Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session. – Mark Twain (1866)
You see a lot of stupid comments made about the financial crisis and what should be done about it, and one of the most dangerous was made over the weekend by Vince Cable, the UK Business Secretary, when he proposed that the ECB should be given unlimited powers to support the Euro and the region's debt-ridden economies. You can see the full article at Bloomberg here.
This post's pissing and moaning is on the topic of civil servants.
By that I don't mean each and every civil servant individually. Some government workers are just fine and dandy. I've got no beef with the fellow who brings me my mail, or the utility worker who inspects my electrical panel, or the police officer directing traffic at the broken stoplight. They're all doing their job, and those jobs are needed.
Yeah, yeah, the downgrade, I know. An article on biofuels doesn't speak to its urgency. But I was on a plane. To explain:
I'm a bit of a nervous flier. I guess, being somewhat of a control freak (ahem…….), it's unsettling to be in any situation in which I have absolutely no control over what's going on. After all, if an airplane gets into trouble, the most I can do is chat with God and work out the terms of the life of charity I shall lead in exchange for not plummeting to earth in a metal cylinder.
So as I was flying from Chicago to Denver yesterday evening, there was a large thunderstorm positioned directly – and I mean directly – over the Colorado Springs airport. The woman next to me, whom I guess had been through this kind of thing before, said, "we're going to be up here a while." And she was right.
We made a huge circle around the storm for half an hour, spending about half the time violently shaking as the air buffetted us. It was the worst plane right I had ever been on, and all I could think about was how nice it would be to get us safely landed on the ground. The shaking and the flying seemed interminable, and I kept worrying who would NEW POST this site for the rest of eternity if I were to perish at such a youthful and surprisingly handsome age.
Well, I obviously made it, and my pact with God was amorphous enough that my spending time sharing my thoughts on the market for no charge strikes me as adequately charitible that I think God will approve. So I resume to the struggle.
So the big news is that S&P has declared that, in a nutshell:
+ The United States and its future does not present the most unquestionable credit risk
Not to do S&P's job, but I'd like to supplement their findings with some other equally salient facts:
+ Ophra Winfrey is, and always will be, on the fat side;
+ Julia Roberts and Anne Hathaway have unnecessarily gigantic teeth;
+ Barack Obama enjoys making public speeches
So how will the market react? I'm not sure. I've become so accustomed to perverse market reactions that I would not be surprised at all – in fact, I would be kind of pleased – if the market wound up closing higher on Monday.
As a bearish sort (perhaps I should have added Tim is a Bear to the bullet points above), I am obviously pleased with the market action we've seen lately. But – as a perpetually dissastisfed sort as well – I keep having two contrary, bummer-like thoughts:
+ I sure wish I had even more shorts on;
+ I wonder how long it'll be before we get the big bounce I need to go 200% short
I mean, I've been almost purely net short for a while, and last week was beneficial for me, but many stocks that I wanted to short at better prices still got clobbered by 15%, and I was not there to partake.
I tend to have a "bottoms-up" approach to my analysis, and the preponderence of evidence tells me that the shorting opportunity of the decade is coming up, but it requires a substantial bounce to make the risk/reward worthwhile. By "substantial", I don't mean new recovery highs – – but a 4% to 6% push higher on the big indexes would do the trick (which, for some stocks, would mean a 20%+ rise).
As for the Fibonacci time series, I remain blown away that the video I did on May 2nd (which, conicidentally, was the recovery high) specifically mentioned August 5th as the bottom for the cycle. What's the next bottom? It looks like February 3, 2013 – – which would make a certain amount of sense, since whoever President we wind up with in November 2012 will probably start off with a market that's in a death-spin.
In any event, I remain totally short, but only lightly committed, and Monday bears very close watching. Have a good Saturday.
