaic in personal account

4 comments:

Brian said...

Perhaps it was the energy legislation that Pres. Bush signed yesterday that is the catalyst behind today's move? Not that no one knew what was in this legislation beforehand but the local paper where I live made a huge deal out of how much of a push is going to continue to be made into ethanol (despite the idiocy of it as a fuel source)...

TraderMark said...

could be. As good of reason as any. :)
I'm glad my tax dollars are hard at work. Oh well at least we can make up for it on the other side through investments.

Steve said...

I recall in the past you highlighted the link between natural gas prices and COGS of the fertilizer manufacturers; the link below shows nat gas inventories 9% higher than historic averages and NWS also forcasted an usually warm Jan-Mar '08...they also forecasted a busy hurricane season but...

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/ngw/ngupdate.asp

Great call on CF by the way, ag is hot!

TraderMark said...

thanks Steve. CF and MOS have rotated as my top position for much of the past 2 months. In fact I feel naked by having only 6% fertilizer exposure at this moment - lowest in many months.

As for ng, both ng and coal have traditionally been looked as domestic energy sources - but coal has now picked up as an export. Due to difficulty in transport ng has not and probably will not. Hence a weakening US economy should keep a lid on ng. Just another feather in the cap of fertilizer plays. I can't tell you how many hits the website has had in past week or so on fertilizer (google search). If only they had listened in September ;)

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