I don’t get bored very easily.
That’s in very clear contra-distinction to my Sugar Momma.
Selhamos used to describe her as having “a flea in her tuchas”, meaning she just couldn’t sit still.
Never getting bored can either be a blessing or a curse. I see it as a blessing, others see it as a curse, because I’m more than content to just camp out on my La-Z-Boy and watch the leaves change as the seasons come and go.
I never find myself asking “so, what are we doing today?”
Some people find that level of commitment to inertia as being annoying, as opposed to one that respects the state of the established order.
But I was bored today. Very bored.
Not that I was planning to go anywhere today, because I rarely venture out between 9:30 AM and 4 PM, but I lent my car to a neighbor for the next few days as his needed some unexpected and major repairs.
Maybe knowing that I was homebound contributed to that feeling of boredom. A very strange feeling.
Obviously, the day in the markets did nothing to capture my interests. Not even that patented “Bernank-O-Meter” unveiled on CNBC could keep me from constantly checking the time. I never did figure out what exactly that Bernank-O-Meter was supposed to represent, but I was too bored to investigate.
Of course, that ticking clock in the lower right hand corner of the screen that counted down the 7 hours until the Federal Reserve Chairman’s press conference didn’t help to speed up the perception of time. It was soporifc. Must SleepTV, to put a spin on the old NBC slogan from years ago.
Logically, not much happened, as the countdown clock ticked away until the scheduled Bernanke press conference at 2:15 PM, after the FOMC meeting.
For the first 30 minutes not much happened during the press conference either. A series of heavily accented questions, none of which really pierced anyone’s armor, did little to move markets, although there was a very slow downward bias as time went on. However, as it became clear that the press conference was nearing its end without any incredible revelations, the direction slowly changed and started heading back to baseline.
In the meantime, once again giving into The Beast, I just had to make a trade.
I didn’t have much available cash, but I once again picked up some ProShares Ultrashort Silver and then just as quickly sold some in the money calls.
Sometimes dealing with things like currencies, Treasuries, puts and these Ultrashort products requires trading in a mirror or suspending yourself upside down in order to re-route your thought processes.
I’m a reasonably smart guy, have always had a way with numbers, even read Adler’s Number Theory in 9th grade, but I’ve always been a bit confused about currencies and Treasuries.
Of course I know the inverse association between interest rates and bond value and yes, I know that when the dollar goes down in value against the Euro for example, the dollar to Euro ratio goes up, etc., etc. and etc.
But I have to think about it. even if only for a second, I still need to divert some rapidly dimishing cortical resources toward interpreting the data.The basic question becomes, “Which way is up?”. That question makes me feel so stupid.
Basically, like most everyone else, the interpretation is on a dichotomous scale. Is it good for me or is it bad for me?
As boredom was setting in and the mind was shutting down, trying to make those interpretations was really unnecessarily difficult.
Going long the ProShares Ultrashort silver means that the bet is that the price of silver is heading down. Selling the call is a bet that the price of the underlying stock will stay flat or go down, which in itself means that the price of silver either stays flat or goes up.
Understand?
I didn’t say that my trade combination had to make sense, but at least there were some trades, using the same logic as in the May 2011 cycle. In fact, I still don’t know if that trade combination makes sense. To know so, would require far too much thought. It did make money last time, so why not do it again. The logic behind the trades can wait, since the outcome is far more important than the process.
So, if the option is not exercised, that means that silver increased in value.
Maybe I bought the position so that I would put my mind into some kind of endlessly looped thought just to keep me from getting bored.
The problem is that I don’t really have the patience to try and understand what it is that I want and I’m apparantly past the prime of life when all of the nuances would have been intuitive.
So let’s just leave it at I traded, because the flea needed tickling.
By a couple of minutes after 3 PM, the press conference was over. I looked at my computer screen and decided that nothing worthwhile was going to happen and so I dozed off.
Barely an hour later, the market was down another 60 points.
It doesn’t appear that I missed anything during that inopportune time to sleep. The only trade that I had been looking at was one to sell call options on Praxair. I had been hoping for a move up to $105 and that never happened.
In a way, I’m glad that I fell to sleep. Had I not, I probably would have made the Praxair trade at a pice less than I wanted, just for the sake of making the trade, as if E*Trade would disappear without me and my totally unnecessary trades.
Interestingly, in my search for a germane photo to illustrate today’s topic, I couldn’t find a photo of a bull or a bear yawning. Plenty of babies, dogs, cats and other assorted mammals. I don’t know if there was some kind of hidden message there, because it seems as if yawning is a fairly universal action.
I never considered myself to be in the “pig” category when it came to investing. I’m really not certain why a pig needs to yawn, as if we really know the true utility of a yawn, but assuming that it’s from boredom, you would think that investing pigs would be in a perpetual state of yawning. Never satisified with the price of their stock and never excited about its trajectory. Always wanting more and more and ceratin that it’s going to happen that way.
What a sad state to be in. Seems that boredom may be the best way to express a world in which excitement may be just around the corner.
For me, that corner may arrive as early as tomorrow.
As for today, 80 points is like $153 million to JP Morgan. Nothing terribly exciting. There’s always tomorrow to see a really nice market gain or violate SEC and banking regulations in a really tremendous way.
So here’s to tomorrow. A day perhaps filled with excitement, meaningful trades requiring little thought and best of all, profits.
I’ll even take more meaningless and boring trades, if it means profits.
How piggish.