Hurricane Season

After last week's depressing market activity, it seems strangely coincidental that there's now talk from the US Government about Hurricane season. Depending on your news source, some are predicting that this year the hurricanes will be worse than last year while some are saying that they won't. This sort of guessing is speculative at best. Nobody knows for sure how many of the storms will turn into hurricanes.

Late last week there was also a sensationalist article from the National Post that claimed that Iran passed a law that would require jews and christians to wear badges. Of course this story was talked about throughout friday. The contents of the article were disputed and subsequently the National Post pulled the story.

So what was the point of the article? Fear mongering? Again it seems strange that such an article came out right after several straight days of horrible results from the market. Could this sensationalist article have been fabricated for the sake of stimulating the markets?

You see, by shifting attention to Iran, this has the effect of potentially increasing the possibility of an upcoming war with Iran. As they are a major oil producer, a war there would disrupt operations and would help drive up the price of oil.

Is this a buying opportunity?

Now that metal stocks and gas/oil stocks have pulled back quite a bit, it may be very tempting to find some value in some of the metal and gas stocks that have been beaten up over the last couple of days with the intent on holding them for the long term.

As the market is still very volatile, I am currently looking into safer and boring stocks that could be good defensive plays instead.

Among the ones I am currently investigating are:

Danier Leather (DL)
Yellow Pages (YLO.un)
Maple Leaf Foods (MFI)
Sterling Shoes (SSI.un)
Arctic Glacier (AG.un)
True Energy (TUI.un)

Of the 6 stocks I am currently studying only one of them is an energy stock. I am currently about 15% weighted to energy/oil and do not really wish to increase my weighting in that sector but True Energy is paying out at an extremely high rate. There is speculation of course that a dividend cut may occur as the price of natural gas approaches $5.

I feel that the stock is already trading as though a distribution cut will happen. The question is how much of a cut will be made (if any)?

I will comment futher on the above stocks in future posts.

As always, please do your own DD. What may appear to be good may be bad to you.