Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Odd Stuff

Today's a perfect example of the market reacting to something that to my mind was no surprise. I stand by my caricature of the market as a teenage boy. You can holler and repeat yourself until you are blue in the face, but he ain't gonna listen until there is a whack to the head. I supposed the Fed statement boxed the ears of the market.

Also NG left a very interesting comment by Dennis Gartman about the oil futures. I've wondered out loud in this space and others as to whether or not someone was blowing up and short oil. If one is undergoing a forced liquidation, if you are long, you must sell. If you are short, the obverse happens: YOU MUST BUY.

Remember with natural gas exploded? Remember Amaranth? I believe they were short natural gas. Remember Mother Rock? They were long. So Amaranth's frantic buying pushed the market up. If you went long and levered up--the gravitational pull of drying up buying interest has an unkind effect on prices.

I'm just now back from a shopping expedition to get "stuff" for my dinner party. It has been bothering me that I do not have any "decorations". I'm not a good tablescape person. But I went to Tuesday Morning, then Marshall's, then Kohls and the to Target. If got some melamine dinner ware and napkins etc that will give us a nice Caribbean theme for my Cuban dinner.

I'll post the sector sort tomorrow.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

nice- you have company...not short oil but am short commodities via SMN...also short bonds via TBT, and long china via CAF...nice combination of losing trades so far this week...but hey, it's only wednesday...;)

2nd

Anonymous said...

2nd

Pretty wacky market heh?

All over the map.

Seems to be easier to catch the wild intraday swings than to time multiday swings - never can tell anymore whether its distribution or accumulation in many cases.

Market's like a wild animal trapped in a cage... with all these primal impulses of greed and fear - but having trouble finding outlets for the greed.

Until they clean up the mess - could be a long time before we get back to "normal investing"

.. perplexed investor... indeed!