Weekend Update

What an oddly serene, yet uncomfortable week coming up.

Here we were, on Good Friday, on the precipice of another year in which lunar coincidence allows Passover and Easter to coincide.

For many, serenity comes from family time, celebration and sometimes the re-inforcement of faith, culture and heritage.

In honor of the holiness of Good Friday, even capitalists will put away their arms and take the day off from their all consuming efforts. After all, the Prince of Peace wasn't exactly a fan of the 1%, so what better way to honor the message of peace than to take a day off from advancing your personal caches of wealth?

I may not recall much from my college Theology class days, but I'm fairly certain that among the things that was not discussed at that Last Supper Seder was hedging strategies for the coming week.

Even those Jewish people without much in the way of belief will retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt in whatever metaphors are appropriate for their own friends and family. Again, hedging strategies are not likely to play a role in the re-telling of the story.

But still, what a perfect day to release the employment numbers.

Our currency may say "In God We Trust," but report releases rest for no deity.

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Is that All it Takes?

The day started with a nice surprise for me.

Still upset about the bad luck I'd had when my computer froze during the final minutes of FrIday's trading session, I was prepared to start the week with most of my Freeport McMoRan shares assigned from me after just having sold those calls earlier in the day on Friday.

Compound that with only a net $8 profit from the big mega-Millions drawing and you've got some blood pressure raising seething going on that can be internalized for only so long.

Sometimes, though, the system is neither perfect in its execution nor in its pricing.

For example, sometimes really stupid people win really big lottery prizes.

They can be safely assessed as having been stupid on the basis of blowing through tens of millions of dollars and more in just a few years and being left with nothing but memories of days of grandeur.

That reportedly happens fairly often, so there may be an inverse corrrelation between jackpot winners and IQ. I still don't understand all of the testimonials of past jackpot winners who claim that their lives became worse in so many untold ways after their good fortune.

Seven out of ten people that I polled on that issue agreed that it was a sign of stupidity at its greatest height.

Sometimes the system gets it wrong too, as shares are expected to be assigned if they closed more than a penny above their strike price.

But the surprise, the yawn of a system taking a break, was right there, staring at me this morning.

I felt as if I'd gotten a gift when only the smaller lot of my Freeport shares was assigned, leaving a bit more than 75% of the shares still safely stored in my portfolio.

Not quite a Mega-Millions jackpot, but I gladly accepted it.

Of course had those shares not taken a well deserved climb well higher this morning, I'd be muttering about the inequity of the system letting me down and would be raging against those 1% fat cats that comprise the 1% of the 1%.

Instead, move over and make room for me and my boys, Mac and Moran.

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Weekend Update

I had a hard time getting myself out of a deep blue funk in order to write this week's "Weekend Update."

No, not because of a gut wrenching week in the market, the week treated me just fine.

For you see, it turned out, as I awoke this morning, that I had not won the $640 Million Mega-Millons Grand Prize.

Forget the fact that I won a $2 voucher at the time of my ticket purchase and chose to cash it in rather than re-invest and forget the fact that I won another $7 by virtue of having 3 of the numbers,

Believe it or not, it was the $640 million that I'd set my sights on.

Sure, the $8 net return on the $1 investment was good, but still a far cry from real triumph.

But, not to let a good thing go to waste, I may pick up a few hundred million shares of Sino-Forest.

This past week, I actually started looking for the coming week's potential plays on Thursday and was hoping certain depressed prices would hold, because I was anxious to re-play some previous positions.

One of those was selling puts in Focus Media again, a distant relative to Sino Forest, although at some point we're likely to find out that the distance was never really terribly great.

Unfortunately, it only offers monthly options. Too much can happen between now and the three weeks until expiration. Equally unfortunately, it's one of those Chinese companies, so you never can really tell what's going on. But that is what helps to explain very enticing premiums.

If you dare.

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Winsome Wednesdays

I spent a good part of the day in a medical facilty and its waiting room today. and I'm not quite certain how to describe the fare that was playing on the communal, but grossly undersized overhead television.

Obviously I'm spoiled by both content and context.

It certainly wasn't what I was used to watching during the day, as local news production values leave much to be desired.

Unless I'm mistaken or still in some drug induced recovery mode, I think that one of the correspondents adorned in a plaid blazer was named Herb Grunberg and he was accompanied by Brian Mulligan and Candy Drury.

Other than perhaps being a bit more hirsute and much less intelligible, I guess I could learn to like them, if I was destined to spend the rest of my life in a Bizarro universe.

But my stay here was to be a short one. Sugar Momma made me promise, though, not to divulge why I was here, but I am at liberty to disclose that my efforts to perfect an Erectile Dysfunction drug that allowed you to wait 8 hours before seeking urgent medical attention went awry.

Seems that the calculation should take into account the amount of time that it takes to get to the facility.

But despite the utter boredom of the day, it was a welcome change from what is typically "Winsome Wednesday" which for me represents the low point of the week in terms of trading activity and meaningfully relevant news stories.

Lest you think that I don't know the meaning of the word "winsome," let its use just be refelctive of the fact that I was too lazy and unimaginative today to come up with some other word for alliterative purposes.

Yet, when looking for a change of pace, maybe boring Wednesdays are my definition of "winsome."

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Hello Volatility my Old Friend

I don't know why, but so many things in life seem to be able to be expressed in someone else's song.

For lots of people, the feeling is that the song is speaking directly to them and captures exactly what they've felt.

For me, if that were the case, I'd be a die hard fan of instrumentals.

As much as I love Bruce Spriingsteen, there's no doubt that he's not singing to me or about anything that I know or can identify with. I'm just a big fan of unbridled sweat stains.

"I see you walking down the street, pushing that baby carriage at your feet'" is a line that I can play back in my head for hours at a time, yet it means nothing to me.

"My father said right before he died that true true love was just a lie."

Again. Nothing.

Simon and Garfunkel come as close as anyone that I could identify with other than the fact that I can't sing and I never had any friends to disharmonize with on the streets of the city.

Garfunkel on the other hand did have a couple of solo hits that seemed to speak to me, but more than likely it was the hair that I idenitfied with.

Now that he's old and has male pattern baldness, I won't look nor listen in his direction.

For me, volatility is far from the "darkness" that the original duo known as "Tom and Jerry" sang about, except that I do think of it as my friend.

Friendship is a strange thing, because even arch nemeses somehow perversely become friends, if only because of the years upon years of battling with one another, and the mutual understanding and respect that ensues. At least that's the image that's painted in "The Fugitive," and "The Pink Panther."

Personally, I think that years of battling would only deepen the anger and hatred.

The recent friend, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Starbucks just had a falling out and then just as quickly had a reconciliation, just yesterday.

Friendship is great and quantifiable, as Green Mountain went up about 13% after Starbucks announced yet another initiative with their insipid coffee making friends.

But then, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was on air after the annual meeting and despite saying nothing but good and warm things about his friends in Vermont, discounted it all as he quickly changed his tone and cadence with the perfect use of the word "however," as he transitioned to a more bubbly discussion of Starbuck's upcoming venture into coffee hardware.

Whatever happened to Simon and Garfunkel, anyway?

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Weekend Update

If I do say so myself, the nice thing about my blog is that you really don't have to read it very often, because I'm constantly repeating myself. Imagine being married to me. Suddenly the unlimited supply of amusing stories and anecdotes reaches a limit, as long as your memory or hearing is intact

Best of all, this still being a free society, you don't have to read it at all, as long as you continue to pay the monthly subscription fee to have it delivered to your Kindle.

Imagine, just $0.99 a month to have it electronically delivered to your e-Book reader.

I think Amazon should adopt the old Telephone directory strategy for having an unlisted number and charge $2.50 a month to not get the blog delivered to your Kindle.

But if you have been reading on a regular basis you'd know that I've been bemoaning the fact that so far in 2012, I've been trailing the S&P 500.

Ever since I've been doing this dogmatic approach to covered call writing I'm not accustomed to seeing myself behind the eight ball.

The real kiss of death probably came when Barrons Magazine called the covered call strategy the only winning one for 2011.

It's exactly the same as when TIME magazine puts something hot on the cover.

It fades and fizzles.

Or like when Sugar Momma finally got herself an iPod Mini.

The day that she gives up her Kindle and exchanges it for an iPad is the day I start shorting Apple shares with every last bit of my soul and portfolio.

But finally, this week was back to normal, though not in trading activity. I still made relatively few trades this week. Having made such few trades, some dumb ones, in hindsight, really stand out.

Like grabbing a few pennies by selling calls on all of my Research in Motion holdings on Thursday, the day before shares inexplicably go up 7%.

I say inexplicably, because the purported reason was first given that there was some sort of Samsung alliance rumor, which was then followed by the contention that the fact that RIMM didn't offer a "profit warning" report had to be a very positive sign.

I don't know very much about SEC rules, and by that I mean that I don't know anything, but are they required to give profit warnings?

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Price Points

I really don't know anything about "Price Points."

I'm certain that there's a fairly well established discipline that melds economic theory with behavioral science to explain at what point people will be spurred into action.

Call it cost/benefit. Call it risk/reward. Whatever.

I'm not much of a consumer, but I do occasionally get feelings that have to be requited.

Oh, and I buy things, too, sometimes. That desire tends to be inelastic, as opposed to the diminishing elasticity related to the other desires.

I'm not really certain that I've ever been intrigued to buy an item from a retailer just because it dropped its price, other than that DiGiorno Pizza and chicken combo that was on sale a few weeks ago, yet wasn't last week.

Last week, I chose not to buy it, as I made a decision, on some level that's not entirely clear to me, that the cholseterol hit wasn't worth the retail price du jour.

Or is it Di Gior?

Actually, it wasn't the sale price that got me to buy it initially. In fact, prior to that day, I'd never tried one of their products. It just happened that on the day in question the product was prominently displayed and the price seemed reasonable. I never had any idea what the usual price was.

Best of all, both the pizza and chicken actually tasted good. Despite the fact that I'm very far removed from my Bronx roots, I really enjoy good pizza and accept both the short term consequence of heart burn and the longer term consequence of death.

There must be some kind of price point buried in there somewhere, especially when it comes to those longer term considerations.

What I discovered today, though, was that there was a clear price point for my "Option to Profit" book.

Until about 12 AM PST today, you can get it for free to read on your Kindle.

Amazon must know what they're doing, because in just the first 8 hours, more people have demonstrated that their price point is "free," at least when it comes to what I'm offering.

That seems odd, not because there's any great value to what I'm offering, but because at the very same time, for some inexplicable reason, people are signing up to get this blog delivered to their Kindle. They're willing to pay a monthly fee for what they can read for free, or more than likely, choose not to read at all.

This shouldn't come as a complete surprise, since a couple of months ago, the book became enriolled in Kindle's lending library program, where Amazon Prime members could download the book for free.

Free.

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Case of the Mondays

I spent more than my usual share of time this weekend re-watching old movies on Comedy Central.

If you read yesterday's blog, "Market Crashers," you'd already know one of the movies. Despite what your mother may have said about how TV will kill your brain cells, I find it useful for creative inspiration. Besides, that's much easier than having to actually interact with anyone.

Although I have no doubt that I am beginning to lose some of those brain cells, I'll never pin it on my viewing habits. One of the really great things about starting to lose some of those brain cells is that regardless of how many times you see a movie or a show, somehow it still manages to surprise. I'm sure that I've written that before, but even then, it's still funny, in a poignant sort of way, to me.

See what I mean.

That was also the case watching the cult classic "Ofice Space," on Comedy Central, the cable station where commercial failures go for new life.

It probably works out that way because it's really hard to smoke weed in the movie theater during the first run of movies that go on to become cult classics. It's also hard to make it to the theater if you started smoking weed beforehand, thinking that the weed is way overpriced at the concession stand.

The cult, in case you didn't know, smokes lots of weed. There's no other plausible explanation for why the mere mention of "TPS Reports" elicits spasms of laughter.

Right.

As opposed to much of the world, and definitely the downtrodden characters in "Office Space," I always look forward to Mondays. In fact, even when I was a contributing member of society, I had nothing against Mondays.

These days, the only Mondays that I don't care for are the Federal holidays, with all due respect to dead Presidents, laborers and others deserving of retail sales events. It's all simply because the stock markets are closed.

Otherwise, Mondays are like a re-birth.

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Market Crashers

I wasn't always a creature of habit. Although I could never have been accused of wantonly dipping into the deep end of the pool, I wasn't totally closed to the ideas of trying something new. It's not that I feared the new and unknown, it's just that there was so much comfort and security in staying with the tried and tested.

Danny Kaye, comedian and unlikely movie star from the 40's had a great joke about the immigrant who used the only words he knew of his new country to order the same thing at the diner every day for 5 years.

"Coffee and donut."

The joke is too long to tell here and the accent very difficult to emulate, but you could probably look it up. Anyway, the punchline also happens to be "Coffee and donut."

The fact that I get upset when even a 30th run of The Simpsons or COPS is pre-empted on a weekend evening, though, is still upsetting to my routine.

Obviously, I'm mature enough to understand that social obligations should be spared my indignation, but is there a reason why we can't all just "early bird" everything?

This weekend was yet another of those that COPS wasn't where it was supposed to be. I know that I could probably have trolled through the cable channel universe and come up with some 24/7 COPS network, but I needed it to be on my usual station. Afterall, I only have about 4 channels in my universe and the same number of buttons on my remote.

Instead, there was some bizarre show featuring Jennifer Lopez and the guy she used to be married to, on some kind of adventure to discover talent in Latin America.

And so my limited channel surfing took me to Comedy Central and I settled in on watching 2005's "Wedding Crashers."

I had completely forgotten just how funny that movie had been, although admittedly earlier in the day I'd also forgotten that I had left the neighbor's cat in the microwave.

After finishing the movie, I'd come to the realization that the misunderstood and artistically brooding brother of the family, "Todd" was a character that completrely channeled Christopher Walken's portrayal of "Annie Hall's" brother "Duane" almost 30 years earlier.

If I were a real artsy sophist type, I'd venture an opinion that the oncoming headlights shining on Woody Allen's frightened face in that memorable scene were in contrast to the darkness that emanated from within Duane.

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Weekend Update

This has been a busy week, but not so much for me.

It figures that on the week that the blog begins its apperance as an offerng by Amazon Kindle Subscription services that I would miss two days worth of blogging.

But only in America can you choose to pay for a subscription service to have a blog delivered directly to your Kindle when you could just as easily opt to not read the blog online.

And for free.

What really doesn't figure is that there are actual subscribers.

First of all, special thanks to Tony Vahl of The Original Daily Skew for authoring a guest blog this week. I had enough foresight to arrange for that, but not enough to consider the fact that I might be somewhat under the weather. So much so, that I barely even made trades for two days and when I did, I think they were through the lens of a Percocet fueled analyst.

As if I ever practiced any form of analysis.

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