Mortgage and Financial Market Update

Author: Ed Culin

Today's Mortgage and Bond  Rates

Bond Market Rates                  Mortgage Rates

30 Year Treasury    5.04%          30 year Fixed       6.500%

10 Year Treasury    4.94%          15 Year Fixed      6.250%

2 Year Treasury       4.97%           1 Year ARM       6.375%      

3 Month Treasury    4.79%            5 Year ARM       6.500%

 

Today's News

The Bond market is opening slightly stronger in early trading while the stock market opens lower. Heavy loses overnight in China markets appear to be hurting stocks a bit and bringing some much need strength back to the Bond Market.  The yield on the 10 Year Note stands a 4.93% still near the 10 month highs made on Friday.  The 30 year bond stands at 5.04%. This marks the 8th day that yields were above the  psychologically important 5.0% level. 

In news today Bloomberg has an interesting article regarding Options trading which indicates a market opinion that the Fed may be raising rates not lowering rates in the near term. They feel that weakness in the housing market will be offset by strength in other sectors of the economy. Our view is that most prognosticators are underestimating the impact that the housing market will have on consumer confidence. The losses being seen in housing are going to be more severe and widespread then thought. The article below details the issues:

Fed Faces Growing Pressure to Raise Interest Rates, Options Market Shows

In what some would view as positive news two more mortgage companies have been acquired by Wall Street companies Accredited Lending and ResMae were purchased by two hedge funds. Companies again are bottomed fishing under the hopes that can acquire future production at Rock Bottom Prices. Accredited shares traded as high as 58 less then 2 years ago. The company is being purchased  now at 15.10 per share. The articles below provide specifics:

Citadel's ResMae Purchase Signals Recovery of the Subprime Bond Market

Accredited Home to be bought for $400 mln

 

As we say on a daily basis We continue to urge caution in placing new money into the equity markets. We believe that the weakness in the housing market  will continue to impact economic growth. Rates have risen steadily over the past month further hurting the ability of buyers to afford the housing they desire. This is also making it more difficult for economically challenged folks to affords potential increases in mortgage payments as ARM loans reprice .We believe that this weakness will impact company profitability in all sectors as time goes on, which will  cause lower stock process over time.

We believe that we are in a recession at this point. We continue to believe that the Fed needs to Cut rates at this time to help stabilize the issues that consumers are having in the repayment of their debts. From what we are seeing in the market place there is no indication that the Fed will be acting on this anytime soon.  If action is not taken this will just prolong the slowdown in housing and create a deeper recession.

 

About the author:

This article was written by Ed Culin. Ed is a Mortgage broker who manages the following Web Sites http://www.gofairway.com and

http://www.thebestloandeal. com . Visit these sites for more information about the mortgage process.

Only pick a fight you can win - the first rule of successful Web marketing

Author: David Rosam

We're at least a decade into the Internet as a commercial medium. The top sites have been there for a long time, so if you're launching a site now, you have a lot of catching up to do.

Aren't a great site and brilliant products enough?

In a word, no. Consider the nature of the battlefield. Google is king of the Web - more than 70% of searches worldwide are on Google. And, in the B2B sphere, probably more.

Google actually prefers older, established sites - it even largely ignores new sites by 'sandboxing' them for 9 to 12 months. The big hitters have been there for 10 years or more, and they have thousands of mature links, many of them inevitably of good quality. They're the kind of sites that will be entrenched in the top positions on popular searches.

Now do you want to take them on? Do you have the budget, stamina and time? Or will you find a better way?

Only pick a fight you can win

To pick a fight you can win, you're going to have to operate smart. You're unlikely to want to take on Tesco (Wal-Mart, if you're reading in the US) by setting up a small general store next door, so why would you want to take on the Tescos of the online world in a similar kind of contest?

One of the areas we find people trying to pick the wrong fights is in financial services. From time to time we get an enquiry from someone who wants to rank on the first page of Google for 'home insurance', 'car insurance', 'pensions' and 'mortgages'.

There's next to no chance (within reasonable budget and patience boundaries) of getting them there because every bank and financial institution has been pouring loads of investment into marketing their sites online.

Many have been on the Web for years, and just as many of them have thousands and thousands of links. And, for regulated financial products, the poor financial services business will have government sites to contend with as well - Google loves government sites because they're the ultimate reference for so many matters.

Where's your niche?

You need to look at what makes you different. Particular product niches or geographical focus, perhaps? That's good basic marketing, not Internet marketing or SEO. Look at your products and services.

Let's go back to the mortgage example. Do you specialize in self-employed mortgages? Or do you have particular geographical focuses? 'mortgages in West Sussex' would be a much more realistic target than simply 'mortgages'.

Your Web site needs to reflect what your business, products and services are really about, not what you'd like to be about, or what you'd like to target. Be realistic. The tough targets can come next year, once you've started making some profit from your site.

Pinpointing your opponents' undefended side

So how can you find a niche where your competitor is weak? Think about the kinds of things you can do that your competitors don't or can't? If your business is already running, then the chances are, you already have figured out your niche offline. That's your starting point for marketing online.

Or look towards your business plan. A SWOT (strengths weaknesses opportunities threats) analysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis) can be applied in the online environment just as well as off-line.

But commission some appropriate key phrase analysis, researching both traffic levels and link competition, and your opportunities should be laid out in front of you. By this, I mean higher traffic key phrases that are relevant to your business, and that you should be able secure a first-page listing for on Google because the tougher competitors have ignored those pieces of prime turf.

These niches are normally there if you look hard enough and in the right places.

Winning your fight

Once you've identified your niche, you can attack on two fronts - Organic SEO and PPC. For successful Organic SEO, you need to do three things: Write the copy with an awareness of your customers' needs and the strengths of your products and services - to be as competitive as possible, your copy should be optimized on your researched key phrases Build links - one-way, non-paid-for links, so don't go in for link exchanges, and beware of anyone who promises you thousands of links very quickly Ensure your site is built to enable search engine spiders to read your copy - it's best to use CSS

For PPC you need to:

Run ads on one system only - unless you have a large amount of time to manage the campaigns (or the budget to employ an expert to do it for you), choose Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsoft adCentre. In the unlikely event you are profitably buying all the clicks you can and still have some budget, you should try the same profitable key phrases on another system as well Start with the key phrases you have researched, then use the system's tools to research even more - and keep on researching as your campaign runs. With PPC, you'll almost certainly find yourself targeting more key phrases than with Organic SEO Set a budget - and make sure you have set that maximum budget in the system to ensure you don't overspend Set up Ad Groups and write copy - bear in mind you should try testing headline, content and landing page variations Monitor, manage and test, test, test - keep a close eye on what's working and what's not; monitor bidding levels and CPCs (costs per click) Work out your break-even point and be ruthless - if you can't make a key phrase profitable after a reasonable time, drop it. It's no use inflicting a hit on yourself through making a loss on PPC

Have patience and you'll win

Sandboxed or not, it'll take some months before you really start reaping the benefits of your Organic SEO. And although you can get immediate traffic from PPC, it's unlikely that you'll hit the jackpot right away. Have realistic expectations and make a sustained attack on your competitors' weakest points and you'll have won the online fight.

About the author: David Rosam is Head of SEO Copywriting at Web Positioning Centre (http://webpositioningcentre.co.uk/search-engine-optimisation.php ), and specialises in Internet marketing strategy and optimised copywriting. His blog is Dangerous Thinking (http://dangerous-thinking.com) which covers SEO Copywriting, Ethical SEO and Marketing.

A House is Not an ATM or a Slot Machine

Author: ForeclosureFish.com

It is always a little disheartening to read and hear about homeowners who treated their homes as if they were a giant ATM machine and could pull out a few thousand dollars whenever they needed. This gambling on the value of a home to pay off past, present, and future debt is one of the main contributing factors to the current foreclosure situation, and it was a factor that wholely avoidable. The missing counterbalance was simply education for homeowners on the actual use of a house.

The necessary lesson can be summed up in a single sentence: a home is a place to live in,

not a slot machine that periodically pays off every few years. Given a choice to pay off the mortgage completely and own a home free and clear, or keep going further and further in household debt while increasing the amount of money is costs to pay back that debt, it is amazing that homeowner chose the second of the two possibilities. Instead of eliminating their mortgage payment completely, they chose to increase it stedily over time, to keep up with their own rising consumption rate. This is, frankly, crazy.

Now that the bills are coming due, many homeowners are realizing that their house is more important to them as a place to live, even as they desperately try to use it as a bank one last time to hold onto it and remain living there. But with so many others facing the same problems of rising payments and falling home values, these homeowners are unable to stop foreclosure from taking away both their homes and their equity.

What is even more disturbing is the fact that foreclosure victims are made to feel as if they are alone in this situation. This is exacerbated by the fact that almost

no one is talking about the dangerous atmosphere in the housing market ; in fact, many ""authorities"" are talking up the rebound in the housing market as if it actually exists. Besides a few isolated areas of the country in which housing prices are rising or holding steady, there is a

general decrease in property values this year, the first since 1990-1991. This time, there are no huge bank failures or a meltdown of the Savings and Loan industry to blame it on. And with even more Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) about to reset this year,

the devestation may just be in its initial stages .

Homeowners are not alone in their quest to stop foreclosure and save their homes. They should seek out the best foreclo sure information that they can find, and put together the best plan to work with their lender or get a fresh start. But this is also a time that foreclosure victims should take a careful examination of their situations and work towards viewing their home as their place to live, and making sure they own as much of it as quickly as they can. Treating a house as if it was a bank or ATM machine will only cause more problems the next time the machine runs out of money.

About the author: ForeclosureFish.com is a website that was designed to help homeowners find as much foreclo sure information as they need to save their homes on their own. Visit their website today and download a free e-book and learn how to stop foreclosure: http://www.foreclosurefish.com/