Interdum stultus opportuna loquitur...

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

A Heads-Up (Housekeeping)...

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

It's a short week in the US this week; markets are closed on Thursday, and are only open for a short session on Friday.

As such, I will finally be able to get the finishing touches on the Australian version of the Rant - a post-match analysis of the day, with the usual crap (All Ords winners & losers, highest volume and so on) and some other stuff.

With News Corpse finally going to the place where its boss has his citizenship, and DavNet a thing of the past, I will be sorely bereft of an easy target. That's OK... while there are fund managers there's always someone to poke fun at.

Speaking of NCP - did anybody see John Safran's new show last night? The recap of News Corp's botching of its takeover of Mushroom Records was the highlight... Murdoch as supermanager my arse: he gets "deal fever", just like any junior merchant wanker.

Anyhow... I'm aiming for Thursday arvo as the likely kickoff day, but who knows. I'm told you shouldn't "launch" new stuff mid-week (it makes the natives restless or something) but to be frank I couldn't give a rat's: when it's built, it rolls (doesn't that sound macho? If I was bisexual I could maybe be President of somewhere, with machismo like that).

I'm digressing again...

The Aussie rant will also coincide with my ability (fingers crossed) to include more graphical content - I think I've found a sensible "hosting paradigm" for images for this blog. If so, I will be the happiest little Vegemite - because a lot of the sentiment stuff makes FAR more sense when accompanies by a well-annotated chart.

Plus, you're probably thinking... more pictures = less text? YOU WISH, Dear Reader, YOU WISH.

Other stuff that's in the Aust. version includes

  • Earnings Calendar and Estimates
  • Economic Data (tomorrow's rather than today's)
  • Domestic futures (only SPI and BABs).

Now it goes without saying that there's no investment advice anywhere; I might be tempted to sell a December SPI at some stage, and I will point that out if needs be, but that should not be taken as an invitation to do the same thing yourself.

Oh, and one more thing... unlike the dopey setup that happens when non-finance types set up your data queries (on Yahoo! Finance for example), the "Biggest % Gainers" will only be drawn from stocks in the All Ordinaries - that prevents the list from being dominated by warrants and options. It also prevents some of the more (ahem) speculative stocks (penny dreadfuls) from being included, but them's the breaks; they will be included in some of the "StockScreener" output (of which, more later).