Just a Bunch of Stuff

Happy Valentine's Day! My cunning plan for surprise flowers and chocolates delivered to the wife's work was foiled due to heavy order traffic! It will be delivered tomorrow but it's not the same thing. Oh well.

ETF's - Save the Drama for Your Mama
Who knew ETF's can be so exciting? A couple of stories from today.

Kid Dynamite notes that the Egyptian fund, EGPT, is going to have some problems squaring the fund when Egypt's market re-open (whenever that is):
EGPT – The Problem With Cash Creations: An ETF Lesson Part IV
very interesting and thus you should be aware how any ETF you are buying is structured so you know the risks.

Last week news was out that the leveraged 3X bearish inverse types of funds were closing up because nothing goes down anymore anyway. That makes sense as the product has no value in this market of forever ascending channels. What is strange is the double long agricultural fund as that one has been on fire (via Zero Hedge):
Deutsche Bank Suspends New Issuance Of Double Long Agricultural ETF DAG
Anyone want to take a stab on why this is going on? I have a conspiracy idea that food commodity speculation is about to become the next "end the shorts against the banks" target! Call me crazy, try it!

Bubbles Are Everywhere and No Where
Maybe Alan Greenspan was right, a bubble can only be identified after it has burst. Before then people will bend themselves into intellectual knots justifying price and valuation. It never changes.

As a metal lover (long physical gold and silver) I am always amazed at the fury of screams that the metals are a bubble. The stock market is always correctly priced, but metals are off the reservation. Ok.

The Golden truth pens a nice missive on metal hysteria and compares it to a new era favorite, NFLX. Below is the graph comparing gold and NFLX since the summer of 2009. I suggest you click on over for the commentary:

NFLX: up 450%
Gold: up 40%
I know, soon everyone in China and India will be streaming 50 videos a day through Netflix and they will make a quadrillion dollars. When? Not now, and not in 5 years. NFLX and social media are the next bubble, IMO. I know it's different this time and all that. I think I will call it the Easy Service bubble or the Time Waster App bubble.

More metals? Click on over to Jesse's site for some great commentary on my beloved Silver:
James Turk On Silver, and A Possible Twist of My Own
I keep meaning to stake out some trades in silver, but then I already am carrying heavy in that area.

Market Operations
Last night I left my list or review stocks but I never updated it! I was running late and I was trying to narrow down some buys. I came across plenty of good chart set ups and I was really working them. I ended up going with 4 buys, and I do not like to have that many positions open at once. The mix is conducive to making easy decisions so I am ok with it. My buys from last night (click for larger view):


Look what Ben Bernanke has done! EconomicDisconnect is buying solar stocks for crying out loud! It's the end of the world for sure!

I recently switched my entire trading account over to TD Ameritrade and I love the service. My orders got filled in the early am (pre-market?) and so I was able to catch most of the run today in the two solar stocks! My old Bank of America/Merrill brokerage would have put me in at the high of the day no doubt.

The solar stocks were not my idea but the great work by chessNwine in the 12631. Chess is maybe the most sound and patient trader I have ever come across and I totally followed his play in this space. I am targeting a nice move up in both stocks, maybe even 10% or more. As always we shall see and no one should take anything written here as advice in any way.

New buy recap:
Solars
JASO
YGE

I found a couple of other quick hit type of trades on my screens and these two are either going to rip or fall flat so trading them will be easy:
COCO
PRSP

I am leaning towards holding my AMRC stock into earnings and playing lotto! It's only money (and a small position) so I think I will let it gap down 30%, I mean see what happens on Thursday.

I am Sure it is a China Only Thing
Make fun of Zero Hedge all you want but the site calls things better than most.

Two posts show how funny the world has become:
China Lowers Weighting Of Surging Food Prices In CPI
Not like the US CPI is from fantasy land, we call it like it is, hee hee. The Zero offered this:

As a result of this pre-emptive manipulative action, expect to see a CPI lower than the 5.4% consensus when the number prints later tonight.

Well, it is later tonight:
China CPI Comes At 4.9%, Below Consensus Of 5.4%, In Line With Zero Hedge "Pervasive Data Manipulation" Expectations
Wow. Inflation erased by the magic of decision. Love it.

Have a good night.

Return of the Friday

The week went by pretty well considering I was coming off a long holiday and often that will make a week back at work long indeed. All kinds of stuff to talk about tonight so here we go. I will press on even though I am guilty of many poor blog issues as per The Reformed Broker template but I am small time!

Trading Time
I have been using the iBankCoin model the PPT for this week and it has plenty of features that are great. Formerly I would screen stocks using various online tools and my eyes, but now things are much easier. One of my favorite types of screens in an uptrending market is too look for oversold stocks (technical or other) that have high institutional ownership. The theory is that big money will put more out to "defend" a stock they own a bit of. At least that's what I observe. Finding oversold stocks in this market is next to impossible of course, but you do what you can.

Two stocks came up last night and I really liked how the setups looked. I was attracted to:
EW at $78.81
NFLX at $178
I know, NFLX! I never said I was just going to buy metals! This is what is called trading, not investing or making a macro call. I had an issue with my brokerage through Bank of America buying EW but got is squared away and I was in NFLX at the the above price. I am looking for a nice bounce short term (5-7 days) that I hope will garner 10% wins on each. Not investment advice of course, I tend to suck at this stuff. I will update later on.

NFL Wild Card Weekend
The best time of the year is NFL playoff time! I love it. Here are my picks:
New Orleans Saints 34, Seattle Seahawks 20
Indianapolis Colts 27, New York Jets 24
Baltimore Ravens 23, Kansas City Chiefs 17
Green Bay Packers 31, Philadelphia Eagles 28
These are tough games to pick and foul weather in Seattle may be an issue for the Saints as well. Who knows?

Friday Night Entertainment
After a long hiatus, Friday Night has returned!

Did You Know?
-In "Return of the Jedi" Luke's lightsaber was to be blue but when shown against the desert backdrop in the film's opening fight scene on Jabba's barge, the blue blade was hard to see against the bright blue sky. Hence, the green lightsaber!
-Plants, insects, and some small mammals have an ability to find and harvest gold?
These actors turned down these roles:
-Will Smith – Turned down the role that eventually went to Keanu Reeve in “The Matrix”
-Tom Hanks – Turned down the role of Ray Kinsella in “Field of Dreams,” Andy Dufresne in “The Shawshank Redemption” and the lead role in “Jerry Maguire.”
-Keanu Reeves turned down Charlie Sheen’s role in “Platoon.”
More at the link!

Say it With Pictures
Classic:

see more Very Demotivational

A crushing right hand in the 13th round wins the Heavyweight title for Rocky Marciano when he was trailing on points (in 1952):

Find the video for this, it's a huge right hand!

Rock Blogging
The tunes have returned! You know you missed this!

While not the complete song (get the soundtrack already!) here is The Blasters playing "Blue Shadow" in the film "Streets of Fire" and pardon the Spanish stuff:

And yes that is Amy Madigan from "Field of Dreams".

How about The Cult with "Edie" (love the section at 2:30 to 3:06):

And no, not Edie Falco, though I used to find her hot!

Now picking a favorite Black Sabbath tune is like picking a favorite Beatles tune (except all their songs suck so bad they are all even!) but if I was pressed I am going with "Snowblind":

There are MANY close seconds however.

We have a request from my wife for tonight (thanks princess!), and so here we go with Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros and "Home":

I love you too darlin'! I like this one very much.

Ok, I am about out of time so two more to close the show!

When I took little kitty Jessie to the Vet for her wellness check, they had Cyndi Lauper's song "She Bop" on the radio and I remembered how much fun the song was:

Nice!

Well, Home is where the heart is, and so let's close the show with Motley Crue and "Home Sweet Home":

Good stuff.

Have a good night.

Market Operations

I have the day off and it is frigid up here which will likely keep me indoors for the day. I have plenty of house keeping items to attend so I will have plenty to do.

Market Operations
First point of business this morning was to check over my market positions and make a plan.

As I have been writing about recently, something feels very wrong to me right now and everything I am looking at makes no sense. In that light I closed out the following positions (all winners) this morning:
GLD
SLV
HRL
CPB
PAAS
I still hold a very small position in OMEX, but that company has been a huge disappointment. Still, as a lotto long I love any company that looks for sunken treasure!

I am now 98% in cash for my trading account. I still hold a position in gold and silver that remains a core holding and is not likely to ever be sold, and I do not count that in my trading account.

So why now? As I said, something feels wrong. I am also looking at some new ideas to trade, but I will need some more data points before I lay them out on the blog.

More Later.