Pick a short. It goes against you. Get out fast. Ditto for buys. Ultra-tight stops — two to three percent — limit losses, retain profits. I had been out of gold. I bought a little yesterday. It went against me. Will I get out today? I don’t know, yet.
I don’t profess any brilliance in today’s squirrely market. I shorted CCL yesterday. By end of day I was up a grand total of $98.75. I believe Carnival Cruise (called Carnival Corp — CCL) is a cockroach stock. There’ll be more bad news in coming days — leaking oil, law suits, drops in reservations, etc. … But, several TV commentators are saying it’s a “buy.”
Natural gas stays in the doldrums. Why? Because the U.S. makes too much of it. We’ve been finding it everywhere and prices continue to fall, as do many stocks associated with it, e.g.:
Stay away from natural gas.
Classic Pump and Dump:
From the company’s web site:
Searchlight Minerals Corp is a dynamic mineral exploration company focused on the acquisition and development of projects in the southwestern United States
The nonsense stockmarket forecasters produce. Try this one. Don Hays of the renown Hays Advisory Service he: adlines “Dow Headed to 16,000.” Then he writes:
+ Hays’ Asset Allocation Model currently suggests that Monetary Liquidity and Stock Market Valuation are in their most bullish positions, despite Investor Psychology being in a less bullish position following the market’s recent rally. However, this combination has historically provided a nice range of 12-month stock returns between -4.5% and 54.4% (with an historical average of 16.7%).
+ Don sees US stocks performing relatively strong compared to international markets, as big investors look for a place to park their money in lieu of the crisis in Europe.
He’s absolutely right. The market could go down and also could go up.
The most interesting predictions for 2012. Compiled by Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence. Click here.
Annals of life and technology:
+ I tell my bank we’re expecting a significant wire in the next few days. My bank manager says he’ll check and then he asks, “May we keep it?”
+ My son Michael works at Nike. He upgraded to a Apple 4S from Verizon. But it wouldn’t ring at his desk in Beaverton, Oregon. He switched to an Apple 4S from AT&T. It works perfectly. Go figure. Personally I think AT&T’s service is improving.
+ The price of hosting a web site is all over the place. Some web hosters are many times more expensive than their competition, yet deliver no better service. Personally I like ICDSoft.
+ After Apple did so well with the Macbook Air, Intel felt threatened. So it invented the word Ultrabook. According to Intel, an ultrabook is a small, thin, lightweight laptop (also called notebook) typically with a solid state hard drive (SSD), with Wi-Fi and several ports — including a USB 3.0 and an Ethernet RJ-45, but typically no optical CD or DVD drive. I’m not a big fan of ultrabooks since they usually have chiclet keyboards, i.e. keys that resemble chiclets. I find such keyboards hard to type on. I prefer the more professional keyboards on the Lenovo ThinkPad X series, which also have a pointing stick, which virtually all ultrabooks don’t have (except one from Lenovo).
+ Five years ago, Susan researched washing machines/dryers to death and chose Whirlpool. She did good. We’ve had no problems with the Whirlpools. Five years later, Michael researches them and finds the best are LG washer WM3360HWCA and LG dryer DLEX3360V. He loves LG because they have direct drive motors (more reliable, no belts, less noise), are more energy efficient and have more features — like steam cleaning (good for pillows).
He got the LG washer (first photo) and LG dryer from Home Depot. Said Michael, “The price was right. They offered free installation, free delivery and free knowledge.” Says Michael, “In Home Depot there’s someone around every corner to help you. That compares with Best Buy, which is like a graveyard.”
Which brings up: When Michael and Claire were young, we would drive by a cemetery, and I would ask, “How many people in the cemetery are dead?” The answer, of course, is “All of them.”
Michael compared the LG against Whirlpool, GE, Maytag, Miele and Bosch. LG came out the best. For Home Depot’s LG washer and dryer, click here and here.
Getting hacked, again and again. Reader Jon Levine writes:
To add to your story apparently my Amex was hacked. There were 2 charges for $1 each (these are called the feeler charges to see if the credit card is good)
Now for the good news, my whole family is protected by LifeLock. The day before this all went down I got an email from LifeLock to give them a call, they thought my credit card was compromised. After speaking with LifeLock I called Amex immediately (Thurdsay night). Rep from Amex said everything looked fine, no problems. I decided to follow LifeLock’s advice so I closed my Amex and got a new one. Friday morning I get a call from Amex security do you know these $1 charges? They must have snuck them in before I cancelled Thursday night. Amex rep continues we also see three declines on Friday all for $100 plus. Thanks to LifeLock my card was closed and no real harm done.
Moral of my story. LIFELOCK works. Thieves will always be able to steal your info. LifeLock also protects my kid’s ss# which most people forget about.
I personally haven’t used LifeLock. For more on it, click here.
P.S. Symantec, the security company and makers of the Norton line of anti-virus software, had its network hacked recently. Not good. It’s happening to everyone. The motive is stealing credit cards, reselling them or using them to buy junk.
Headline of the week. From the Wall Street Journal:
What is Europe sinking about?
Remember the famous Berlitz ad?
Romney Vows to Undo Everything Obama Has Done: ‘I Will Make Bin Laden Alive Again’
Calls Slain al-Qaeda Leader a Job Creator
MANCHESTER, NH (The Borowitz Report) – In a rousing victory speech in New Hampshire last night, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney vowed to undo everything Barack Obama has done as President, promising his supporters, “I will make Osama bin Laden alive again.”
Mr. Romney called the assassination of bin Laden “just one of the many mistakes this President has made,” adding, “Say what you will about Osama bin Laden, the man was a job creator.”
The presumptive GOP nominee said that on his first day in office, “I will get a hold of the DNA of Osama bin Laden and breathe the life-force of capitalism back into it.”
The reanimation of the slain al-Qaeda leader is just the first of many steps Mr. Romney plans to take in his effort to get the USA “back to exactly how it was” before Mr. Obama took office.
“As President, I will immediately close down GM and Chrysler and put thousands of Americans out on the street,” he said. “And then I will try to get a hold of the DNA of Qaddafi.”
At another point in his victory speech, Mr. Romney complained that his controversial remark about “liking to fire people” had been taken out of context: “The full quote was, `I like to fire people – and then laugh at them.'”
The above from a recent issue of the Borowitz Report. To subscribe, click here.
After the tragic sinking of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, here’s a little postscript. The pictures tell the sad story:
Favorite recent New Yorker cartoons.
Harry Newton lives on his bond interest. Do I care that one day interest rates will rise? More about that tomorrow.
