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You all remember that song written by "Chistopher" aka Prince Nelson aka "Prince". I never cared for the song though I always thought Susanna Hoft was a cute thing.
Yeah we are talking about the Bangles and 1986. It reached number two in the charts here and in the UK. Such a long time ago. But I digress.
Today was a Manic Monday. My plan was to get up early and surprise my new boss, Antonio, our foreman, by having the rest of the grapevine clippings in yet another stack before he arrived at 8:00AM.
Unfortunately, I could not find my alarm clock last night and was forced to use my iPhone. It has a great world clock, alarm, lap time, stop watch feature that is simple to use. BUT (acronym for Behold the Underlying Truth), you must be able to read the clock when you wake up in order to hit the snooze.
Well when I go to bed I take off my glasses and take out my teeth (just kidding I still have most of my teeth), and when the alarm goes off, I cannot see the snooze feature and end up shutting the darn thing off.
I did have the alarm set to me singing "For O'l Times Sake" from my album Anybody Can Make A Record, but Devin really hates to start her day listening to my voice. She made me change the song. Now I just have some chimes. But I digress, The Sequel.
Anyway I got up a little late and decided to check my e-mails as I knew I had a Board Meeting to attend in Newport Beach at Noon. Well, I was reviewing the Agenda and realized the meeting was to begin at 10:00, not noon.
Hurry hurry scramble scramble, I walked into the Board Room in Newport Beach at 10:00, looking quite punctual. Several readers are on the board of the organization in question, and they now know how close I came to not being punctual.
The meeting was for the Foundation side of the TV show I told you all about several months ago. Devin and I decided to support the foundation side of The Real Guys versus the enterprise size.
As a result of our contribution we were invited to their Board Meeting. I am truly honored to be associated with the talent and the energy this group brings to the Mission to make a better man in today's society.
The meeting ended with me feeling like we had make the right choice to get this foundation off the ground with our donation. Once in the car, I realized I had almost two hours of down time before Miss Pinky Bone Crusher had at my hand at physical therapy.
I knew a dozen great places to have a casual lunch and read my WSJ I had wisely stuffed in my trunk.
I wanted to check in with my beautiful wife. She and Kristin were stimulating the economy at Mission Viejo Mall. When I called, she got a call from Jack who was home taking care of the critters. Jack was telling her to get home right away, as Abbey, one of our cats was foaming at the mouth.
Yeah, we were both 25 minutes from home, but the race was on. Devin beat me by about one and half minutes. I saw he whisking away our daughter, son and kitty. I had the house to myself, except for the gardener, foreman, four dogs, and two cats.
There was just enough time to whoof down a box filled with processed turkey, processed cheddar, tasteless crackers, and a banana with way too many sugar sports, before I left to have pain inflicted in my hand.
If the pain in my hand was not bad enough, Devin was also scheduled for PT half way through my appointment. She made it a point to announce to everyone that I was a "weenie", which got a big laugh.
Then she came over to my station and suggested she pinch the arm pit on my left arm to make me forget about the pain in my right finger. Gotta love that girl.
I made it home and was ready for Veranda Time when the boss lady got home. She enjoyed some 2010 Soho Sauvignon Blanc and I enjoyed a short shot of 21 year old Glenlivet as we watched the sun set on Chateau Cronin/Circle D Ranch.
Kristin and Ryan joined us for some chicken wings and tempura green beans from Friends. It was a great way to end a Manic Monday. The Cat is OK by the way.
We got a lot of responses for Angel Tickets and VT invites. Who says you can't buy love. I will be building the group contact lists in the next day or two.
It is now 10:40PM and Devin and I just watched our favorite "together" TV time, DWTS. After last seasons of DWTS season winner competitions, this is a lot like waiting for train wrecks to happen. There were several.
Now its time to wrap up the blog, and turn the light off around the house. I should be done about the time Jack needs to get up for school. Life is good.
I Need To Fix My VIXmeter
We called a good Dallas Fed Survey correctly. Germany's Retail sales numbers are now being released on Thursday. (Did Barron's make a mistake?)
Now let's talk about that sage idea I had about APOL. Last week and last night I said we were going to sell APOL short. They reported earnings today before the open and had a decent beat. Historically (The last 14 quarters) a beat will get them a 7-8% gain over the following 15 days. (Thank you whisper.com) We saw APOL jump over 10% today to settle up 7.1%.
That got me scratching my head for the few minutes I had to think about the market. One of our readers, a man much wiser and learned on these manners explained we might be seeing a short cover.
That situation occurs when some of the casino managers and pitt bosses are short naked on a stock (They sold shares they do not have.) and they want to cover some or all of their losses by buying back some shares driving the price up.
The somewhat unexpected beat of earnings today may have triggered a short cover buy back of the shares driving the price up that 10%. Fortunately, I did not get in my short position today, but will be looking at that possibility tomorrow depending upon the pre-market action.
We did stop out of our VXX positions today at a 60% LOSS. That erases all the gains we made 3 weeks ago on brilliant VXX play back then. Today should have saved our stop on the VXX downside, but despite all the chaos of the Cypriot deal and the S&P respecting the resistance of 1565 and then dropping, we hit our stop and suffered an ugly loss.
We still have the green flag flying, but we may have picked up a distribution day today. It is hard to say as volume was light. Let's see what the IBD says tomorrow morning.
Keep an eye on the reaction to the Cypriot Bank solution. Because Germany, France, and Italy are tired of bailing all the debt ridden countries out, they said no to Cyrpess.
The decision to close the second largest bank in Cyrpess was one of the few options left. Keep in mind that a lot of companies and wealthy individuals store money in a tax have country like Cypress.
Jeroen Dijesselbeom (Can't wait for Ben's Lexus to reads that one to him) the Dutch Financial minister implied that is how all future bailouts will be handled, scared the heck out of the European Financial markets. That kind of uneasiness has a way of spreading.
Possible options for wealthy folk and companies with too much cash in shaky times. GOLD, maybe?
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