We are having a crazy busy week and I have been distracted by an investment strategy that is taking a lot of time, but is showing signs of promise. Like days of ol' Devin is holding down the fort with the contractors. Gotta love contractors. I went to take my dogs out this morning to fetch the Frisbee. (Actually the dogs fetch the Frisbee. Well occasionally when they get tired, I am forced to fetch it, but I digress) Anyway I went to open the gate to our yard and they had stacked lumber in front of the gate to get out of the back yard. Mmmmm? What goes through one's head. "Hey, aquí es un gran lugar para apilar unas 300 piezas de madera!" Which is kinda Spanish for "Hey this is a great place to stack 300 pieces of lumber."

Anyway, Thursday we watched a heartbreaker football as The Freshman A team for Santa Margarita lost by one point to John Bosco in Bellflower, California. Varsity made things right in a nice game Thursday night beating Bosco. We have our last game next week against the Trinity League leader Servite. It should be interesting.

Things are going well at the office as most of the team is at our big trade show in Orlando. I have found I can save the company about $20,000 by not going. In the last years of me going I would end up with two or three dinners a night and of course we would pick up the tab. It makes for long expensive days. It is a great event for the company we get to network with so many of our customers.

When the show is going on we staff it with about 40 people from this office so it get's quiet here. That works out well as most people are in the midst of budget preparations. It can be stressful. I try not to have stress, but I have been accused of being a carrier. Our CFO, Gary is in high gear this time of year. He is pretty easy to handle if you know the secret. (Raisin Oatmeal Cookies).

At the house we are still trying to figure out how to store stuff without the two garages and the last bedroom. We are doing this as Devin is trying to restock 40 years worth of Christmas ornaments. (We lost most of our during the great flood of 2010.) She first got a new 9.5 foot tree from a mail order place called Front Gate. It was little to big and we were thinking about sawing our Baby Grand down to an upright before she decided to send it back and get a reasonable sized tree. Then we had the trauma of not having ornament hooks. Oh The Humanity Of It All. The drama of the trauma keeps my blood pressure in a good range. 170 over 135, that's healthy right?

Anyway, during all of this we decided that we did not like the new cable boxes. I have to agree with we on this one. Cox Cable came out with a really lame cable guide that takes about 2-5 second to change channels and search for other channels. So what's 2-5 seconds you say. We have 934 channels, do the math. Oh the drama of the trauma.

We also did a lot of cleaning and organizing since Friday and Devin got a lot done. We actually sat down last night and watched a few minutes of TV together. Life Is Good and we are blessed.

This morning I had breakfast with the guys. They were interested in the cross country trek. Russ is a religious reader but the others are hit and miss. Tim has been dropped because he never opens the note. That means Russ is forced to sit through a repeat of much of what we have said here in the blog. He doesn't seem to mind and actually has helped me remember parts of the story as written in the blog.

They were all wondering about Ben's new surroundings. Here is the view from behind his house.

It is as pretty as it looks. He was catching some football today as he slowly unboxed himself. Good luck buddy and have a glass of wine and enjoy the outdoors.

Greece Is The Word

There are a lot of things moving the market of late, but most of the headlines is about what is going on in Europe. In reading Barron's this morning Randall Forsyth, Editor in Chief took Alan Abelson's column (Interesting that Abelson's name did not even appear in the masthead this week?) talked in depth about the goings on with Greece and the G-20. In a nutshell, Papandreou put the austerity message to an up down vote in his country. A refusal of the austerity program would mean the return of a devalued drachma and the acceptance means more riots for the corrupt on the dowel country. The referendum passed and Papandreou got a short lived vote of confidence. (Rumors have it he will be gone in a week. Not good for the market.)

A bigger blow to the Eurozone was the exit of world leaders without resolving a sound sustainable rescue plan for the Eurozone. Watch the bond premiums explode on Monday especially in Italy, Greece, and Spain. Forsyth points out that some of the demands by the G-20 were reminiscent of the Treaty of Versaille in 1919 post WWI. How did that work out?

What I found particularly amusing was the presentation made by The President of The United States, at the G-20 where he applauded the work of the French to get their economy on a "sure footing" but expressed that was not enough. He then addressed all of the European leaders by saying, "The European political leadership, understands how much of a stake they have in making sure that this crisis is resolved, that the euro zone remains intact," Obama said. The quote was from the Washington Post and the NYTs. Neither are what you would call bastions of conservative propaganda. Don't do as I do, do as I say. These comments were made as we plod our way through our own fiscal quagmire.

The sentiment in Barron's is mixed. We had a down week, but we are still in a confirmed uptrend. We saw a drop of 2.5% in the S&P, but after the October we had, that is not a big surprise. We are going to look at the data points coming out this week and give you a feel for what we think is going to happen. 

 Needless to say, be agile and keep an eye on your stops.

Project X

We have not been posting much lately as we are in the midst of crunching number for a strategy that is showing a lot of promise. It's not ready for prime time, but when it is we will be sure to share. We are currently having someone who knows their way around an Excel spreadsheet better than I making my efforts look pretty.

This idea was buried in a poorly written book about buying, selling and holding gold. We did some back testing and found the results very impressive. We decided to look at applying the same principle to equities and the results are impressive as well. We have beck tested 26 equities and are going through the Salve Lucrum Portfolio to back test at least 100 positions we made money and lost money with using this idea. Here is one little teaser. AAPL made is about 93% profit in the last 5 years. That is pretty impressive, but that is based upon our best guess as to when to buy and sell. This strategy takes one simple gauge once a month and tells you whether to buy hold or sell. Using the strategy we would have seen a 232% return over the same period of time. By the end of this week, we will have 100 equities back tested to compare against out performance.

Keep an eye out for more.

"There is only one thing you know for sure and that is the things you think you know for sure, even if they are not a for sure thing." Who said that?

Salve Lucrum