When I left home Wednesday morning, for an unprecedented third consecutive day of honest work, I was resigned to once again being completely in the dark. Since I feel that I don’t have that much time left, I find myself having to get used to things much faster, so I am getting somewhat accustomed to being cut off from streaming news in record time.
Following that earthquake induced rally that was clearly a result of everyone forgetting to follow-up on the morning’s market rise with a spirit deflating plunge, as per the script, I was happy to see the futures pointing to only a mild giveback. I combed my memory banks and really couldn’t find a recent example of how the market reacted to a mildly negative open. Lately its been a series of exaggerated up or down pre-market futures.
Granted, I didn’t look or think very hard. I’m sute there’s some kind of precedent.
By the time the work day ended the market had closed and that early morning drop gave way to a nice triple digit rally. That combination definitely hasn’t happened for a while, but complaints are definitely not in order. Those kind of surprises are pretty easy to deal with.
A quick glance through the New York Times online edition gave me no great insights into what moved the markets. I’m not certain why I even checked since in the absence of any concretely path altering news, the reasons given are always conjecture dressed up to be fact.
I did know that something was up with the precious metals. In fact what was up was that they were decidedly down. Since I own shares in the ProShares Silver Ultrashort ETF, I also follow Silver and Gold ETF’s just to have an idea of metal’s direction. What I didn’t realize was that the drop was over $100.
Maybe somebody actually considered James Altucher’s comment last week that gold was just a rock and realized that it is just a rock.
Someday, people will add where were you on the day of the great east coast earthquake andwhere were you when gold droped $100 to the classic OJ and JFK questions
Normally, with the kind of move that the UltraShort Silver shares showed today I would have sold calls into the strength of a 10% upward move, but I think that there’s still quite a bit more downside for the metals, especially Silver. Unfortunately, by not selling those calls I’m violating one of my cardinal rules by giving into greed.
Alright, so we’ve established that I can be greedy, but let’s just rationalize it by thinking that the decline in silver prices, when leveraged by the short ETF can help to nicely offset the paper losses from last month. Sometimes it has to be about the capital gains and not just the options income.
As it turned out, there really was no news. The Steve Jobs resignation had occured after the market close and wouldn’t be a potential factor until today’s open. The after hours drop in Apple paralleled the 5% drop in gold and who knows, may be the basis for tomorrow’s blog.
Add where were you when Jobs resigned for the second time to the list.
The only news that caught my interest was that regarding Dick Cheney, except that this time it wasn’t related to a new cardiac incident. That’s what made it news.
As soon as I heard the revelation contained in Dick Cheney’s upcoming book, “In My Time”, that he had drafted a resignation letter in the event that he suffered an incapacitating illness, I had visions.
Normally, my visions are limited to stock options I’d written expiring worthless as the stocks hovered just beneath their strike price. Vions, fantasies and dreams are all the same for me.
That’s a strange kind of dream. It’s not the kind of dream draped in deep imagery that could be used to rally people to greatness. I doubt that they’d be dedicating space on the National Mall to commemorate the life of a man behind that kind of dream. It certaily doesn’t reach for the unreachable. It just reaches for a consistently unlikely, yet possible, sequence of events. More like a “I have a scheme” concept.
But this time I had a different series of images.
Imagine if the world had known that sitting in some secret vault was a resignation letter, that if released, would have resulted in Dick Cheney relinquishing his Vice Presidency.
Obviously, Dick Cheney changed the nature of that office and he had many supporters. But they’re not the ones in my vision. Instead, I see all of the 2004 and even 2008 hapless Presidential hopefuls running around in comedic fashion trying to find the location of that secret vault so that they could save the nation by putting through the resignation of the individual so many so as evil personified.
Yes he was mad, and not in a good way.
Imagine a devious Dennis Kucinich trying to outmaneuver a roller derby-like Hillary Clinton for the next clue. I suppose that there would have been a few Republicans in that mix as well since the Vice-President was just a heartbeat away from the real thing. In my vision, Mitt Romney is breaking a sweat and there are some mis-placed hairs.
People always think about the impossible. Among those dreams are time travel. Some dream of going forward while other dream of going back. I suppose that either one would only be complete if you could book the round-trip.
Cheney, in his book, is reported to paint a sometimes unflattering picture of his less experienced boss, George W. Bush. I don’t know if he reads many books, but I’m guessing that Bush would probably like to climb into that time travel unit right now and release that resignation letter before Cheney ever gets the chance to steer him into what would turn out to be a series of misguided paths.
While there, I may ask him to place a few trades for me.
That’s more in keeping with the kind of visions and dreams dancing in my head.
Invest like TheAcsMan
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