Root of Al's Evil

Wubba Wubba

Sorry, no time for much else at moment. Cisco tonight has the potential to break this friggin' NDX finally...or else buy yet another stay of execution.

I'm betting on the former, since the brkdwn in the charts is real at moment.

Good trading.

Woot! Shoot

Ok, things got exciting after all today - on the upside. Yep, we're on fire tonight baby - Woot woot!

I can laugh at least, since I'm almost entirely on the sidelines at the moment; Still wearing just a tiny Dress Barn short at moment.

Actually, I really should have jumped-in long, even if for the day. It was obvious by the time I hit the Send button this ship was headed up. A younger, more clever trader with 6 to 8 screens in front of him would have managed. I'm so last century.

Obv. I'm just an old toad, waiting to piss on everyone's party- and now I'm stuck. Stuck because it's not like I can chase this higher from here. If I had traded long I would have exited already by the close. That means I missed a decent opp. going up, only to be resigned now into the wait-and-see chamber - where I can't do much more than watch young guns try to make up for their recent whack-a-mole set-back. You know the type. The same people who said C was looking attractive in the mid-forties. Bugger!

Ok, the other pisser is this ass-savvy staff (of none) here is finding out today the new Subscribe feature (for email delivery) is not much better than waiting for land-mail in Kansas. Apparently Feedburner is not sending posts out upon publishing, but looking to send whatever new material a blogger can mustard only once/day.

That's tidier for them I suppose, but it's pathetic if you're actually trading this market and you might actually use this stuff (whoa-now - you should NOT actually use this stuff - what were you thinking? Read the disclaimer at the bottom and at the right side of this page - this is for info-tainment purposes only. My legal staff is smaller than my tech staff, which is non-existent next to my infectious diseases staff - so do not actually try this at home. Hell, you can't even get proper delivery on the micro-picture of how things are flying on and off the handle, so even if you wanted to attempt it I couldn't guarantee you any gains even if I am grinding out 200% - Get a life already!)

So I need a tech-staff. Great.

And piss-off to this market. After a day like today I just want to wait for Cramer and short his featured (ass)play in the after-market.

Yesterday he slobbered over NCR, which naturally opened at the high of the day today and then shat all over that smart-money Cramer crowd.

So at 6PM EST. turn on CNBC and turn OFF the sound (seriously). You don't need to know what he's actually mouthing. You just need to hot-dog short on whatever his big feature of the day will be (assuming he's jerked it up >3% - I'll give you the full parameters another time); the graphics will say all you need to know. Even better, call someone else like I do, so you don't have to see any of it.

Then turn the show OFF after the opening plug - the rest of his blather is not moving anything enough to fade it and it's certainly not worth the effort of having to watch his next zit pop (sorry, no link).

God, I digress. Heaven help the readers of this page when I am on the sidelines. If it takes more than a day or two, well, I apologize in advance.

Attila the Hum

The market action was mostly weak early today, but there was no real excitement this time. That concerns me some.

Never short a dull market, right?

Actually, it's a great rule.

Watching the paint dry, or in this case watching the dry tape, is usually not how serious plunder unfolds. I wish I could say otherwise.

So again I have been obliged to unload (short) positions; take the goods off the table; keep the powder dry; live another day; beat the hum-drum and then some.

I know, we've had pockets-of-plunder out there for some time. But I'm talking about the all-you-can-eat buffet.

A trader's life is so boring sometimes. Because the over-all market is such shit, I cannot partake in the popular, bucket shop party-time frenzy; in the two or three Googley names within a permanent cheap-on-a-valuation-perspective roaring bull market.

Sometimes you've got to just let the other guy make the money. Sit on you hands and wait for either A.) The market to improve enough to go long; or B.) Some friggin' blood in the water, thank you.

In the meantime, I still have my lovely Dress on, but I'm out of everything else for now.

If we aren't letting out a little more red on the tape again soon, it's back to finishing, err fishing school, for me. At least until something wakes up.

Chow.

Fully Half Empty

Volume has let-up today, but otherwise today's internals remain mostly negative. Strongly negative breadth is particularly notable and argues we won't manage a reversal today.

I've re-increased the index shorts slightly today, but nothing dramatic and I may even have to let them go again before the close, depending. We opened more or less near the lows of the session (so far anyway) and the bulls can argue that as positive. At the same time we were unable to reverse higher on the day; so there is the argument for the bears.

It's a half-ass, empty glass...if you ask me.

Shanghai backed-off for the 3rd session in a row, after trading nearly to new highs last week. But Hong Kong was pelted 5% today, marking a succinct breakdown now in that market. Sub-prime Sublime.

What's a trader to do? Keep it short baby!

I'm not buying anything on weakness at the moment. But if we start something higher again, I will take my lumps and move aside; as I have done several times since going net-short in May.

All accounts are at new highs again and I'm letting the other geniuses buy-the-dip on this one - I will only buy/cover this market on strength. I'm not putting my head on any chopping blocks right now (long or short).

Buying the dips only works the first 10,000 times in a perma-bull market. At some point you become the dip.

Ben There Done That?

I brought up Jim Rogers here last week. He's on the wires and in the blogosphere late this week and it's pretty amusing; in an alarming sort of way.

Here is a collection of JR quotes put out today by the Bob Brinker Fan Club.

Rogers on Bernanke:

"This man is a nut. The dollar is collapsing, commodities are going through the roof, which means inflation's going through the roof.

"These people are leading us to terrible problems down the line.''

"Bernanke loves printing money."

Rogers says of FOMC chairman Bernanke's job performance:

“It’s been a disaster."

"If a 6% decline in the stock market causes the man to go and cut interest rates by a half a percent, when inflation is running rampant, when the dollar is under pressure anyway, what’s he going to do when the market is down 36%? What’s he going to do when we have a real crisis? He’s going to print money until we run out of trees. I don’t want to own U.S. dollars in an environment like that.”

He's going to print money until we run out of trees, you have to love that line. Unfortunately, it remains the case. Jimmy has become Bernanke's greatest critic and it's about time somebody with a big voice took the Fed to task.

Rogers suggests the dollar will now likely rise in the short term (now that every widow and orphan has gotten short), but longer term, “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s a currency that’s going to be going down for some time to come."

Pay Day

Ok, taking some of these shorts off the table; in case the market re-reverses higher today. The Dow, S&P500 are still down >1/2% at the moment, but the Russell 2000 is only down .25% and the Nasdaq and NDX are hardly lower now.

For a minute there it looked like a very nasty downside reversal was getting going - not so any longer. If we re-re-reverse lower...well, things should get rude and I'll be putting on individual shorts for the weekend.

Out on GRP short [oils and oil services are pretty resilient today]
Out on COH short [>25% profit there; will look to hammer again]
Reduced 50% TWM and QID [fat gains there, out of the super-sized portions for now]
Holding DBRN short [might trade out today if market makes new highs on day]

DBRN made a nice move lower. Besides the general weakness in the market, they pre-announced lower results yesterday.

I'll have more to say later if the action becomes dramatic; otherwise bon weekend.

Downward Facing Dow

No time for chatter, but I piled right back in on my index shorts in the pre-market and at the open. Unfortunately I missed on the Financials double-short SKF (damn!), but as the broad market quickly blew through yesterday's lows I put on more short than what I had coming into yesterday's Fed cut. Internals so far are clearly negative and breadth is very negative (>6-1 negative on NYSE and >5-1 neg on Nasdaq.), but the NDX is not leading on the way down; as a result, I'm focused more elsewhere at the moment (keying w double-short Russell 2000, TWM today). Oh, I covered the opposite-Cramer play GLW at 23.85 ave. in the opening minutes.