The following article courtesy of ForexTraders.com..

“Buy on the rumor, sell on the news” is an overused phrase in the investment community, but before an investor takes this advice to heart, he should also verify the sources and confirm the validity of the messages that he receives. This last part of prudent counsel often gets lost in the shuffle of buy and sell orders, but it may be the only protection that an investor has when it comes to detecting obvious stock manipulation techniques employed by those bent on deceit.

Stock manipulation is also a favorite topic of the “talking heads” on financial news channels. Fraud openly exists, despite the efforts of regulatory and law enforcement officials to stamp it out. A sad testimony to risk management efforts is that fraud can never be completely eliminated, but must be tolerated at an acceptable level as a cost of doing business. The forex market is, perhaps, the only market we have that is less prone to manipulative tactics due to its shear volume, now at $4 trillion a day and counting. Even the largest hedge funds with their sophisticated forex trading platforms or even central bankers are unable to artificially drive the market in one direction or another, though their efforts to do so are widely publicized.

Read Entire Post “Stock Manipulation Is Real, Types Of Scams” Here

According to the WSJ, investment bankers are beginning to discuss proposals with Groupon for an IPO.  Should Groupon go public this year it would likely be the most talked about IPO of the year (assuming Facebook holds off for another year).  Groupon already turned down a $6 billion offer from Google which in my opinion was a big mistake but some value the company now at $15 billion so what do I know.  It’s a great business model but with a low barrier to entry and I think Google will begin making a much bigger push in this space and have the infrastructure in place to do so.  The company was rumored to be looking at an IPO in the fall, but is now looking like it could happen within a couple months.  Considering the company just raised nearly $1 billion from big investors, there probably isn’t a need to rush an IPO, but at the same time the IPO environment is strong which may not be the case later this year.  Anyone smell a bubble?  Facebook $50 billion valuation, Groupon $15 billion, Twitter nearly $4 billion…

It’s been awhile since I provide an update on gold, so I thought now would be a good time to take another look at the yellow stuff.  In my last report on gold the GLD was inching closer to $130 and I thought that level would present a very difficult level and be an area where gold would stage a correction. 

A few things to point out.  For one, gold didn’t really correct, but rather digested overbought conditions with more of a sideways move (actually head and shoulders pattern) and remains in a fairly tight range above the $130 level, so certainly gold has held its own up here and could be poised for a move to the next major resistance level up around the $150 level (another 10% or so from current levels).

Read Entire Post “Gold Resting Before Push To 1500 Or About To Confirm Head & Shoulders Top?” Here

Politics isn’t something I ordinarily get into on this blog, but couldn’t resist the gems that came from Obama’s mouth today.

“We also hoped for a chance to get beyond some of the old political divides – between Democrats and Republicans, Red states and Blue states – that had prevented us from making progress. Because although we are proud to be Democrats, we are prouder to be Americans – and we believed that no single party has a monopoly on wisdom.”

This gem of hypocrisy was stated early on today, right before he spent nearly an hour berating Republicans (John Boehner in particular) for the current mess we’re in.  So much for helping to close the divide. 

I nearly fell out of my chair today when I heard this statement:

“I have a different vision for the future. I’ve never believed that government has all the answers to our problems. I’ve never believed that government’s role is to create jobs or prosperity. I believe it’s the drive and ingenuity of our entrepreneurs, the skill and dedication of our workers, that has made us the wealthiest nation on Earth. I believe it’s the private sector that must be the main engine of our recovery.”

It doesn’t take long for him to contradict himself saying,  “We want to put more Americans back to work rebuilding America – our roads, railways, and runways.”

It gets better.. much better..

“I believe government should be lean, it should be efficient, and it should leave people free to make the choices they think are best for themselves and their families, so long as those choices don’t hurt others.”

Read Entire Post “Best Of Obama Speech Today: "Government Should Be Lean"” Here

We’re more than half way through 2010 and this year has seen a significant pickup in the number of quality IPO’s, so I thought I’d rank the top 10 up to this point in the year based on fundamentals.  Part I will highlight the first five, part II the next five and I’ll follow that up with a report taking a look at some of the most promising IPO’s that may begin trading in the last quarter.

Camelot Info Systems (CIS): This is the highest rated IPO that I currently track with a fundamental score of 29/30.  The company provides enterprise application services and financial industry information technology (IT) services in China. It’s the largest provider of enterprise resource planning in China and names HP, Accenture and IBM as customers.

Camelot has posted significant growth every year it’s been in business and that growth continues today despite a shaky world economy.  In 2009, they experienced EPS growth of 60% and is posting record growth again this year with an estimated 113% growth for 2010.  Revenue growth has accelerated in each of the past four quarters.

Technically, the stock remains extremely bullish, but very overbought in the shorter term.  After a month long flat base formation, the stock exploded higher Aug 18th and hasn’t looked back.  It’s up nearly 50% in under two weeks and buy volume continues to come in above average.  It’s best to look for a retracement of about 50% from the breakout point above $11, so a return to the $12 – 13 area would provide an ideal entry point.

====> Click Here For Your FREE Daily Camelot Technical Analysis

Read Entire Post “Top IPO’s Of 2010 (Part I) – CIS, ONE, FNGN, GDOT, SPSC” Here

About six weeks ago I mentioned that you might want to look for a BIG head and shoulders formation in indices just days after the infamous “flash crash” day.  About one month later, the right neck line was complete after another test of the lows of the correction, kicking off a weak rally into resistance of the 50 day moving average and around the left shoulder.  In the case of the Nasdaq which you see below, that was the area around 2326 – 2350.  The Naz would ultimately fail around the 2340 level following a significant reversal day on June 21st.  It should be noted that the Dow did fail at exactly the 50 day moving average on June 21st.  That was signal to begin locking in profits and shorting the market if you’re a trader or offering another chance to raise significant cash if you’re more of an investor.  I still don’t think it’s too late to do so.

Read Entire Post “Nasdaq Confirms Head & Shoulders Top” Here

The analogy I had been using over the past few months to describe the action in the market to my members is that of a majestic skyscraper, each story beautifully built, higher and higher to the heavens. Just one problem.. they skimped on the foundation.  So, as the glorious skyscraper neared the heavens, the foundation began to crack, piece by piece by piece with each passing day.   As dignitaries and VIPs arrived to celebrate the completion of this majestic masterpiece with a ribbon cutting in Ben’s Liquidity Lounge, it tilted ever so slightly.  It was barely noticeable, but those that did, chalked it up to thin air and one too many trips to the punch bowl.

The charts never lie.  As the rally continued to soar to epic heights, the charts began to reveal the warning signs well ahead of the crash.  Granted, this has been a historic, Fed fueled, artificial rally where minor topping patterns failed again and again as the market pushed higher and higher with considerably less conviction.  That began to change in January, when institutions began to unload positions which was revealed in the heavy volume on the sell side.  I have to admit, I thought there was a very good chance of topping in February following the January plunge, but was forced to abandon the plan to get aggressively short on March 4th.

I sent the following note to members:

Read Entire Post “Anatomy Of A Market Meltdown; Potential Head & Shoulders Pattern” Here

With the the likely appointment of Janet Yellen to Vice Chairwoman of the Fed, don’t expect the easy money policy to grind to a halt.  In fact, Janet “easy money” Yellen is more dovish than Kohn and another cog in the easy money wheel.  She supports extremely low rates to keep this economy artificially inflating.  In February, she commented on the economy saying  that while the economic tide appears to have turned and recovery is well under way, “the economy faces a long period of subpar growth, high unemployment and downward inflation pressure, and so it will continue to need “extraordinarily low interest rates.”  Let the good times roll.

The news has certainly helped pressure the dollar in the last couple days, but the dollar remains bullish for now and just consolidating recent gains.

The internet changing news from Cisco (CSCO) the tech world has been anxiously awaiting was unveiled today.  Cisco’s CRS-3 router has been heralded by CEO John Chambers as a system that can download the Library of Congress in a second, stream every movie made in four minutes and allow simultaneous video calls by every single person in China.  It will be available at a cost of $90K in the 3rd quarter of this year.  Mighty impressive, but let’s see what the tech experts have to say.  I thought I’d do a run down of some of the reactions to the big announcement today.

From BNET

BNET doesn’t see any immediate gratification unless others get on board  and says, “Chambers’ promise depends on cable operators and their telecom rivals abandoning greedy habits like doling out bandwidth in metered increments and randomly hiking service rates. So, this could take a while.”

From ChannelWeb

ChannelWeb reports that Cisco’s statement of 12x the capacity is aimed at competitor Juniper which has issued a statement saying the claims are misleading: “The claim of 12 times the traffic capacity of the nearest competing system is based on a theoretical maximum of 72 interconnected CRS-3 chassis in order to achieve the 322Tbps total capacity — this will likely never be deployed in practice due to space, power, and manageability realities.”

From Yankee Group

The Yankee Group notes that the CRS-3 is IPv6 ready, designed to handle the explosion of mobile devices, “cloud ready” and 10x the speed of the closest competitive product but doesn’t quite live up to the big hype.

Quote: “So, did the Cisco CRS-3 live up to the immense hype that preceded it?  No, I don’t think so. But they did set a very high bar.  It’s a good solid announcement that will allow network operators to put a foundation in place to drive differentiated multimedia and mobile services.”

In my opinion, the technology is great and a big step towards handling the explosion of data, but let’s put it in perspective.  As a UBS analyst pointed out today, the high end router market represents less than 5% of Cisco revenues.  The new router may be a game changer for the internet in the years to come, but it’s probably not a game changer for the stock price.

Shares of Cisco were flat today.  Get your CSCO trend analysis here.