NonRant: US Stable Below RantShort...

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Just about everybody knows how much I despise the brokerage industry - the sorts of people who say that current valuations are 'low by historical standards' - but neglect to mention that by 'historical standards' they mean 'including the period since 1995'.

Well, two (or more) can play at that game...

I therefore declare that I am the tallest, most attractive, smartest and most successful man in Paris - simply by defining 'man' as 'people listed in the Paris telephone directory under Transom'.

I am not sure, but I might also be the smartest, tallest, etc man in history (with 'man' keeping the same definition as above).

I have also noticed the penchant for the 'intellectual' type of Frog (and some Ities and Ancient Bubbles) to go by only one name - the Bubbles usually slapped 'of X' at the end (e.g., Heron of Alexandria, Solon of Samos and so on).

You know what I mean - these folks who drop their first name and just go by 'Voltaire' or 'Moliere' or 'Colette' or what-have-you. (and actually Voltaire's pseudonym was entirely fabricated, since his real name was Francois Marie Arouet).

Since there is almost certainly not another Transom in France (otherwise the French government would certainly have formally surrendered by now), I reckon I could safely designate anything I write in French as 'Transom' and get away with it. Or maybe I will just do what Arouet did and declare myself a pseudonym... maybe 'Superion'.

OK... enough tripe for the moment. jimhaz1 pointed out to me that the 'hundredth monkey syndrome' was apparently a crock - the 'learning at a distance' bit of it was invented by a writer who liked the idea and sticky-taped it to the end of a piece of valid sociological research which canvassed the learning-to-wash-sweet-potatoes in a populaiton of monkeys. Bugger...

And (as you might have discerned from above, France Telecom has finally fixed the residual problems with my telephone, and - wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles - the 'FreeBox' also arrived today... meaning that as soon as I get the thing innstalled, RantWorld will explode back onto the horizon. the instriuctions are in French, and that's half the reason that I am at an internet cafe as I type this... I have to try and find proper non-Gibberish instructions. (I'm kidding - I want to do all my downloading of little freeware things from here, and put them onto my USB key).

100 channels of cable TV - some of it in English! (In fact, for the first three months I get all the channels - some 240 of them... how can there possibly have ever been enough telly produced to fill 240 channels???)

And one final thing... I found a 2006 diary in a bookshop the other day, with a picture of a cat on the front - the cat is, I kid you not, the spi't 'n' image of the recently-departed Chubba. Inside the diary, each month also has two cat photos. The photo on the front is also the photo that relates to the second half of March, 2006.

(Note - I try to remember to use spi't 'n' image instead of 'spitting image' because what we now think of as 'spitting image' is actually a contraction of 'spirit and image' that began in the Southern slave populations in the US prior to the War of Northern Aggression.)

ChubbaRant: Vale.

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We learned last night that Chubba - a giant gentle lion of a tabby - died in the night after a very short illness.

Chubba arrived furtively, peering over the window-ledge at the back of the house in Barkly Street in Carlton. After gentle beckoning, he finally made himself a fixture.

As I said, he was what we would call 'a big unit' if we were talking about a bloke. Like most big units, he was a lamb to go with it (although he tamed two labradors when they tried to change the pecking order - and he baled up a fox once).

I have often wondered why he arrived at our place - and how his previous 'owners' reacted to his disappearance. We never saw any signs indicating that he had been lost.

We re-settled him at The Lovely's parents' place, and he enjoyed it. Recently he had taken to going on the hour-long walks that The Lovely's Dad performs twice-daily to exercise the labradors - and often Chubba and the dogs could be seen hurtling downhill together.

It's a bit embarrassing trying to write this from an internet cafe - lip quivering, wet eyes and a snotty nose. Too bad for me, frankly.

He will be sorely missed (he was being missed already, but this seals it). A hundred kisses for Chubba... a big lug with a broken tooth. Once I have scanned the only photos I have of him, I will post them in a place dedicated to his memory.

DeathRant: "Liberators"?

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The rabble who did this - the drone soldiers that everyone wants to call 'hero' - are as much victims as the children in the photographs. First of all, they come disproportionately from 'bad' backgrounds, and as the US gets deeper in the shit the Army and Marines are having to dredge even lower in the barrel and accept convicted felons (they already get almost 30% of their recruitment from people who 'volunteer' for military service in place of having a criminal record).

They are then desensitised and dehumanised during their training, and then sent into a hostile environment and constantly fed material that makes them view the IRaqi people as subhuman.

If you are pro-war, read this piece by Chris Floyd over on Empire Burlesque. Then/ re-cast those images in the face of the now-admitted FACT that the carnage that happened here was the result of people who 'greased' this house DELIBERATELY.

The man who sits atop this whole putrid edifice - George W Bush - is, following the ratio decidendi of Nuremberg, legally culpable for all acts committed during his war. He should be dragged into the Hague, given a trial of the type his Quislings have tried to force on Saddam Hussein, and then executed by 'ordeal'. He should be forced to fight to the death against as many people as it takes until he dies of exhaustion...

Chris Floyd's Item (graphic images)

Note - I almost didn't put the 'graphic images' warning on this - because frankly I think that everyone should HAVE to confront the photo of the 7 month old child with his head blown open. It is ESSENTIAL that bourgeois shitheads like you and me get made to feel GUTTED by this tragic waste of human potential. This child - and almost a million others - would still be alive if Hussein was still in power and the uS had relaxed sanctions. WHO IS THE EVIL ONE?

TootRant: Also, Belarus...

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Sometimes watching the news just git me plain riled. Take last night, for instance. Across the world, footage of the 'mass protests' in Belarus, wherein a group of a few hundred agents provocateurs are crapping on about how they don't like the results of the vote. the western media shoot it nice and tight (like they did for the 'massive crowd' of 40 Chalabi apparatchiks who toppled Saddam's statue in Firdos Square) to make it look bigger than it is.

Forty seconds later, footage of George Bush being made to look like a complete dill by Helen Thomas.

The two things are linked in my mind thusly: on the one hand is a strongman that the US has decided to unseat... on the other is an inbred idiot who was put in place by a process at least as corrupt as the Belorussian elections - and who then went on to perpetrate war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The US has decided that Alyeksandr Lukashenka has outlived his usefulness as a regional strongman... so it has sent in its agitators (just as it did for the 'Rose Revolution' and the 'Orange Revolution').

{The serfs in former Soviet satellites are stupider than their Latin American counterparts, so these attempts at subverting the political protest always draw a crowd (or more accurately, a herd) in the Baltic states... whereas they failed in Venezuela when the Yanks tred to oust Chavez.}

Frankly, I don't really give a rat's - I am far more concerned about the move to 'biometric' ID systems for passports. No WAY do I want my DNA anywhere that the government can get access to decent quantities of the stuff - the moment that happens we are in a world where the State has the tools to provide 'indisputable' evidence of one's presence at a crime scene.

Speaking of which, I am reliably informed of something interesting. Those of you who have experienced this phenomenon (which I will get to in a second) are about to experience an "AHHH!!!" moment.

The phenomenon is that of lovely well-dressed 20-something women, who accost a chap in the street (always a chap who looks like a foreigner) asking for change (as would a beggar). "Un petit piece pour manger, monsieur?" while wearing €200 shoes and €10 worth of face-spackle.

Well, that's the 'setup'. You might think (as I did originally) that it's just an organised gang - Lovely canvasses a given area, Lovely gathers X euros, and splits it with her 'handler'.

Not so, mes amis... it's an attempt to get hold of coins with small amounts of genetic material on them (that's the reason coins stink so bad) - just a bit of recent sweat will do, given current PCR techniques. They get paid by... the US Embassy.

What would you think about a country in which the city police arrested protestors for nothing more than the act of protest - and the chief of police then bragged about it in internal memos? What if this country's 'internal security forces' corralled all negative opinion in cages while the head of state swanned past in a limousine? Would you think that this country was the 'beacon of light for the world'?

More to the point - do you think such a country has a right to lecture ANYBODY about 'freedom', 'liberty' and the rest of the pleasant sounding babble that are now little more than the names of different models of SUV?

Oh, and yes... the Tooting... here's yesterday's little short note...

This will be a short post (I am writing another longer post which will apepar in a few minutes). The Dow is currently at 11318... short it now and laugh...

the market fell almost 100 points from that point - the closing level was more than 80 points below the short entry. As such, everyone should have taken their money and run...

TOOT!!!! TOOT!!! TOOOOoooot!

RantRant: And Now ...

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... for something completely different...

In the none-too-distant past, I have read a bunch of stuff about the likelihood of the ability of 'shared consciousness': that is, the ability of a geographically remote sub-population to acquire - as if by telepathy - an innovation which has been discovered by another sub-population.

I am aware, for example, that in one experiment blindworms were taught to be scared of the colour yellow (by submitting them to a choice in which red = food; yellow = electric shock). When these blindowrms were chopped up and fed to OTHER blindworms, these other blindworms seemed to 'digest' the information as well. Furthermore, subsequent research purported to show that blindworms in locations that had nothing to do with the intial research, also showed this new aversion to yellow.

Let me say right off the bat, that I have not ever reviewed the original research - so I have no idea about the merits of the research methodology in this case.

But one piece of research whose methodology is sound, is the study of the Koshima Monkeys... in which a 'meme' seemed to develop in the indigenous population once a certain threshold had been reached, but more importantly that the same 'meme' spread to a geographically dislocated group (on another island, with no contact between islands).

this was the source of the so-called '100th Monkey Hypothesis' by which an idea will gain 'traction' so long as enough people believe in it.

I am a firm believer in some form of 'collective consciousness', even though that consciousness has not yet managed to do the world a favour and help Dick Cheney's heart in its quest for freedom.

{As we know, Dick Cheney's heart has been trying to free itself from the moral culpability of providing 'aid and comfort' to an enemy of mankind. After decades of helping to keep alive the meat-bag that carries Cheney's suppurating soul, his heart woke up to itself and decided to quit... but the doctors won't let it.}

In fact it's the Cheneys of the world that I am particularly interested in, when I consider the "100th Monkey Syndrome"... what if the first 99 monkeys believe something that is inherently evil? Is it possible for a collective consciousness to accept as valid, something which is morally reprehensible? Can a collective consciousness be 'swayed' by an idea that has negartive net utility?

This is something that is never made clear in the discussion of the 100th Monkey stuff. It is assumed that since the original observation was something that increased utility (washing sand off of sweet potatoes) that this 'interconnectedness of everything' is a positive thing. But what if the other 99 monkeys also believed that it was OK to gas Jews, Poofs, Retards and Gypsies? What if they believed that the Holocaust didn't happen? What if they believed that George Bush had half a clue about foreign policy?

As someone once said... aye, there's the rub.

Humans are by and large very stupid herd animals, despite what you hear on the telly (present company excepted, of course). If you can get a decent chunk of the herd to believe in some idea ('Lebensraum', 'Germana', or 'operation Iraqi Freedom'), maybe that eventually resutls in a new 'meme' in human consciousness.

Does the propensity to generate a new meme vary with the degree of belief? In other words, does this '100th Monkey Syndrome' require a thousand, or a million, or a billion monkeys, if 90% of the monkeys are only weak adherents? or is it literally just 'weight of numbers'?

Obviously, what is desirable is for the system to require on'y GOOD mems to develop, and only when large numbers of the population are genuinely interested. So those flabby-armed, fat, sweaty "gotta git me a whole bunch o' Jeeesus" types that populate Republican conventions wouldn't count, because they have no idea what the fuck they mean when they say they're 'conservative'.

And likewise, anyone who shows any interest in mainstream political parties would get a weight of azero in any meme.

Frankly, my opes aren't high.

ShortRant: Short Now...

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This will be a short post (I am writing another longer post which will apepar in a few minutes). The Dow is currently at 11318... short it now and laugh...

Bugger....

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I've been very busy today organising the insurance for a vehicle acquisition (bloody Frogs have nationalised health, education, trains... but not third-party insurance - the one thing that would be sensible).

So when we went out to Cergy to look at the impending RantMobile, we knew that it generated a problem - two Australians, buying a vehicle in France, where third-party insurance is mmandatory but must be acquired in the marketplace from a private insurer. To get your premiums down you have to show and absence of accidents on your driving record (proving a negative). (Plus, I have been driving for 20 years and have never had a licence, so I'm a write-off from the start!!).

Anyhow - all this stuffing around has left me little time to do stuff. Except find another brilliant place to eat. It's a little Vietnamese restaurant in Rue Monge (called "Foyer Viet Nam") which is just down the road from where I get the groceries when I head home from the internet cafe.

What a gem - the nem (like spring rolls, but much bigger and tastier) are only €3.50, and the Soupe Pho (a Hanoiese soupe with noodles and beef and ginger... sensational) was only €6.50. And not an Anglo in sight. There were loads of student-y types, and I got chatting with a gentleman who was sat nexzt to us (everybody sits cheek by jowl in this VERY unassuming place).

We were chatting away - me in my deplorable (but swiftly improving) French, aided by this gentleman in his good (but not perfect) English. He splits his time between a house in the 5th and a place in Geneva (he lives mostly in Geneva) - oh, for a life like that...

Anyhow - at the end of the meal he fishes out his card (loads of French folk carry personal 'visitng cards') and hands it over, inviting us to drop in if we are in Geneva. On the card it turns out that he is a Chevalier des Artes et Lettres - France's highest literary honour. His son in law is ... an Aussie. Small world.

Anyway, that's by way of background.

More background: Slobodan Milosevic was murdered, my favourite French politician (Dominique de Villepin - he of the perfect coiffure) is watching his presidential ambitions die... in a slow-motion train wreck over the 'Contrat Premiere Embauche' (CPE) which is the French equivalent of Howard's gutting of unfair dismissal procedures. Meanwhile, the chatter about Iran keeps getting worse except for those who keep an eye on teh Russian and Chinese media, which show that China and Russia will almost certainly be drawn in if a theater-wide conflict ensues.

(Note - as you know, the words "favourite" and "politician" go together like 'favourite' and 'crutch infection').

Anyhow... note this, and note it well. Islamic clerics long ago declared a fatwah, decreeing that nuclear weapons could never be used aggressively (effectively, denying Islamic forces any nuclear first-strike capability). People like Osama bin Laden take the declarations of the ulema very seriously.

Ask yourself this: given that Osama has at least four suitcase nukes, why has he not detonated one somewhere significant? your answer should be "Because he is respecting the fatwah... but if the US uses any nukes in an attack on Iran, expect the molten glass treatment on a US city." It is also consistent with the Islamic requirement ot invite your enemy to negotiate before taking significant action - the recent offer of a truce by bin Laden should be seen as a prelude to something of at least the same scale as September 11th.

Use this bounce to short again... at least we can have market fun even while Cheney and his JINSA cronies drive the human race to the brink of extinction.

On a lighter note, I think I will enrol at the Sorbonne next year - or perhaps I will do the one-year, coursework-only, English-language PhD in International Relations which is offered by a UN-related entity here in Paris. Might be fun to stir up the Americans in the class...

TootRant: Toot Toot...

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I can't remember whether it was Parry, Andrew 'Colonel-Burger' King or Simon 'Chocolates' Guiliano, but one of the analii at InvestorWeb used to say 'Toot toot' to indicate that he was blowing his own horn. That's where the phrase 'toot toot' comes from in case anybody's wondering.

They also - for a reason that I still haven't discovered - referred to cigarettes as 'darts', and therefore smoking became 'darting' or 'on the darts'. And who can forget "scheisen" and "elephant's" (elephant's trunk... drunk)?

Anyhow... enbough reminiscing... this is about tooting.

Seriously though - picking the bounce...

Anyhow... there's not a lot more to say - guard your gains on the index shorts, and expect a short-term bounce relatively soon. Re-entries will now require a divergence - and I will be back online to give chapter-and-verse details of those very shortly (at which time the gory details will be distributed to subscribers first, of course).

12:41 a.m. Oz time, Thursday)

...

And then picking the top of the bounce to within tenty Dow points... thusly...

... the thing has opened continuing yesterday's bounce, but this is just a bounce (as I forecast about five posts ago - just to slap late shorts upside the head). Re-set shorts in whatever index you fancy at 10:05 a.m. NY time.

(1:42 a.m. Oz time, Friday)

...

For those of you who can do the sums, that was a 150-Dow-point round trip.

Now I know that ths stops were too tight, but everybody kows that I still haven't reparameterised the Rant machine (I can't do that for a little while because contract rolloever happens soon and I need a few days of data for the June contract) - but the key thing is getting the direction right.

toot toot... (and let us say nothing about the 30year bond, which had us underwater almost the whole session and wound up giving us absolutely NOTHING...)

IndexRant (Think of a Better Name): Midnight Oil...

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Had a song ("Read About It") that went

the rich get richer
the poor get the picture...

And unfortunately, it was only the folks with relatively deep pockets that got to ride this whole little intraday decline, thanks to my excessively-conservative guidance on the 'equity breakeven' stop.

Anyone trading two wound up with absolutely nothing (because they set their stops at a point that broke their equity even), while anyone trading 3 or more had about 40 points worth of Dow 'shimmy' to work with - so they could have rode a bounce to 11070 or above on the remaining unit. Sadly the thing bounced to just over the level necessary to take 2-lotters out of the game (that level should have been 11046 - and the Dow futures got to 11050 exactly), and then reversed and is now showing a lovely decline.

I dunno what to say - the bloody markets have a bead on the stops at the moment.

Still, my mail shows that the same 5 folks who cut a fistful out of yesterday's bounce, also rode half-positions all the way up to 11050 and decided that only a "genuine" break of that level (i.e., a break by more than 15 Dow points) would clip them out... so they've grabbed the absolute lion's share of this ride. Again, well played.

So it's not a bad day for the one-lotters (they got their one-SP-point-and-out), two lotters got zilch, amd 3-or-more-lotters are still lapping up the gravy as the decline below 11000 threatens to accelerate.

You wouldn't read about it...

IndexRant (Yet Again): See How Not Hard This Is?

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At 10:05 the Dow futures were at 11035; ten minutes later they were at 11017. That's roughly equivalent to a 1.5 point S&P drop, which is the defined target. So now, if you had more than one unit on, you should only have one unit still running. In such a case, move stops to 'equity breakeven' (i.e., risking the gains from the first units) and see how it goes. It might end up being another 'nuthin' trade, but the gains on the first unit will prevent any actual pain.

Those with only one should have followed the 'one point and out' mechanism (for the Dow futures, 1 S&P point equivaleent is 10 Dow points)..

IndexRant (Again): Sell The Dow Soon...

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... the thing has opened continuing yesterday's bounce, but this is just a bounce (as I forecast about five posts ago - jsut to slap late shorts upside the head). Re-set shorts in whatever index you fancy at 10:05 a.m. NY time. At the same time (for those who like the bonds) try buying the bond for a scalp. It's over-reacted to yesterday's BoJ announcement. it will only be a counter-trend scalp, but it will do OK. (Bear in mind that my long-term target for the 30-year has been under 100 for some time... this is a long SCALP)

ScoreRant: I'm Not Counting That One...

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What a pooper...

If you scroll down and read the stream of babble apropos of last night's S&P hack-job, you will see why it pays not to try and punt long when the nuffnuffs are still keen to try shorting a low.

First, the entry coincided with one last lurch downwards - the last little grind down to lure in the breakout nuffies - which meant that the long position was underwater for longer than I like them to bne. Second, for those who left the trade on after the initial target was reached (at which point I indicated that setting stops at breakeven would be sensible despite a declaration that the market was likely to close with a gain), the bloody thing came back and clipped those stops as if it was predestined to do so.

So instead of waiting for the last flush down and then being able to confidently ride a long position all the way to the close, we were left holding a loser for 90 minutes... then sitting after the target was hit, then giving it all back.

Although I said eplicitly that it was only for the super duper keen, I'm sure that quite a few folks took the punt - I only hope that they had the sense to use a looser stop. From the mail flow, I know that at least five people did precisely that - and they also had the benefit of entering slightly later, after three points of the five-point flush had already happened... so they entered at a lower price and held until the close. For the session they picked up an absolute poultice... well played.

Still, this is designed mostly to help the less-initiated, so I am declaring it a wash - not a loss, but no gain will be presented in the RantRecord despite everything panning out in the end. I think that's fair to all concerned.

IndexRant: There We Go...

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Out with the targeted 1.5 points, albeit an hour late...

Still, nothing has been reparameterised yet, so blinding accuracy is not to be expected.

If you're super duper keen, move your stops to breakeven and ride this one - in all likelihood the indices will close green for today's US session.

IndexRant: This Is Taking Longer...

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...than I expected. Of course it will end up giving its required yield, but it could have done without the 4.5-point lurch downwards at about 2 minutes after I posted. That'll learn me...

I did saythat you had to be keen for the long side. Don't get too worried though - it's not going to be a loser, just one where the ex-post risk-return wil be lousy (having to ride almost a 5 point negative excursion when you only expect to gain a point...)

IndexRant: If You're Keen...

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... Buy the S&P now 0 just for the next half-hour or so (or until it's showing a point and a half profit, which shold actually only be ten minutes, max...

People moan about me never offering long scalps (I do, all t he time).

IndexRant (Again): Still So Good, So Far...

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Thus far, the 'short any bounce' hypothesis has paid off for those agile enough to take profits at the 60-SPI-point level and re-enter on bounces back towards 4900. You will notice that the venom in the bounces is waning - which you should take to be a warning sign... luring dullards into unwise short positions.

That's not to say that the short side of the market is going to get hard for us... given that Rant-o-philes initiated their 2006 shorts within twenty SPI points of the all-time high (and have had at least two situations in which they could pocket gains and wait for another bounce to overbought to short again).

But it will be hard for anyone who shorts at the current oversold market status; the SPI in particular has worked up a nice daily oversold condition that should prove disastrous for those who have initiated shorts in the last stages of this first thrust down.

I am not saying to try the buy side - because frankly the global economic and geopolitical picture is starting to get ugly. There is now some wider reportage of the chicanery in the official US statistics (stuff that I have banged on about for three years), and the US dollar is looking very shaky despite having bounced 1.5 full points (basis the USDX) in the last few sessions. USDX just can't shake that 90 area (which I identified as resistance when I talked about the bounce of USD off 82-ish). When you consider how lacklustre the Euro has been recently, you will realise that the weakness is being driven by a growing unwillingness of foreigners to hold USD reserves. The upcoming Iranian euro-denominated oil bourse will exacerbate that trend - to the benefit of the Euro, primarily - very soon after its launch in late March).

Anyhow... there's not a lot more to say - guard your gains on the index shorts, and expect a short-term bounce relatively soon. Re-entries will now require a divergence - and I will be back online to give chapter-and-verse details of those very shortly (at which time the gory details will be distributed to subscribers first, of course).

IndexRant: Much Enthusiasm About Not Much...

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Between the GM "we hope to find some way to stay out of the grave" announement, and the Consumer Spending "we will spend more than we earn until someone stops us" data, investors had bugger-all to cheer them up. However they still generated a good hearty bounce (as I mentioned was likely well before the market opened).

Franchement, (as me and my Parisian chums say) the idea that the US indices (and global indices thanks to the baa-lamb effect) could rocket upwards based on this news, is an indicator that nobody thinks the music has stopped.

That's fine - it gives an opportunity to re-set shorts at improved levels. Even if you were a super-slowcoach and gave everything back except the 10 SPI points advocated as the stop, you still made out like a bandido - and those who took the 60 (or more if you exited first thing in the Oz morning) did significantly better. Nobody should have reversed (although a couple of e-mailers mentioned that they had done so - bien joué, as we Parisians say).

Have you taken a look at the US housing market lately? Man, does it ever look sick. And all the same store sales stuff that was released yesterday looks absolutely AWFUL. Falls of 10% year on year are not something to be taken lightly, and it was happening right from top-end retailers all the way down to CostCo.

I read something very interesting by Paul Krugman the other day - it pointed out that even among the top 10% of income earners (the ones who have pocketed all the gains from the so-called 'productivity miracle'), the outcomes vary wildly.

Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution (i.e., the top 10%) rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. (I think that's in real terms).

1% real income gains per year - better than the NEGATIVE growth in real income for the rest of the US, but read on...

Once you get to the top 1%, you find that income over the same period grew 87 percent (2.1% p.a.) - but it gets even better...

The top 0.1% income grew 181 percent (3.6% per annum); and income at the rarified "atmos" of the top 0.01% had their incomes more than quintuple (in fact they al,ost increased by a factor of 6, with a gain of 497% or 6.4% p.a.)

Krugman doesn't 'partial out' the gains of the stratospheric earners when calculating the gains for the 'rest' of the top 10%, either. Now anyone who has done 8 years of Econometrics can tell you that the overwhelming bulk of the dollar value of ALL gains experienced by the top 10% accrued to the top 0.01%. In fact if you assign numbers to the actual average income levels and so the numbers, it turns out that, on average, everyone below the top 0.1% went backwards.

And remember, that's in REAL terms.

I can't be bothered putting my "back-of-the-Excel-spreadsheet" calculations into a table to prove that statement, but if anybody wants to 'call' me on it I will do so at a later date. It's pretty easy to calculate. Just note before you try to countermand the idea, that the calculation is a little tricky... you have to get starting values for the 1972 incomes (easy enough using Krugman's estimates for the top tiers and reversing the growth), then you have to establish the annual aggregate income for each stratum, then you have to establish how much of each stratum's aggregate income per year is accrued by the stratum ABOVE it (i.e., for the top 0.1%, how much of the year's additional income went ONLY to the folks in the top 0.01%).

The original Krugman article is here...

The end point is this" nobody in the US is getting richer except those who were mind-bogglingly rich already. EVERYONE else is going backwards (which is a good supporting anecdote to hepl explain the massive increase in DEBT in an environment of supposedly-increasing prosperity).

ParisRant: Urban Chez Rant in Paris...

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

Well, I promised that I would provide some snaps of the new place (which is on Passage Jean Nicot, which runs off Rue Saint Dominique in the just-too-bloody-groovy-for-words 7th arondissement). My internet cafe of choice is still in the 16th though - which entails a bracing constitutional past the Tower and across the Seine.

Sadly I have not yet got a reliable way to get the photos off the memory card for my digital camera, so for the moment the only thing I can offer (apart from breathtakingly timely calls for short-term declines in the equity markets - toot toot!) is some satellite imagery.

If you look at the attached image, you will be able to make out Saddam's mobile weapons labs - they are represented by the red dot on the picture. These 'mobile laboratories of death' are a clear and present risk to the whole of humanity...

Oh, wait... the red dot is my place. The Irish pub is half a block away, and there are three little supermarkets, four bakeries (proper French boulangerie/patisserie) and God knows what else within a circle with a diameter of 100m. It's great.

As you can see, the place is located about where I said it was - a couple of hundred meters from Les Invalides, and a few hundred meters from the Tour Eiffel, as my parisian mates call he Eiffel Tower. Honestly - they've had it for a hundred years, so you would think they would get the name right. As it happens, they get a lot of stuff wrong - half the time they speak what sounds like utter gobbledegook. (The tower is the triangle-y shaped shadowy thing on the upper left of the picture... Les Invalides is at the bottom of the grassy area that starts at the top right).

Speaking of Les Invalides, if Napoleon hadn't been a short-ass, he would not have required a gold-covered dome on top of a huge building just to house his swarthy little woggo corpse. Short men are like short decision horizons (e.g., "I will take up smoking so that I will be liked by other insecure teen wannabes") - their aggregate effect on humanity has been negative.

Here's the image...

The red dot is my place...

IndexRant II: Another Little Toot...

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

I just looked at the SPI chart for the day session - not realising that the silly thing had dropped 93 points after my 'short anything you like' call (mentioned in the post below in the spirit of tooting one's own horn).

Taking it from the opening gap down, the fall from high to low was 78 points - but those who have the SPISpy RoE will have taken everything off at 60 (which is a nice even $1500 gain in a session) and will be looking to risk some of that gain on any bounce today (Oz time).

Those who are still riding (this should definitely only be those who initiated the trade with 3 or more units) should put their stop at their entry plus ten points (just in case of a spike). [Note - by entry PLUS ten I mean to place yur stop at the level which LOCKS IN TEN POINTS OF PROFIT... his is a SHORT so the stop will now be BELOW your entry - you knew that but I thought I should make it clear]

The GM "we 'aim' to stop losing money in Europe" announcement is the latest in Wagoner's attempt to stop his gravy train from grinding to a bankrupt halt. I notice that several newswires (the disreputable shills, like Reuters) have reported that the company's CEO said that GM EXPECTS to stop losng money in Europe... that is not what the announcement said: the announcement said that it AIMS to stop losng money. You can aim for anything you like, but you may not actually EXPECT to hit what you aim at.

Anyhow - the news has caused the tamest of spikes in European trade (S&P futures are up 2.5 points relative to their previous day session close), so there's not much risk of anybody being forced to give back the lot.

You might have been groaning that I wasn't offering my ΣΟΦΙΑ as often as usual these days... it's not because I don't love youse all, believe me. I have tried to ensure that I chuck out a $1000-gain-in-a-session trade at least once a month. That ought to keep subscribers happy until I get fully back on line.

(PS - Mav... see how I can write Wog now? I'm surrounded by them, man... but they have blue-grey eyes, which is a KILLER combination)

IndexRant: How Easy Was That?

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

Line 'em up, bartender...

To refresh your memory (and to rub it in for those who got sick of reading before getting to the nub of yesterday's post)...

A short term top in the Dow either tonight or tomorrow... short any index you fancy.

A 100 point fall in the Dow (and a 25 point in the Nasdaq and a 13-pointfall in the S&P) isn't exactly rare, but it's not exactly chicken feed, neither. And furthermore, when I wrote that (just before 12:30 a.m. Oz time - an hour before the open of the US day session) the SP futures were at their overnight high (or within a point thereof).

It was one of those "It just came to me, as if in a dream" kind of calls...

if you waited until the day session open to short the SPI, you still made out like an absolute bandit - congratulate yourself for being smart enough to listen to some fat doofus half a planet away.

Speaking of fat doofuses (or doofii perhaps?)... I'm going to have to drop that adjective from my self-description soon. I won't even be able to say "100kg of number crunching terror" anymore - that's my obscure reference to a movie called 'Grizzly' that was out when I was a kid (the tagline was "600lb of bone-crunching terror' or something like that..).

I'm gently caressing the 100kg mark from above, and look like breaking it soon. Not through effort or exercise or diet or anything - probably just 'coz I do loads of walking and 'coz it's generally been pretty cold (here in Paris there was snow again - over an inch during the night - and the day was clear and crisp and sunny.... absolutely perfect for a human walrus).

Anyhow - don't get too concerned... nobody's going to mistake me for a callow youth, and I'm never going to get thin enough for people to think I have any flair for interior design.

Oh... and george Bush is visiting India (the non-signatory to the NPT which developed clandestine nuclear weapons and took the CIA completely by surprise when it did its first test) while his she-male Secretary of State hisses through that massive gap in her front teeth, at Iran (a signatory to the NPT) about Iran's development of a nuclear ENERGY capability. Bush meanwhile is in India to seal the deal for the sale of enrichment technology to India that will enable them to divert their existing NON-MONITORED enrichment equipment towards plutonium production.

I wonder if, when Bush visit's Ghandi's tomb, we will actually be able to hear the creams of existential agony that the universe will utter. The ignorant savage Bush, who probably thinks Ghandi was the guy who led the Indians in the battle against Custer, disgracing the tomb of a genuine man of peace. If you're not a red-meat no brain Republican redneck, you will have no words to describe the feeling of utter disgust that washes over you when you view that sort of false piety.

But back to the rather spiffing call from last night. Hooray for me!!