Well today takes the cake....at first I think I am seeing things. I see a headline story that Wall Street had a major rally over Citibanks financial statements...I mean how in the WORLD did Citi make any money?
But as I read on I realize that Wall Street is going nuts over Citi....ONLY loosing $5.1B dollars????
OK so they are celebrating higher revenue reports, well that's a no brainer considering the Feds handed over $600B a few weeks back, I mean if I could get a $5M loan to bu new equipment I GUARANTEE my revenue will increase!!

I'm sorry - but what is the good news here again?

Well usually these things are predicted and already factored into stock prices. When people buy and sell based on assumption on what a loss will be and it's less that what everybody had already assumed it would be then that leads people to buy since it isn't as bad as what was priced into it already. At times you will see a huge profit lead to a stock or the market in general going down because it's below expectations. It's all about trying to predict the future and people try and use data to forecast that and make decisions based on those forecasts.

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"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

There were no surprises. Yes - it was a very bad report, but it had been predicted. It sounds crazy. But it was not worse than expected. But that is how it works.

Also, it may be a sign of a market bottom. The financials did very well today - around the world.

Well I like to refer to that as "budget-speak", you know like "we came in 15% better than budgeted revenue for this quarter and we enjoyed 9% better earnings over PYTD"...however the speaker will fail to mention that PYTD was an absolute disaster - so they budgeted 20% down over 2 years ago - so the quarter is still abysmal.
Budget speak is a language I am unfortunately intimate with, and constantly have to translate into reality.

In a nutshell - Citi lost over $5B - and no matter how you spin it - that is not a good thing.

Unless it is the bottom, and the price is now cheap.

Of course that is a big "unless"....