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"I am encouraged with the recent action."
isn't this typical for end of month in gold? gg rebounded really nicely, on high volume, during the last few minutes of trading. wish i hadn't sold mine in the mid 10's. (but then, it was redundant, since i have a gold fund ...)
re i-watch.
well, yes, i remember how it was used/abused during the bubble years (or at 1999-2000). i'm just going by what i've been told - true, quite a while ago on a yahoo board (rfmd). so yes, i'm aware that nothing is as it seems. hey, this is wall street, after all, den of thieves and pack of wolves and all that.
so i guess the answer you're both giving is "it means nothing". however, i'm not sure that that's an answer. someone must have indended *something* by posting such messages. at the very least, to determine whether there was any buy interest down there.
oh well.
> I think from a probability standpoint ...
nevertheless, from the point of view of prudence ... there's not a whole lot you lose by waiting a bit. (nevertheless, i'm short, but also hedged with some old calls ... well, the ones i haven't sold.)
is anyone here familiar with i-watch, or at least the system it reports on. (auctex?? nah, that's a linux thing. something like that.)
now what i do know is that there's nothing really special about the messages, and there's no commitment to buy or sell, and that sellers are probably as likely to issue a sell message as buyers (to judge where competing buyers might be). but the odd thing is here:
http://iw.thomsonfn.com/iwatch/cgi-bin/iw_ticker?ticker=kopn&symbol=kopn
the stock's roughly $5+. was already squozen, downgraded and fell. but is lingering here because of extremely low short interest. however, its getting sell messages at $3 and $4. is that common? meaningful?
re excrement:
aww, and i thought you were being witty and snide. "an excrement of spx" has a nice ring.
speaking of nvls, here's a quote that made me laugh out loud. its from thestreet.com coverage of the nvls cc.
"I don't think [SARS] is going to change end demand long term," he explained in response to another question about how SARS affects Novellus. " [But there are] people sitting there saying, should I aggressively ramp my factory or should I hold back and ramp only to the level I have to meet the demand I see."
so perhaps these guys just think "sars" means "cautious investment in the face of slack demand ..."
OT in response to something you said on SI:
"my bad", i think, gained popularity through the movie "clueless", 1995.
or suppress unfavorable studies ...
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=105...
re previous discussions on linux vs msft
Microsoft down and out in Munich
By Ashlee Vance in San Francisco
Posted: 28/05/2003 at 18:45 GMT
Linux zealots all over Munich have strapped on their lederhosen and knocked back a few liters of beer after the open source operating system beat out Microsoft's Windows for a major city contract.
Munich will dump 14,000 PCs running Windows and install Linux instead in what is one of the biggest moves away from Redmond to date. The importance of the deal prompted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to make a last minute pitch and reportedly to undercut an offer from IBM and SuSE.
Ballmer's efforts failed.
[...]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/30912.html
re housing data.
perhaps this will help. sorry about the lack of columns:
Category Apr Mar Feb Jan Dec
Existing Home Sales 5.84M 5.53 5.86 6.10 5.91
Months Supply 5.1 4.9 4.4 4.5 4.3
Median Price Y/Y 5.8% 5.8 8.0 6.6 6.1
> NVDA's cards are even faster, but Xbox stinks.
ah, but what makes the playstation different is the vector units, and their accessibility to the programmer. that, plus the fact that sony wisely made linux available for the playstation long long ago (you can go buy a hard disk and boot it up and upload programs from your computer).
nvidia chips do have a cool gpu, but using that for high performance computing is something else entirely: a program running on the cpu has to take data off chip, into the gpu, and then bring it back - a big delay, and not what the chip is intended for: its intended that the data go straight through the graphics pipeline and to the display memory.
re playstation and scientific computing:
http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/
> NVDA's cards are even faster, but Xbox stinks.
and, of course, xbox stinks because it comes from msft and they haven't had an original idea since, um, extortionary licensing for software, i guess. its just a clone of the playstation, and as such, will need to be better by a wide margin before it steals the market. as console gamers know: you buy the #1 system, because that will have *all* the cool games.
> The Z4 looks pretty stupid too,
i drive american: bmw 01 m roadster. made in spartanburg, s.c. 35% american parts. just like the z4 and x5. and yes, bangle must lose his ego.
"Shouldn't there be increased foreign demand as a result of a weaker dollar?"
hmm. now which foreign economy is not teetering on the edge of recession? and, of those, which won't be pushed in that direction because of decreased exports to the u.s.?
OT: actually, it did get play in the FT. just not in the u.s. i guess.
> Based on the Moore's law, the cyclical nature of the semi
> industry ought to start as of the end of last year, which will
> last 2.5 years before the next down turn. (new fab, new speed,
> etc.)
moore's law is not a law.
although the semi industry *has been* cyclical (in a cycle of its own, that is), the current downturn doesn't fit into the cycle as its been seen in the past. when, in previous cycles, were fab capacities down under 75% using older processes (i.e. not upgrading to newer).
if it comes, you'll see it in the equipment co's. which i suppose is why they're still clinging to inflated p/e's.
> They moved IBM up about .80 in the last 55 min of trading,
dat's nothin'. the jammed up cof over 1.20, to well over 44.
but isn't this a bad thing? well, unless its just profit taking, it would signify dumping of u.s. equities and bonds, right?
at least that's the impression i got from cole, who's been saying (over on zeev's board) that he thought the rally in stocks would continue while the rally in bonds continued ...
OT two java plugin failures are more likely a symptom of problems with your own browser. you might first want to try killing all copies and then restarting it ...
"I think Buffett has been trying to talk the market down to buy more ...."
hmm. now we just have to figure out why 99.44% of the talking heads on cnbc have been talking UP the market. i suppose its possible that they're "the investor's friends" ...
nah.
> Basically putting a floor on the dollar as he has on stocks.
hrm. while you might be able to print money to buy stocks, you can't print dollars to buy dollars. printing dollars is part of the problem anyway, right?
whipsaws are what would kill me, which is why i started doing what you're doing - very loose stops and then hedge to tolerate that. i remember back in the good old days of spring 2000 when someone taught me about pairing things up. and back then it was easy (first time, i was short long etek and short jdsu, which had just bought it. that way or vice versa. the stocks traded in tandem, and the market volatility was great.) lately, its been like extr short vs fdry long, or pmcs short vs brcm long. but i don't feel very safe holding these things long (!!), so tend not to stay in very long ...
"One simple word explains it all, Leverage."
but you're suggesting that they could have done what they were doing and been sufficiently profitable without it.
re money management: well i completely agree with you there. that's one reason i definitely do not try trading the wiggles. though its a tempting game, its a sucker's game and eventually your return will approach the mean and the house wins. i've come to terms with my inability to time the market. and once you do that, you just need a rational strategy for following the long term trends but dodging/hedging the short term fluctuations. which, oddly, is almost exactly not what everyone on this board does (since its primarily short term traders). but e.g. if i see brks selling at $10, i want to sell some. is it possible the market will give me a more irrational price? yah, maybe. so have some cash aside for that possibility, and take out some insurance (options) in case some out-of-left-field burst of exuberance comes along. slow, patient, persistent. that's worked for me so far ... what was losing me money, in fact, was the feeling that i "had to" trade all the time. when i got past that, its just been me sitting back and looking for great opportunities ...
"what was your exit strategy for good/bad trades?"
not addressed to me, but since i'm here and about to leave :-P
ease in, ease out. that, plus cheap out of the money calls. during the recent rally, for example, my short on pmcs went underwater roughly $2, but my calls (1.6x my short position), turned that into a > $1 profit, and still holding the short position.
"LTCM went bust because of pathetic money management."
!!! if they had managed their money conservatively, in any sense of that word, then they never would have been able to do what they were doing.
> i encourage you to build a comprehensive trading system based
> on that premise and backtest it.
>
> the results may surprise you.
well, as i've said, over the last two years, its performed well *for me*. if you randomly stick a pin in the chart of kopn or pmcs or rfmd or klic over the last year and assume you shorted there, you'd pretty much be far ahead at this time. with a little smarts in easing into a position, easing out of a position, and hedging the wiggles, my profit has been over 400% (since august 01). on the other hand, its been as high as 550% (roughly october and march of this year). so its plausible that things are not the same any longer ... but for that timeframe, it *could* be made into a valid strategy ....
> You must be a young man or woman and have never read the
> original papers on cloning experiments or or the development of
> new restriction enzymes or protein purification of membrane
> proteins or transcriptional protein-DNA interactions.
yup, i can honestly answer 'yes' to all of those questions. i'm not a molecular biologist nor do i play one on tv. that's my sister (phd from harvard). i'm an undergrad in uc berkeley in engineering.
i suppose you're right in the sense that if you're applying known and now standard techniques, then there *is* a handbook that tells u, "use x mol of this and y mol of that and expect the following ...". anyway, can't comment on the specific examples. though "developing restriction enzymes"? my understanding is that they're all found. and there its just a combinatorial exercise, not a statistical one. to some extent the statistics is hidden, since - if in the end - you just run a gel or do the equivalent - then you're pretty much using a tool that reduces everything to digital, "this is the overwhelmingly correct answer", and most folks can live with that.
> the accuracy of the sequence data.....
on the other hand, a company like celera had a huge bank of statisticians and bioinformatics folks that do nothing but statistics. (hell, their first "fellow" was a statistician). in fact, that's a place where you'd have to say, without statistics, that whole approach to sequencing was a non-starter ...
> there were no clinical trials of penicillin or
> glucocorticoids either before they were given to people,
> because they worked.
i don't think there were clinical trials of leeches and moxie(tm) either.
> Statisticians make assumptions about the preconceived reality
> of what they are studying time after time.
everyone does. this is not news.
"Anyway, SCH does not have neither the authority nor the power to drop the requirement below what is set by Fed Reserve."
odd. that's what i figured. nevertheless, the message went out a week before and the new number apparently started apr 24.
reading about the "reserve requirement" here brought something to mind that i hadn't read about elsewhere. in late april (apr 24), schwab announced that margin maintainance requirements were dropped to 30%. was this an nyse thing or is just news at schwab?
"All of molecular biology and cloning was done without one single darn statistician. do you really think the people who cloned the insulin gene actually repeated the experiment 10 times and got a mean and standard deviation?"
gak! you should talk to my sister sometime, and she'll tell you the headaches of having results published in a reputable journal. but the simple answer is, duh, yes.
actually, ironically, the example you cite is especially relevant: cloning and gene splicing and all of the tools that a molecular bioligist uses to manipulate genes are inherently statistical in nature. (you're applying something to a huge mass of bacteria or viruses and want to figure out how effective the process is, how often it worked/failed, where it worked and so forth). a molecular biologist who is not also trained as a statistician is merely a lab technician.
"... also, I wonder how many people got out of equities based on TA in early 2000"
well the guys on LG's board on SI back then (MDD board) were screaming it in such horrific terms that it got me out ... primarily out of fear, rather than understanding. however, when folks bring up the ghost of 1929, that much i understand ...
"Does that sound like a plan?"
since i'm a lousy timer, i'll say something here. i've played a number of stocks this way -- bad timing originally, but short at what i think is a good price, hold or increase my position, etc. actually, in one part of my portfolio, that's been the primary strategy: follow where i think things are going long term and stick to it, without trying to follow all the wiggles. so let me add one thing: if you're following what you think is the high probability route for long term, you still need to at least hedge against the wiggles, and against the low probability events. for me, naive as i am, that's been by buying cheap out-of-the-money calls (sometimes with a bit extra for speculation). anyway, it served me well on ntap (140 to 36, 22-27 to 10, etc.), kopn (14.85 and above to below 2), extr (11.85 to below 3), rfmd (high 20's to 10), klic (21 to 10, and again 7 to whereever it goes), brks (14.5 to 8, and again 10 to whereever), pmcs (9 to 3, and again 10 to whereever ...).
but of course, this time *could* be different ... however, the semi-equipment co's look ripe. not sure about semis, though i have a position there.
"Not when Greenie is buying both trying to draw J6P back into the market with his loose cash from a recent REFI due to rates being so low."
sigh. i feel so old. i remember when saying "mortgage your house and invest all the money in the market" was a bad joke or something told to stoopid people. alas.
re schaeffer:
for such a guru call, don't ya think he's a bit late on this? like where was he when vert and akam and avnx were popping?
my shorts - klic, brks, pmcs - look extremely tired. klic hardly participated at all in this rally; brks had two days of pumping and spent the rest of its time clinging onto 10+ (which, by the way, is not even near a high for it). pmcs was pumped mercilessly, but momentum have given out and lately they've just been holding it steady and ramping at end-of-day when possible. trading today was positively lethargic.)
anyway, there must be somewhere that schaeffer warns you to pick and choose these stocks wisely, make sure the short interest is still there, and make sure there aren't some hidden landmines that you're about to step on: because some of these heavily shorted issues are heavily shorted for a very good reason. (e.g. klic, for reasons that mlsoft has mentioned; pmcs for obvious reasons, together with recent warnings of how the strong canadian dollar will negatively impact earnings).
"Greenie knows that irrational exuberance got him in this mess, he's betting he can manufacture irrational exuberance to get him out."
must be. came across an infomercial last night for something called "teach me to trade", which must be a product resurrected from 1999. at least the commercial makes it seem so, with lines like "i'm not the kind of person who wants to work, so daytrading is a perfect job for me" or "everyone you meet now is trading on the internet - cab drivers and waiters - ..." ...
oh, and the best one, repeated several times, "... the risk free way to trade ...". (you have to listen closely, though, to see that the 'risk free' way to trade is to use their provided 'paper trading' system before committing any money to the market.)
Benj: "I have always used MSFT and a few others as bell weathers for general market direction, but Linix is making inroads. When do you think linix will become more complete and easier to use allowing for a significant exodus?"
well, i suppose i'm not a good judge, since i've been using linux since i was in diapers. but my perception is that linux desktops (e.g. redhat, suse) are currently equal or better than msft, with many clone apps out there. the big differential is price. e.g. open office is free, and you can do virtually everything you can do with office, except for msft specific stuff (like coding in visual basic, although you can code in java, scheme or just about anything else, in gnumeric at least - the gnu 'excel' clone). me, i'd say alot of the barriers are still cultural; that plus the baggage of legacy apps out there. but the more cost is an issue, the more that will drag folks over. its already been decided in several countries that gov software must be 'open'. and recent articles over on http://www.theregister.co.uk show that msft has a 'slush fund' for giving huge licensing breaks to co's and gov's that might otherwise be tempted to go the free software route.
anyway, its only a matter of time before linux commodotizes the OS and other middleware and applications. and i think the company that benefits most from that is ibm (and possibly oracle). rhat maybe, but rhat - i *think* bears alot of the legal responsibilities for what's in the code base, which could add some risk there. (e.g. sco is on the warpath to sue linux vendors, though paradoxically they're a linux vendor themselves ...)
"I liked the 1st one better."
yah. when i said "tepid" i added, "for what it is", meaning that the original was one of the most popular films for this audience in the last 5 years, and the sequel has been anticipated for a long long time.
i liked it too. summer blockbuster stuff. better than the mummy movies. (:-P) not as much heart as the lord of the rings movies.
"And I would add that I don;t even agree with that assessment of the avg. viewer..."
hmm. perhaps it has something to do with the use of "fan" here. if you check out slashdot, e.g., the thread there on the matrix is a long debate on the "philosophy of the movie". plenty of others seem to be happy enuf just to walk out of the movie confused and go have some waffles.
"Could be first movie that easily gets a date into the boys bedroom (potential)."
while a movie tie-in could help, most gamers recognize that most movie-tied games are little more than a modern version of fuzzy cuddly ewok dolls. matrix is more of a late teen/young adult movie, and these gamers tend to be picky and loyal to their favorites.
but then, who knows ...
enthusiasm re the movie on e.g. http://slashdot.org (geek cabal) seems to be tepid, for what the movie is. (much more so than the original.) perhaps because the movie seems more like "the matrix redone". or maybe the "middle movie in a trilogy" thing, although this didn't hurt two towers much.
"I have noticed recently that MSFT is acting peculiar"
well, as i've always said here, its not "if" but "when" - gov's, companies, and eventually individuals - will turn to linux, as it becomes more complete and easier to use, avoiding the msft lock in and the implicit tax on all your software (not to mention the heavy handed licensing). and the squeeze for lower IT budgets (plus the push for independence from a monopolistic u.s. corporation) is already pushing many in that direction (with some gov mandates already in various countries).
anyway, if the "when" is "now", then this could explain not only the weakness in msft, but the strength in ibm ...