What follows is a hodge podge of opinions and links to stuff I found interesting in the news and in blogs in recent days:I will happily admit that as a lifelong Mets fan all other news took a backseat this week to the story of the Mets landing the biggest of big fish, Johan Santana. I haven't been this pleased by a Mets acquisition since Mike Piazza came aboard via trade back in 1998. After a painful and historic collapse ended my team's season abruptly a few months ago, it is suddenly cool to be a Mets fan once again.Afraid to Trade has a great post on "fading the gap" in the Dow. It was a pretty successful strategy in January to say the least. For what it's worth, fading a gap remains my favorite day trading technique and I often use QID or QLD as my equity of choice.Dr Brett has a new p
Brian Auer [CC by-nc-nd]
A sharp focus with crisp detail is generally one of the most sought after features in a photo. How many times have you thrown out a photo because your auto-focus was off a little? How many of us fret over shutter speeds, “sweet spots“, image stabilization, tripods and tripod heads, and image sharpening techniques in Photoshop?
I’m not arguing that sharp photos are are worth the extra effort — but I think unsharp photos are worth more effort than we typically give them. And by “unsharp photos” I don’t mean those accidental blurry shots resulting from your AF picking up on the wrong subject. Intentionally unfocused photos can be quite amazing for certain scenes and subjects.
I spent a bit of time on my last photo shoot working on de-focused, mis-focused, and soft-focused imagery. One of my key learnings is that it’s much harder to pull off than you would think. But before I get to the tips, here are some obs
Hey, here's some good stuff to read!Van Tharp has a thought-provoking and very brief post on the subject of why people trade. I would fall into the category of someone who loves trading and wants to be a great trader. Aside from that, my primary goal in trading is to beat the major indices every day. In my own weird mind, I swear I enjoy the days where I'm up a small fraction of a percent and the market is down big than the days when the market is up huge and I am also up huge. Is that odd?Bill has a very instructive post on the subject of liquidity that is a must read. Check it out...InformationWeek has my favorite headline of the day bar none with Top 5 Things About Windows Vista That Still Suck. No, I haven't used Vista enough personally to have much of an opinion yet. That said, I do enjoy a good Microsoft slam from time to time.Which Hedge Funds are currently in the most trouble? Glad you asked. You can check out The Hedge Fund Implode-O-Meter for that information as well as a
As usual, I've found that I can't make a trip to Dr. Brett's site without learning something. His three part post on Trading Like a Scientist (I, II, and III) is a great example of that particular phenomenon. I am a firm believer in approaching stock trading (and my day job for that matter) in the objective, dispassionate manner that Dr. Brett describes. Read and learn, my friends.Need any other examples of how Yahoo screwed up during Terry Semel's reign as CEO? How about how they mis-handled the financial blogger phenomenon? TheFlyonTheWall (not to be confused with Fly on Wall Street) has the story.Adam writes about naked put selling as a bullish strategy (see here also). It's been on my to do list to learn this exact trade for a while. That being the case, don't be surprised if I tinker with this approach a bit in the coming months.Kevin has started a new blog called The Forex Report and I immediately added a link to it on the right side of my blog. If it's half as insightful
How should you pick stocks for a swing trade when the market is down three days in a row? Marlyn has an idea and it makes sense to me. If a stock goes up when the market is down, then it's logical that it will usually outperform the market when the market starts rising again. Unless it's an inverse ETF, of course.The Old Prof makes some excellent points about personal savings rates and debt levels. To hold the amount of debt someone has against him without taking into account the value of their assets is just silly. Debt, especially mortgage debt, can obviously be your best friend, especially in a lively real estate market.Should I be worried about my MSFT puts? Barron's Tech Trader Daily blog writes about betting on a Vista surge (or Vista escalation if you prefer). Oh wait, they don't think buying MSFT is the best way to play the surge. Personally, I can't fathom what motivates millions of investors each day to say to themselves "man I gotta get me some MSFT at $30 a share". I j
Cerberus Capital to buy 80% stake in Chrysler for $7.4 Billion. That's what the headline says anyway. The fine print tells you, however, that Daimler is basically giving Chrysler away, with most of the purchase price actually going directly toward improving Chrysler's balance sheet. The actual net cash coming to Daimler in the deal? Negative $650 million. I also can't help but raise one crooked eyebrow when I read that UAW supports the deal and that Cerberus will take on Chrysler's pension obligations. Let's keep an eye on how well that works out for the Union. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts we start hearing about management needing concessions from the UAW within months.A couple weeks ago I took exception to Jeremy Grantham's contention that very few sectors will outperform inflation over the next seven years. I'm happy to note that another Jeremy- Dr. Jeremy Siegel- also disagrees with Grantham's assessment that there is a worldwide bubble in almost every class of investm
In order to keep in touch with what bears are focusing on these days, I've limited the following ramblings to only bearish news:From what I can tell, the impending subprime meltdown may well cause plague, pestilence, and the heartbreak of psoriasis for the entire US population. This story is not going away any time soon...Looking for proof that it is way too late for anyone to do anything about the subprime mess? The Senate will be holding a hearing on the issue this week! Nothing confirms that the horse is already out of the barn more than our fine elected representatives beginning to talk about a problem.Feeling a little too bullish today? Jim Rogers can help fix that with his vivid apocalyptic vision of what it will look like when the real estate bubble bursts. Given that I live in a housing market that hasn't appreciated a whole lot since Reagan was in office, I haven't lost any sleep worrying about the inevitable bursting of the housing bubble. That said, I do agree with Rogers
I've been meaning to learn more about pivot points so that I could utilize them in my day and swing trades. Well, Marlyn points out a great website that calculates pivot points using four different methodologies. All you have to do is plug in yesterday's high, low, and close and today's opening price and it spits out the pivot points. I guess I have no excuse not to use them now. I've linked the site to the right... Google was upgraded to buy by UBS this morning. They maintained their target price of $560. As I've mentioned previously, GOOG is one of my largest positions (second in fact, behind Altria) in my core portfolio. Although GOOG has been a passe stock for months and months, I've held on purely because I am loathe to pay taxes on my gain just yet. Well, I'm feeling like GOOG might finally be coming back into style. I've already argued that it is fundamentally cheap as compared to Yahoo. And I've pointed out that GOOG's ever shrinking P/E ratio has made it almost uniqu
Nice profit growth for Staples. I know they're pretty good at what they do but I will remain a loyal Dunder Mifflin guy.Oracle to acquire Hyperion! I was just thinking that Oracle's problem is that they aren't huge enough. This should fix that.I've wanted to transfer some additional cash from my core portfolio to this blog portfolio for a while now and being stopped out of a couple of core positions on Tuesday allows me to do that. Plus, it's the beginning of the month so it make sense to do it now for return calculation purposes. So, as of today, I've added 600 beers to this account, representing an increase of almost 50% in portoflio size. This will allow me to add a couple positions and to increase my average position size. This portfolio now represents about 40% of my liquid capital.If Feburary had 26 days, my returns would have been pretty decent for the month. I guess I should just be thankful that I was able to squeek out a tiny gain. After a 3.6% gain in January, my retur
I am such an idiot that it took me almost five months to figure out how to do bullet points in my posts. Consider this fact when deciding whether to attach credibility to anything I write.I highly recommend you check out Adam's CNBC Viewer's Bill of Rights. It is dead on and very funny, to boot. While I admit that CNBC annoys me on a regular basis and is totally ripe for ridicule, I can't get myself to switch to Bloomberg. I find the tone of Bloomberg to be almost somber. Don't you think? I take the subject of making money seriously, but it shouldn't be depressing.When I sold VSEA ten days ago I was making the bet that cash would outperform it in the near term. I was wrong, by the way, as the stock has risen another 5%+ since I sold. That said I will take that 11.5% gain every day of the week.Yes, it is targeted at propeller-headed politics geeks like me. That said, I am going to keep plugging Bloggingheads.tv until I convert at least one reader. I find the low tech wonkiness of t
* Monday is yet another market holiday? What's with the banker's hours and public employee holiday schedule on Wall Street? As an East Coaster I would definitely like to see regular trading hours extended by a couple hours in the morning. I have my doubts whether it will ever happen.* It seems that AMD, with their oh so ugly chart and cash shortage may be bought out by private equity. Does anyone else remember way back in 2005 when AMD was supposedly eating Intel's lunch? Not that Intel is a rock star at the moment either...* Here's an interesting premise: this blog is dedicated to short-selling Cramer's picks. The anti-Cramer back-lash seems to grow just a little bit more each day.* Housing starts plunge! Investors must think the bad news is baked in at this point, though. Evidence the charts of LEN, KBH and TOL since the beginning of 2007. You could have made a very nice return on those stocks despite almost constant doom and gloom about housing in the news. It's a go
