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I used to think about how good and how bad it would be to live the life of a simple fruit fly.
The good? Not a care in the world, just hopping from rotting peach to rotting peach sucking in all of life’s sweet nectar.
The bad? Splat. You’re dead.
Actually, from what we now know, the simple fruit fly is not so simple at all. In fact, it now appears that nearly 75% of human disease genes have a homolog in the lowly fruit fly, while 50% of a fly’s genes have homologs in mammalian lines.
We are not so different after all, in that fruit flies and most humans are equally unlikely to know the meaning of the word “homolog”.
The fruit fly genome was entirely sequenced over a decade ago. I can’t begin to fathom how many fruiit fly years that is equivalent to, but for starters, 1 day in the life of a fruit fly is about 70 years for you or I.
Just imagine how many Armegeddons the Harold Camping of the Drosophila universe could have called for during that span. Haley’s Comet would have to come about every 20 hours or so, and so on.
What fascinated me was the life sequence. In the blink of an eye a female fruit fly transitions from “birth” to beginning the process of re-populating the species. With that kind of accelerated sequence, it’s not very likely that the show “To Catch a Predator” would have a meaningful species equivalent. Basically, after a couple of minutes you’re not a pupae anymore. Pedoflyia? I suppose that the equivalent would be flies ganging up en mass to hunt down a human predator with a swatter.
And then just as quickly, the lowly fruit fly dies.
Imagine having your entire life cycle crammed into just hours.
That’s exactly what yesterday morning’s market turned out to be.
In the blink of an eye the 130 point gain evaporated as just 3 letters, I-S-M took center stage.
I’d been watching the futures from about 6:30 AM and saw a slow erosion prior to the opening bell, but certainly nothing in the fruit fly realm of things.
The script, at least to my interpretation had a nice bounce and then a retreat, but nothing as rapid as turned out to be the case.
Luckily, I made all of my options sales within the first 15 minutes of trading. During that time, the market was already coming off of its opening highs. I was lucky enough to sell call contracts for JP Morgan, Freeport McMoran, Caterpillar and QQQ.
I had absolutely no inkling that the opportunity to buy them back and close the loop would come just an hour later.
Again, here comes the fruit fly. As it turns out, the female fruit fly, probably aware that her cycle is short, captures as many sex partners as she can during her brief stay on earth. Interestingly, it is the sperm of the final partner that appears most likely to father the offspring as the male fruitfly has an enzyme that actually displaces and destroys the sperm of its competitors.
You may call it slutty, but from my perspective the female fruit fly is hedging her species’ bets. The male fruit flies are like the universe of investors out there. They all want to drop their money, sometimes without due diligence being performed.
It’s all about timing. Anyone can trade, but not everyone can bring home the bacon or the insect analogous salted body part.
And as the market decided to erase its subsequent 140 point drop, it was time to start the cycle all over again.
What a day. I felt so dirty, just like a highly accomplished fruit fly lounging in a rotting peach on top of the world.
Luckily for me, the paroxysms of movement were just that. Thanks to the spasmodic activity I was able to roam around today taking care of errands before our trip, without really missing much. All of the action was at the tail ends of the day.
This morning my Sugar Momma and I are heading down to South Carolina for our youngest son’s graduation from Army Basic Training. In the 10 weeks that he’s been away from home, between his second and third years of college, he has no doubt experienced an incredibly accelerated series of events. If anything, he is just coming to life and will be a completely different person from the one we last saw before Memorial Day.
In the big picture these past 10 weeks were just a blip in time, but in terms of impact, I’m certain we’ll be seeing a new and improved version of a son who was already pretty good, but as good as he was, he couldn’t lob a grenade with reliable accuracy.
I’m cerain that the fruit fly metaphor is not terribly complimentary, but for me the message is clear.
Life moves fast, but we don’t have to go the fruit fly route. We have plenty of chances to enjoy, experience, self-correct and evolve.
Tomorrow is always new day, a day whent he market will completely ignore the antecedent events and trade in a vacuum. No historical memory and no ability to really be forward looking, despite the widely held axiom that the market, in its efficiency, discounts future events.
For the poor fruit fly it’s much more simple, but not all that different.
There is no tomorrow, there was no yesterday. It’s all about the present and the need to be the last one standing or piledriving to pass on life to the next generation.
For me, yesterday was good. I still lost a little, about 0.1% compared to 0.5% for the S&P, but today, with modem ready to go, DC inverter plugged in, I’ll be looking for more opportunity as we head to South Carolina., as Sugar Momma chauffeurs me around. Although there won’t be any procreating opportunity at least I’ve already outlived yesterday’s Drososophila brood and plan to see a few hundred more generations come and go.
As good as yesterday was for those wildly copulating flies, today will be no different for the next batch. For me, today and tomorrow will be even better than yesterday, regardless of what the market can bring.