Stumped? Hazard a Guess Anyway.

One may have to click on these pics to enlarge them if illegible.

Ouch!!! Stock Market Pain

I must be getting wiser. Earlier in my career, I would have been killed on a day like today (Tuesday). Instead, I made some good money in this bludgeoning.

My three biggest long positions all got hammered:

GOOG down 16.16 (-3.48%)
CDE down .42 (-8.75%)
NEM down -2.76 (-5.86%)

But I was short a ton of the Nasdaq 100 futures and the QQQQ's (also PCCC down 1.80 or 10.06%)

The End-of-the-World trade did not fare well today. Though briefly positive, both oil and gold finished down and the long bond rallied. Thankfully, I didn't really have it on.

I did short the 30-year Treasury yesterday and significantly added to the position today so maybe I'll ease my way back into that fabled trade of mine.

Also, I covered most of my Nasdaq short today - way too soon of course. Today would have been an ideal day to be off golfing with no bids below the market. In violent panics like this, I have always gotten hurt. All it takes is a few innocent longs to bite you in the ass or in the case of option trading, a missed hedge or two.

Here's one example. Years ago, Dell dropped 2 points for seemingly no reason. So I bought an innocent 1,000 shares at $118. Well, between that purchase and the end of the trading day, the stock market decided to tank - much like it did today. Dell closed that day at $100. I lost 18k on 1,000 shares of Dell. That is probably the most points a trader has ever lost in a day in the history of that stock. Here's the scary part - I was proud of myself for not doubling up at any point.

I have pretty much stopped watching and reading financial news but today I had to hear the scuttlebutt - and was it depressing or what?

The Chinese market dropped 9% last night and is being named the chief market antagonist. But the thing is, it had just rallied 13% in the last week or so.

Also, the Nasdaq really just gave up its January gains. Why is everyone panicking?

I simply hate being the level-headed optimist!!!

UPDATE



If you enlarge that pic, you'll see Cramer insisted that the market would not bounce on Wednesday - at any point for that matter. Why would Cramer say something so stupid? It's stupid in the sense that there's a 50% chance he would be completely wrong.

As it stands, I went long the Nasdaq in my futures account just after the close yesterday. I woke up at 6am, saw all of the markets higher (Dow futures up 100pts) and sold my Nazzy futures twenty points higher and then went back to bed to snooze on my profits.

As I have said before, "Cramer Sucks".

Seinfeld Covered It All

I spent this weekend in beautiful Newport, Rhode Island. Here's what happened a few minutes after we got there.

My wife and her mother had just taken the kids out of the room to go for a stroll. I just laid down on the bed with my book. Not 15 seconds after they left, I hear my wife trying to scan the key-card and get back into the room. She must of forgotten something.

I remembered the door was a little stubborn and I hear her unsuccessfully turning the knob. She can't get in. Maybe she was using the key-card for her mother's room? Maybe she is just being retarded? She knocks and I have to get up to open the door.

Now I am perturbed; she is always forgetting stuff; I had just started to relax after the long drive down. So I open the door if not furiously, at least with a clear growl and some woman, who's not my wife, is standing there half embarrassed and half scared. She stammers apologetically,

"Oh, I am so sorry. This isn't my room. I am on the wrong floor..."

Without batting an eyelash or mitigating my scowl, I snapped at her,

"I ordered an Asian girl."

The mortified woman couldn't run away fast enough.

You'll find this same joke by scrolling all the way to the end of this Seinfeld Episode.

Why Does This Only Have 12,000 Hits?

Here is the direct link.

It's All Propaganda

I saw a television ad the other day for a DVD from The Big Comfy Couch - a children's "educational" program.

Here's one of the promotional lines from the ad,

"....teaching your kids to share, to care, and to have fun."

Hmmm.

The whole package sure smells like a diet of socialism and heathen self-amusement to me.

Remember I am firmly against sharing.

Don't fall into this trap of thinking I am overly cynical. Consider that these kids shows all fit that same template. Barney, Elmo, and the Wiggles could teach children about family, faith, and self-reliance but they never do. As John Gatto has written, children's programming is always encouraging the brats to "imagine" and wend their own way through life without any authoritative guidance, parental, religious, or otherwise.

It's all deliberate subversion with the end of turning your kids into "blank slates" - not creative, independent thinkers. I can't expound today but do some research and scrutinize the shows for yourself if you don't believe me.

Let me try to convince you this way. The multi-cultural nonsense is thoroughly apparent on these children's shows/networks, no?

Now, have you ever seen the multi-culti crap far removed from agitprop and its attendant God-less heathenism?

I certainly haven't.

Handmaidens, co-travelers, whatever you want to call them...

Like everything else these days, they come in a bundle.

The Italian Tomato Garden

An old Italian man lived alone in the country. He wanted to dig his tomato garden, but it was very hard work as the ground was hard.

His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament.

Dear Vincent,

I am feeling pretty badly because it looks like I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here my troubles would be over. I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me.

Love, Dad

A few days later he received a letter from his son.

Dear Dad,

Don't dig up that garden. That's where I buried the bodies.

Love, Vinnie

At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left.

That same day the old man received another letter from his son.

Dear Dad,

Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances.

Love you, Vinnie

Marginalizing Morons, One at a Time

Here’s the scene – Rattlesnake Bar and Grill, Boston, Massachusetts, last Saturday night.

It was a rare occasion these days, me out boozing with a friend in town from NYC. I have been his wingman for years in his endless search for what Jerry Seinfeld calls "women with qualities important to the superficial male".

So we are sitting at the semi-crowded bar, my buddy was chatting up some fair lady next to him and I ended up talking to some geriatric guy at the bar. He was kind of funny, somewhat drunk, and extremely out-of-place that Saturday night.

My buddy looks askance at me and jabs, "Why are you trying to pick up some old guy?"

Haha.

Turns out, the guy was a big shot at a multi-billion dollar company – actually a publicly traded one based in Boston. Let’s just say his three-lettered title started with a "C" and ended with an "O".

Like most people, the guy was soon charmed by both my conversation and my palpable eminence. He proudly gives me his business card. Now he is getting sloppy, drooling over the barmaid and pathetically trying to hit on girls less than half his age. But I was still BS'ing with him on an array of different subjects and alternately provoking his antics. The big shot thought himself hilarious and was dropping corny jokes like an avuncular dentist. He explained (no less than eight times) how he got his current high level position,

They made me a Polish Mafia offer...

...one that I couldn’t UNDERSTAND.

I actually hadn’t heard that one before and found it quite funny (and I am near half Polish myself).

He had this unrelenting frustrated comedian act going on. When asked if he had kids, he opened his wallet to show me a picture of his "pride and joy".



Yes, that was the pic he showed me. He said to turn it over, there's a picture of his "ex" on the back.

On the back of the card was a big letter "X".

He also told me that he fancied himself a "wit". And his friends tell him he is "half right".

This guy kept going on and on, imbibing, slobbering at unreceptive nubile women, and wisecracking. At some point I told him I have a blog called Marginalizing Morons. He somewhat scoffed at my revelation, asking me what I wrote about. I told him that I was going to go home and write about him. How he was stone-cold drunk, making an ass of himself, hitting on both men and women, and bragging how he cheated on both his past wife and his current one. Of course I would list his name, the company he runs, etc.

Shaking off his drunken stupor, the fossil turned noticeably white. He probably remembered that he had given me his business card, that he had been acting like a donkey, that he was a visible public figure, and that there's probably nothing he could do to stop me from "outing" his boorish behavior on the World Wide Web.

Of course I told the fool I was kidding but it did nothing to disabuse his fears. Still white as a snowflake, he told me all it would take is one phone call to "end" me. Ironically, here he was trying to play his sincerity off as a joke. Quite frankly, I have never ever received a more laughable death threat; bear in mind, that since I spent years hanging out in South Philly, I have heard them aplenty (and only three times did someone actually pull "metal" on me!)

So my buddy and I were in stitches laughing at the old coot; he dawdled for a few more minutes before sneaking out the bar. Maybe he soiled himself? More likely he went home and prayed that I truly was kidding. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to check my cookies tracker and see if "someone" from his company googles "marginalizing morons".

CaptiousNut fancies himself a benevolent public educator; all I was doing was teaching the old man a lesson on how seven-figure salaried executives should comport themselves in the age of the internet, YouTube, etc.

Overall, he wasn't really a bad guy, just as techno-clueless as everyone else in his age bracket. He should consider himself lucky that I didn't whip my video camera out of my pocket - the next guy may do so.

It's hard to believe he near runs a multi-billion dollar public company. Without giving away its name, let's just say the company is already heavily shorted by Wall Street.

Market Extremes

From BigPicture,

Its been a very long time -- 930 days -- since the Dow Industrials suffered a 2% one day decline; Not only has the S&P 500 gone almost four years without a 2% down day, it has been seven months since it has corrected 2% at all! This is the second-longest such period in 53 years.

A data point like this is fodder for both the sheep and the upstream-swimming salmon - see my prior post.

The difference is, the sheep are really fat and flush while that skinny salmon is broke, if not extinct.

Both stock and bond option premiums are also hovering near record lows.

I'd give my right arm to know the precise amplitude of this pendulum...

Too Lazy to Read?

Well I was too lazy to write today - but I toiled nonetheless.

Instead I did for pics what I have done in the past for hyperlinks. In the course of my blog research, I am forever stockpiling links and pictures that might complement upcoming posts. Today, I set my image files to music and uploaded them to YouTube. Many of the pics you'll recognize from my posts while some never made into the blog. Here they are in chronological order. Make sure your speakers are turned up. Enjoy.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Global Warming Empiricism

It's been so warm recently (except when it's ice cold) that many notables have even gone "commando".

I won't provide a link but for a hint, think "Spears".

They Did Not Win the Florida Sandcastle Competition

....BUT they are the favorites in the upcoming contest in Malibu.

Suitcase Nuke Prediction

I want to go on record as predicting a "suitcase nuke" explosion in Manhattan.

When?

No time frame will be given. Heck, if "climate change" doomsayers can be vague, so can I.

Think about it. If you were a terrorist with a three-digit IQ, dreaming of humbling the Great Satan (i.e. America), what else would be more devastating?

First of all, it would kill the most infidels.

Second, a dirty bomb would devastate the American, if not the world, economy.

The stock market would crash, 401k's would become 201k's, many jobs and companies would cease to exist. The fallout would be disastrous. Real estate would crater. Household and national wealth would plummet to impossibly foreseen levels. Tax revenue would dry up, the deficit would balloon, etc.

Think I am crazy?

Well, this gal thinks the nukes are already in America.

Flying planes into the Twin Towers was quite a surprise, was it not?

Well, it wasn't to the Arabs in Brooklyn. They knew instantly that it was a terrorist attack, who committed it, and why. They were jumping for joy on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, taking pictures of each other with the "beautiful" burning buildings as the backdrop.

At this point, a mushroom cloud rising from an American city will only surprise the willfully ignorant. Why the heck would they pick Sacramento?



Where exactly are all of those Soviet nukes????

Hillary Proposes to Confiscate Oil Profits

Yeah, that's a great idea - go ahead and wipe out $440 billion dollars (Exxon) of investors' money. Of course they have to impoverish the shareholders of Chevron, Shell, and all of the other oil service companies all over the globe too. Apparently no pension funds, widows, or orphans own the stock of oil companies. The total market cap of oil names is over $1 trillion. Do you think they are all owned by old white men in Texas?

If so, turn your speakers on and click here.

Here's exactly what would happen in the face of profit confiscation - even if euphemized as "windfall taxation". Not only would investors lose multiples of the money they lost on Enron, oil and gasoline would skyrocket in price. Food, heat, air conditioning and every other consumer expense would inflate. Home prices would deflate; jobs would be lost. What an orgy of prosperity to look forward to!!!

Only in a thoroughly economically illiterate nation can a would-be President trumpet such inanity.

As this news made the rounds today, oil shot up $1.70, a huge move. Just a coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.

Make no mistake - Big Government advocates want oil to skyrocket in price. They intentionally strangle the businessman, the consumer, and the student with their regulation, taxation, and de-humanization and then use the resultant popular angst to argue for more power. Their failures are always excuses for more money and larger mandates. Imagine if you told your boss that your work was sub-par because he didn't give you enough time AND was underpaying you. How would that go over?

"Energy independence"????

Everything in their larger agenda is hellbent on suffocating human independence. As I articulated in a prior post,

They believe everyone should DEPEND on the government for healthcare, housing, birth control, welfare, free lunches, disaster relief, education, retirement, etc. Yet when it comes to energy, all of a sudden they start singing paeans to SELF-SUFFICIENCY. Of course their idea of "energy independence" is based on "alternative" mythology, not on domestic oil production.

The utopists endeavor to control it all.

Please, don't be fooled.