Top Takes From RealMoney

The RealMoney contributors are in the business of trading and investing all day on the basis of ongoing news flow. Below, we offer the top five ideas that RealMoney contributors posted today and how they played those ideas.

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1. Negative Real Estate Data Hitting the Wires

Paul Rubillo
4/7/2009 2:18 PM EDT

Here is some interesting Equifax (EFX) data just released this morning:

Seven percent of homeowners with mortgages were at least 30 days late on their loans in February, an increase of more than 50% from a year earlier.

Also, 39.8% of subprime borrowers were at least 30 days behind on their home mortgage loans, up 23.7% from last year.

I'm still not sold on a housing bottom at this point, and the bottom line is that real estate rarely turns on a dime. Plenty of time to get in when it bottoms.

2. Watching IBM

Daniel Shaffer
4/7/2009 1:38 PM EDT

Watch IBM(IBM Quote) carefully to determine future direction of the Dow and S&P 500. It is heavily weighted in these indices, and just as it helped lead the indices up, IBM could also lead them down. IBM, technically, looks like it is failing off its 200-day down-sloping moving average with a top volume spike last Thursday and Friday. It hasn't been at the 200-day moving average since last September on its breakdown, and this could be just the first test to touch it.