All Your Mines Belong to Us

The dentist took some x-rays and looked at my tooth. He could find nothing wrong. The x-ray maybe showed a slight infection above the root on the tooth that hurts, but it was clearing up and hard to make out. I got a script for an antibiotic and he said unless the pain got worse to let it ride for a bit. I guess that is good, nothing big going on there. It still does not hurt anymore so I should be good to go.

Joe Battipaglia Passed Away
I used to love to watch the Fox Business block on Sunday's a long time ago. One of the more fun guests on the shows was Joe Battipaglia. CNBC reported it earlier and now there is confirmation that Battapaglia has died at age 55. I send all my best wishes for the Batapaglia family and for his friends. Very sad.

All Your Mines Belong to Us
I was still holding some Pan American Silver (PAAS) and everything seemed fine this morning before I left for the dentist around 11am. Of course I get home and get this headline:
Bolivia may scrap Glencore, Pan American contracts
In a nutshell, Bolivia is going all communist and will probably seek to take over mines that are contracted to private companies and use them for the state's wants and desires. PAAS got hit big on the news and I sold out at a 2 cent gain. Yup, TWO CENTS! Figures. It could have been worse.

This reminds me once again why I stopped trading miners a long time ago. They suck. From 2002-2007 with gold and silver rising steadily and happily the miners were always lagging and looking like dogshit. They always burn a 20% move up in the stock by doing a monster secondary stock offering for like 75% of the company, buying some other miner, or just missing earnings even though it was almost impossible to do so.

As of late the miners are now so extremely volatile you cannot even trade them. Stop losses? Forget it, don't bother. EXK moves up and down in increments of 10%, try placing a stop on that screwball, you are gonna get executed.

I know plenty of folks navigate the miners well and clean up doing it. There is a donation button on the site at the left, use it. I am going to stay away from these things from now on.

Zipcar and What it Means Bigger Picture
The Cambridge based company Zipcar had their IPO today and it went bananas. These cars are all over the Boston metro area. This section is not to discuss Zipcar in a buy/sell sense, but a post over at Leigh Drogen's place really jumped out at me as to what this kind of thing means going forward. From Mr. Drogen:

Zipcar is the perfect representation of the fact that our economy is shifting, drastically, from people wanting to own things, to people wanting to use things, but have no desire to own them. This shift is made possible by recent technological advances in peer to peer networks. These services are sprouting up in every industry, even baby toys. Instead of buying baby toys which you will throw out in a year when your kid outgrows them, why not rent them when it makes sense, with a subscription service, and send it back when your kid is done playing with it, like a video game rental.

Zipcar is playing on the same theme, why own a car when you only drive it once in a while?

Good stuff.
This sort of big change will allow many more people access to various things, cars in this case, that they would not be able or interested in using otherwise. This has broad effects on the economy both deflationary and inflationary in some ways. Worth thinking about.

Extortion
This Red Meat comic had me laughing until I figured the banking system is doing the same thing to all of us. Then I wanted to get a chainsaw for the tree, hee hee (click for larger view or hit the link to the site):

Yuppers.

Have a good night.