The DOW Is JUMPIN JUMPIN

By: Alcides Hoy Jr.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Stocks recharged a rally Monday after Treasury's plan to buy up billions in bad bank assets and a better-than-expected existing home sales report raised hopes that the economy is stabilizing.
The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) gained 390 points, or 5.3%, with 40 minutes left in the session. The S&P 500 (SPX) index rose 42 points, or 5.6%. The Nasdaq composite added 74 points, or 5.1%.
"I think the stock reaction is a vote of confidence in the plan," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank.
He said the stock market is also reacting well because the plan is skewed in favor of the private investor, who only has to be responsible for around 7% of the total in any transaction.
But other analysts were less sanguine. "The plan is a rehash of what we've seen before and it still doesn't resolve the issue of how to value the bad assets," said Stephen Leeb, president at Leeb Capital Management. Click to Read More

Real Estate vs Stocks

By: Alcides Hoy Jr.

Round 1
Performance
Real estate has packed quite a punch of late, appreciating 12.4% annually between 2001 and 2006, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. Home Price index. That clobbered stock prices, which gained only 4.3% a year as measured by the S&P 500.
But over the long run stocks win easily. A new study by Jack Clark Francis, a finance and economics professor at Baruch College in New York City, and Yale's Roger G. Ibbotson compared the annual returns of real estate from 1978 to 2004 compared with those of 15 different "paper" investments, including stocks, bonds, commodities futures, mortgage securities and real estate investment trusts (REITs).
The results? Housing delivered a solid but unimpressive annualized return of 8.6%. Commercial property did better at 9.5%. The S&P, however, delivered a crushing 13.4%.
Other studies argue that real estate's returns are much worse. Yale finance and economics professor Robert Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance, who looked back to 1890, contends that only twice has real estate produced truly outstanding returns: after World War II, when returning troops were starting their families, and from 1998 to 2005, a period he thinks is a bubble.
Housing's rate of return, he argues, has to trend back to the mean of about 3% a year - barely above the inflation rate. If that's starting to happen now, he says, we could be facing many years of losses.

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