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Happy Birthday to J. Bartholomew Pick

I’m a fairly boring guy. I don’t think I’ve ever initiated a social interaction in my life. Which works out well with my sedentary lifestyle that has me tethered to the La-Z-Boy, only occasionally reaching out for my keyboard and mouse.

The fact that La-Z-Boy stock surged today didn’t do much for me as I’ve never owned the stock, only the lifestyle.

Yet, despite immensely enjoying my sedentary lifestyle, today I learned that there are consequences. Seeing a family of field mice escape from my stomach folds while I was being measured by a tailor for pant alterations was embarrasing, but it’s not as if I’ll ever see that tailor again.

At least, not if Immigration and Naturalization arrives before next Tuesday, 5 PM.

The very idea that my elastic banded Jorts weren’t going to fit me for life hasn’t really caused my to rethink the physical aspect of sedentary life, just as long as that cognitive part keeps on moving.

However, that comfort and solitude promises to be disrupted as I’ve received my first ever notice to be called for jury duty.

Since I went to a high school that was focused on math and the sciences, that didn’t leave too much time for civics lessons. My guess is that a class mate of mine, David Viniar who has served as CFO of Goldman Sachs did find the time to take Civics classes in secret, because I’ve heard no one impugn his name or reputation over the past few difficult years over at Goldman.

But yeah, I know that it’s my responsibility. Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before.

Here’s the thing.

Not that I’m complaining, but the county that I live in has almost no meaningful crime.

Sure, if its your mailbox that’s been knocked over it’s pretty major. But if I’m going to do anything, whether it’s social or civic duty related, I want it to be exciting.

The one potentially exciting and seedy case that our local newspaper reports will be starting next week is one that I would have to recuse myself from, as the defendant used to attend cub scout meetings in our basement a dozen years ago. Sugar Momma was a Den Mother and my youngest son was in the troop.

Glad I have that excuse and won’t have to pull out any of the other excuses I’d prepared nor display any of the tics that I’ve been working on.

But that’s exactly why this week has been sort of maddening. We’ve had alternating days of real excitement in the markets punctuated by real snoozers. I want excitement all the time, unless it’s the one way excitement of falling off a metaphorical cliff.

Thursday was one of the snoozers, other than for the field mice discovery. I didn’t make a single trade and never even came close.

My hoped for drop in Silver prices never materialized, nor did falls in Visa or Green Mountain Coffee Roasters occur in response to my wishes.

Small drops in Halliburton and Caterpillar were only symbolic and won’t do anything to stave off those who are there to exercise their options.

In Green Mountain’s case, despite all of the controversy, I may end up doing something unusual tomorrow.

Controversy? It’s not even a Chinese company.

I’m on the hook to have my shares assigned at $52.50. For that particular lot of shares, that would represent a loss of $17 per share. That figure doesn’t take into account the additional lot that I bought after the big earnings related price plunge and subsequently had assigned to me with a small capital gain and a nice options premium.

More importantly, that loss doesn’t include $12.66 per share in cumulative option premiums since the position was opened 5 weeks ago. If you add the capital gain from the other lot and the $1.56/share options premium from using the Having a Child, Save a Life strategy the loss isn’t terribly onerous.

Although I can justify taking the loss on the underlying shares by taking advantage of the tax loss, the speculative side of me is saying that despite the bad press and accounting overhang, Green Mountain still has upside. To allow the shares to be exercised would eliminate the tax deduction in the event that I repurchsaed the shares with the terms of the wash sales rule.

Instead, I may end up closing out the options position by buying back the calls.

The upside? A tax loss on the options trade and the opportunity to continue holding shares for either capital gains or more option premiums.

The downside? A capital loss on the options trade and the potential for the bottom to fall out from underneath the shares.

See? That’s exciting

Sedentary, yes. But exciting.

In general, Monday tends to be a busy trading day for me as I add new positions to replace assigned shares and try to sell as many call options as possible.

Then Thursdays tend to be busy as well, as I look for any opportunities to squeeze pennies out of whatever positions remain unhedged. Those weekly options are just great for that kind of activity.

But not today and I don’t see much happening tomorrow, either. You would have been reasonable to think that China’s report of a decreased PMI, as a measure of industrial activity, for the first time since their hosting of the Olympics would have been a little reason to take profits.

Instead, we’ll just have to await official employment numbers tomorrow.

I hate to be curmudgeonly, and I certainly want to see people being able to find employment, but despite calls for a good number, I’m hoping that the market reacts negatively.

Or positively.

First of all, the numbers are always in arrears and are always subject to revision. Those revisions are consistent and sometimes significant.

Lately, there’s been much anectdotal evidence that “things are getting better.” That may be more meaningful than tomorrow’s report.

While the reporting of aged employment statistics may yield bad news, it’s sepia compared to 16 million colors, as far as snapshots go.

From my perspective, I usually like up Fridays if my sold options are out of the money and down Fridays if they’re in the money.

Tomorrow, I’m equally split.

On most Mondays that I’ve had lots of calls exercised I like to see a big downwrd move so that I can repurchase shares at less than the price at which they were assigned.

Again, I’m equally split.

I feel like a little kid having a tantrum, not really knowing what he wants.

Although my body does well with a paucity of activity, other than the insidiously developing midriff bulge, my brain begins to smoke when being torn in opposite directions.

Whereas the comparison of sepia to 16 million colors clearly favors the accuracy of the details contained in colors, my mind prefers black or white conditions.

Guilty or innocent?

Hmmm. Maybe this jury thing won’t be such a bad idea after all.

I wonder what model La-Z-Boys that have in the jury box?

 

 

 

I was up for no really good reason at about 4 AM, particularly since I don’t consider Laszlo the Dog’s barking at a phantom menace to be a good reason.

Probably more out of instinct than anything else I pulled up the Bloomberg Mobile app on my phone while waiting for Laszlo to protect us from the blowing leaves and saw that the US Futures Market was reasonably flat and the Asian markets were doing nothing special.

I went back to bed neither excited nor dreading the open, expecting yet another quiet day. Maybe the kind of day that I could find the time to complete my furniture repositioning tasks left over from the past two days.

Well, for the very same reasons that it’s hard to justify sneaking away to attend to personal hygiene needs, a lot can happen on the international scene.

China decided to loosen up its banks’ reserve requirements.

That apparently is a good thing as far as liquidity goes. Although Chinese companies may not like to abide by standard accounting principles, it does seem that basic economic laws apply, even in the People’s Republic.

As if that wouldn’t have been enough, the European Central Bank and our own Federal Reserve decided to coordinate action to allow foreign banks to access US dollars at lower cost.

What those ECB guys didn’t realize was that those American Airline Frequent Flier miles that were thrown in to clinch the deal were going to be close to worthless.

Score another one for “The Bernank.”

It was hard, though, to hear all of the cheering from the trading pits, what with the sound of Bernanke led chainsaws felling forests worth of lumber destined for the Treasury’s printing presses.

I like Bernanke and think that his calm guidance likely rescued us from the kind of economic travesty that our generation could not possibly endure.

Besides, tell me that Bernanke doesn’t look like a highly stylized and mythical lumberjack.

As it would turn out this would be one of those rare market days when there was no real attempt to sell into strength. The green just kept getting more green.

To my shock, I never once heard anyone refer to the nearly 500 point gain as resulting from “shorts covering their positions,” although with two minutes left to go until the final bell, Bob Pisani of CNBC commented on the light volume.

Of course that’s come to be expected, but what was a bit different was that Maria Bartiromo who made precisely the same observation on Monday, chided Pisani for his Grinch-like assessment.

Ha Ha.

As great as today was, after all what’s not to like about a bonus 500 points? But it was wasted on me, much like a box of fine wine.

I’m still a Manischewitz kind of guy.

Things being wasted on me has been a theme the past couple of days, although it hasn’t always proven to be accurate.

This past Thursday, for example, my kids had 3 tickets to the Ravens and 49ers football game. Since I’m not a huge football fan, I asked my kids if they didn’t want to take one of their friends instead, since my level of appreciation was likely low when compared to your usual football louts.

I really thought that those tickets were wasted on me.

But hearing what every parent would love to hear, they said they wanted to go with me to the game. The fact that it was unseasonably warm for a Thanksgiving evening gave me no real out, but as it turned out, not one bit of it was wasted.

We had a great time and it was a wonderful game and evening, although I still can’t remember why I have some biker chick’s name tattooed on my neck. The kids said I did it as a dare after downing a bottle of whipped cream Vodka.

Whatever. So I guess they’ll just have to bury me in the thieves and unholy section of the Jewish Cemetery.

Well rested and prepared for a nice trading day on Monday, I was noticing a steady stream of Tweets directed to me from a number of different people, each of whom had more followers than the typical spammer.

What made these Tweets interesting was that they believed that I had any clue of wnat they were talking about:

I may make about 1500 trades a year, but I have absolutely no ability or desire to engage in “Chart speak.” I see colors and occasionally dead people and have never hidden that fact.

Look, I’ve owned shares of Riverbed Technology for the better part of 4 years and still have no idea what they actually do.

Don’t really care.

“$GOOG Bullish Tri Star Candlestick Pattern…” I know Google, but the rest?

What the hell does that mean?

$SLM CCI is bullish” Again. Sallie Mae and I? Old friends, but what’s that you say?

Again, no clue.

And there were more from where those come from.

There’s also a very nice person who follows me on Twitter who is extremely polite and thoughtful. If I retweet one of his tweets or a link to his page, he sends me a “Thank You” direct message. Not the Anthony Weiner kind, but one that sincere and grateful. He also very graciously retweeted one of mine yesterday alerting readers of the migration of Szelhamos.com to its new home at TheAcsMan.com

Very nice. Right?

I’ve looked at his blog site, Chartsmarts, and he is clearly far more serious, organized, analytical and capable than am I.

If we went back about 10 years or so, I might be able to understand, or at least have the interest in understanding his passion and output.

I was never a very good one to actually pay attention and never really did well by listening or reading as a proxy for learning. I tended to be the sort that had to deconstruct things to be able to learn them. On rare occasion I’d actually successfully reconstruct what I’d demolished in the name of knowledge.

I still do that, but the problem is that I’m no longer able to retain what I’ve learned in my short term memory banks, so I do lots of deconstructing, but then lose interest in the reconstruction phase of the process.

A few years ago, realizing that to be the case and really wanting to learn PHP and MySQL (don’t ask me to explain), I actually bought one of the “…..for Idiots” books.

After a couple of chapters I threw in the towel.

I wish I had Chartsmarts’ skill, drive and good will. I follow very few people on Twitter. He’s one. Even though it’s wasted on me, there’s no reason for it to be wasted on you, so follow Douglas Busch

Now, what was really wasted on me was the last 500 points.

To some degree, that’s an exaggeration, but my holdings have underperformed the markets through these last 800 Dow points. 

While the S&P 500 has gone up 7.6% this week, I’m only up 6.6%. That still leaves me in the 1% group, so you needn’t worry.

Most of that, actually all of it and then some, is due to the marked underperformance of the ProShares UltraSilver the past 5 trading sessions or so, as silver has kept rising. In fact, today I was able to buy back all of the call positions that I’d sold this month in anticipation of another drop in silver prices and a rise in the leveraged short ETF.

Some of those marked the second such closing trade, so I’m not moaning about the past few trading sessions’ performance.

But as this 500 point surge came out of nowhere, I’ve been caught a little flat footed, having hedged about half of my existing positions and either already at prices close to their strikes or now comfortably in the money.

Did you foresee a $7 rise in Caterpillar today?

Me neither. My risk/reward on this most recent round of call writing on Caterpillar is nothing to write home about, but still, profit is profit.

Although Caterpillar has been very nice to me, especially due to having sold weekly options on a regular basis, today’s rise puts it will above my $92.50 strike at which shares will be assigned. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Visa and Halliburton may share the same fate after today’s surge.

What wasn’t lost on me was comparing the chorus cries of Monday’s “Dead Cat Bounce” to the same talking heads warning of a melt upward going forward.

Once again, as the chorus cries get louder, just this time in a different direction, it’s time to look back to the other and original direction.

The history of government intervention is often measured in days, as reflected by the equity markets, so I can’t get too excited about what it will bring us tomorrow or the day after.

Although I don’t see the melt up quite yet, hopefully today’s bold moves won’t be wasted, at least not on my account.

Maybe then, once we get all of these banking disaster stories out of the way, we can get back to our old habit of bouncing from one fundamentals report to the next and then conveniently forgetting yesterday’s earth shattering report to make way for today’s Andy Warhol like data release.

It’s been a shame wasting those.

I miss the old days.

 

 

Maybe its the fact that we just came off a 300 point climb.

Maybe it’s because its been nothing but rainy and dreary all day long, but despite what was looking like nearly a 100 point run up on Tuesday, I just wasn’t feeling it and couldn’t really get in the game today.

Maybe it was because Silver wasn’t exhibiting its recent paroxysmal and alternating direction behavior.

More than likely, though, my lack of enthusiasm today was probably strongly related to the fact that my portfolio under-performed the market all through the day.

That was thanks to Amazon, Netflix and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which, wouldn’t you know it, led the portfolios to out-perform the markets on Monday.

You can have Yin or you can have Yang, but not both, unless their conjoined twins, in which case they might be more appropriately referred to as “Siamese.”

Whatever the root cause, I was antsy.

Not only was I not feeling it, but it may have been contagious.

The news that the parent of American Airlines was going into bankruptcy wasn’t terribly interesting, either. The only thought that occured to me was that at its closing stock price, it would take about 25 shares of AMR to purchase an in-flight alcoholic beverage.

Even in boredom I amuse myself, but no such luck with AMR shareholders. I suppose they just weren’t feeling it.

I rarely venture from my perch on the La-Z-Boy during the course of the day, but today was different.

Yesterday, despite having only made about 8 trades, I remained transfixed. So much so that despite the fact that our home was in a shambles from having the first phase of new carpet placement done during the day, I let the mess wait until after the closing bell.

Today, I had just two tasks assigned by Sugar Momma. My usual approach and strategy whenever I’ve been given chores is to work like a whirling dervish once the closing bell occurs. That typically gives me 90 minutes to get everything done.

The tasks today ranged from standard to complex. I had to start restoring order by returning furiture to their rightful spots in time for Christmas holiday guests. That was standard and required only brawn, of which despite being in short supply, can be accomplished by using simple laws of mechanics.

I also had to make some sense of our mismatched collection of Rubbermaid and Ziploc containers and lids.

I have every bit as difficult time doing the latter task as I do trying to match socks.That task fell into the “complex” category as it required a combination of visual identification and pattern matching.

Ever since I went to the all Crocs all the time wardrobe, socks haven’t been part of the equation. I wondered why the same couldn’t be done with plastic containers.

Damn, how many different subtlleties in shape can a quart container take? And why don’t they emboss both the container and the lid with useful information?

With my sights set on the 4 PM bell the market quietude led to boredom setting in.

I made a single trade trying to take advantage of some intraday strength in Halliburton by selling calls expiring this Friday.

If Sugar Momma knew that was the extent of my trading activity today she wpould probably exhort me to find a real job, but I feel comfortable knowing that all readers of the blog had to sign non-disclosure agreements.

Crazy? Like a fox.

Although it’s a very small liability, the only thing that really kept my interest during the trading day was the continuing story regarding the CHinese company, Focus Media.

Following a scathing report, by who else but Muddy Waters, their stock had taken a significant hit. As I noted on Monday, I took that as a cue to sell puts on teh shares. My only equivocation was that unlike Harbin Energy and Spreadtrum Communications that had likewise been excoriated, Focus Media wasn’t listing weekly options contracts.

But then I realized that my life expectancy probably didn’t warrant tooking 3 weeks into the future, so I bit.

Carson Block, the head guy at Muddy Waters was the scheduled guest on CNBC’s Street Signs. Admittedly, I’d expected that given the deserved bad reputation Chinese companies have had with regard to accounting and business practices that the hosts were going to ask questions that would simply reaffirm the basic hypothesis that there was something amiss.

But no.

Block was hit by probing questions from the hosting crew of Brian Sullivan, Mandy Drury and Herb Greenberg.

Block faltered. He was tentative in his answers, perhaps using the same law firm that’s representing Jerry Sandusky of Penn State.

He wasn’t feeling it.

In less time than it took for Green Mountain to shed 20 points a couple of weeks ago, Focus Media, trading at about $16 following a $1 intra-day loss, erased all of that during the course of the segment and closed the day higher.

Well, at least that was interesting, but from my perspective, as far as my portfolio went, wasn’t very substantive.

And so I started with my chores while the market was still in full swing.

Uncharacteristically, I felt  no longing today. There just wasn’t anything around to incite interest.

Not even that new retail metric unveiled by Dana Telsey, the ubiquitous retail analyst.

Last year we were blown away by the concept of aerial monitoring of parking lot capacity as well as the ensuing debate as to whether or not access to that kind of information constituted unfair advantage.

And yes, we’ve all heard about the store watchers looking at the size of shopping bags as a proxy for shoping activity.

But this one? Pure inspired genius. The Mall Toilet Paper Index.

Imagine having spotters continually monitoring the volume and quantity of toilet paper used as a measure of jhow long consumers are spending at the mall and how long they are commited to remaining there.

Personally, I would hire DIck Bove, Bank analyst for Rochdale Securities to camp out in the mall restrooms, although that may offend the flies.

Following his response the other day that Bank of America would be his buy recommendation in that sector, BofA stood poised to break the wrong side of $5.

Thus far, no one from Bank of America has returned my call regarding my strategy to help them deal with the financial morass and recent bad publicity.

I advised that they institute a new monthly fee on their basic checking acount, charging customers a single share of Bank of America stock each month. In all likelihood that will be somewhere south of $5.

Win – Win.

Maybe the fine people at Bank of America weren’t feeling it, either.

The only other bit of news today it capture much of my interest either, but it ran counter to my general theme of the day.

Rumors swirled that Herman Cain was reconsidering his bid for the GOP Presidential nomination.

Following accusations made by a seemingly credible woman regarding an alleged 13 year affair, it seems that Cain may have been feeling it.

I can’t even get away with occasionally pumping super unleaded gas and this guy gets away with 13 years of pumping….

Never mind.

But wuth this day now behind us, I have every confidence that tomorrow will be different.

I can just feel it.

 

There’s a saying that if you put 2 Jewish people together in a room you’ll get 3 different opinions.

I’m allowed to say that. Sometimes you get a free pass.

The same has probably been said for other ethnicities, cultures and religions, but other than Hungarian, I’d be ill at ease to use that saying for any other group. Years ago, when I was still in grade school, there was a funny joke book called “Race Riots.” It was a collection of ethnic and religious jokes and was really pretty funny.

So funny and so popular, that there was even a Race Riots II, focusing on the lesser known and under-stereotyped groups, such as Angolans.

I didn’t mind telling those jokes and others didn’t mind laughing, although subconsciously I may have tailored the joke set for the audience, just like when Jeff Foxworthy performs for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Race Riots actually even had a chapter on Hungarians that wasn’t very funny. At least that was my informed opinion. I also knew lots of Hungarians and they didn’t see the humor in those jokes either, but they loved the Polish jokes.

So true. So true.

These days I still think that those kind of jokes are funny, but I would never admit to that, because when it comes to that area of discourse, opinions don’t really matter.

About 5 years ago there was a great piece on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” that highlighted the last two known remaining Jews in Afghanistan.

They lived together under the same roof in an old synagogue, but hated one another. They couldn’t find agreement on any topic, although my guess is that there weren’t too many different topics out there for discussion. By all accounts, though, they were each very opinionated.

There must be a joke in there somewhere, but you’re not likely to get anyone to write one when there are only 2 people in the whole world to poke fun at. By the same token, however, I was the only Jewish kid in my neighborhood and was routinely beaten up by the only 2 Chinese kids in the neighborhood.

In my opinion they should not have beaten me up on a regular basis, but in their humble opinion the black kids shouln’t have been beating up the only two Chinese kids in the neighborhood.

There’s was just an early form of “paying it forward.”

In hindsight that’s funny.

There was certainly no shortage of talking heads today putting their two cents in about what today’s 300 point gain really meant.

I like opinions, after all, that’s the essence of a free society. But what I don’t like are “humble opinions” or especially those who preface their humble opinions with the words “in my”. Don’t get me started with the “IMHO” group of people.

Of course mixed in with the opinions was the obligatory “light volume” comment, although that’s more observational than opinion and is often just an excuse to explain why their clients didn’t participate in a meaningless rally.

Since I don’t care whether there’s tons of white powder over my trading profits, I certainly wouldn’t care if they came on light volume.

IMHO.

The prevailing opinion on Monday was that this was some sort of a “dead cat bounce” or a bull rally in a bear market. Again, this is code talk for “I’m not in it to win it, today.”

The talking head that referred to this as a bull rally in a bear market then went on to say that he wasn’t certain that this was a bear market.

To be confused, you actually have to listen. That’s why you have to shake your head when a talking head insists that the market only trades on fundamentals.

In my humble opinion, that guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. These days the market wouldn’t know a fundamental even if you bit it on its asset.

Then there was divided opinion over what fueled the rally.

You had your Euro-centric school of thought people and you had your “This was the best Black Friday weekend ever” crowd.

The Euro-centric school was elated over the rumor that the EU nations were reportedly closing in on some sort of deal to tackle debt. This, if the past is any indication, would lead to a nearly equal, but opposite movement when that rumor or deal falls short or some other complicating factor arises.

Think Finland.

The retail sales crowd seems to say the same thing every year and then starts to question the meaning of having an overly successful Black Friday through Cyber Monday period.

How many years in a row will we have to watch the give and take of concerns related to cannibalism of sales for the rest of the holiday period, or the stream of data indicating the the remaining sales days between Cyber Monday and Christmas fell short of expectations.

Those thoughts are then typically followed up by revised data that’s released sometime near New Years and those data sets always seem to indicate that sales were actually better than previously reported.

Whew.

The thing about analyst opinions is that they’re subject to interpretation, but that’s understandable.

So too is it understandable that both the written and spoken words could be subject to interpretation, especially when rendered in a foreign language.

But that wasn’t the case on Monday when a piece written by Eric Jackson of Forbes Magazine for the Chinese Wall Street Journal somehow didn’t lose anything in the translation. Instead, it added to the translation, starting a rumor that Muddy Waters, that efficient Chinese stock price disinflation research firm, was planning a report on SINA.

In the past I’ve benefitted from such reports, Harbin Energy, Spreadtrum Communications come to mind. Both taking mighty hits as significant questions were raised about their accounting practices.

Having an opinion on those shares was irrelevant to me. I just waited for the big hits and then sold out of the money puts, much to my delight, as they both recovered from their acute hits.

Jackson said nothing about SINA, but someone just added his humble opinion into the translation.

In the meantime, the concern over another Chinese company, Focus Media was enough to send those shares into another day of tailspins and enough to get me to sell puts.

It’s my evil speculative side that makes me do those things. It’s usually well under control, but just like the craving for crack and hookers, it sometimes is pre-eminent. I have no clue what business Focus Media is engaged in, although I can venture a weak guess.

But again, irrelevant.

At any rate, Jackson’s reporting turned into an opinion, which turned into a rumor, which was then denied.

Sort of the way all of our EU news gets transmitted and with the same results.

I tend to be a very opinionated person. Not Perez Hilton opinionated, but enough so to get me to write daily, albeit without the use of a translator.

My opinions are usually either worthless or very poorly timed.

But having that contrarian tendency I could only believe that today’s 300 point rally would be something other than the quick and uninspired bounce that was the prevailing thought.

Unfortunately, that contrarian side has to deal with my pragmatic side.

In my own personal Afghani synsagogue, despite the belief that today’s move wasn’t a terminal event, I still sold whatever calls I could reasonably get a fair price upon. So I rented out Freeport McMoRan, Caterpillar, Visa, Amazon, Netflix and DuPont. I would have done more, but there were still some sizeable paper losses to overcome before so willingly giving up a share in any future profits.

To my disappointment, despite ProShares UltraShort Silver taking a big hit today, their call options didn’t move enough for me to repurchase them in order to await yet another opportunity to sell them.

As the market was getting to be somewhat boring, I took the opportunity to look at those ProShares UltraShort Silver ETF holdings which have grown to about 10% of my portfolio by slow and steady acquisition since mid-July. I even added on more shares today.

Despite a paper loss of about $5,000 they’ve spun off $30,000 of realized premiums. Had greed not gotten in the way, this would not have been the first time that all of my shares were hedged. I gave up additional option premiums for the fear of missing out on share appreciation.

FOMO. Stupid me.

And that’s a humble opinion we can all agree upon.

 

I’ll be the first to tell you that literary references are pretty much wasted on me.

I’m very shallow, poorly read and have little motivation to change my ways, much to the  dismay of Sugar Momma, who these days is happy just to see me change my socks.

She’s pretty much given up on all of the rest, although occcasionally I will agree to see a movie based on a piece of literature, as long as it stars Seth Rogen or Rob Schneider. I may no longer be fully malleable, but I am open to suggestion before I roll my eyeballs.

So no one is more surprised than me that what is considered a literary masterpiece would help to coalsesce some of the thoughts that I had during this very nice Thanksgiving holiday.

Pride and Prejudice.

First of all, it was exceedingly nice Thanksgiving because there was no trading on Thursday, Saturday nor Sunday. Normally, I love any day that the market is open for business, but we all needed a break. What few hours of trading that we did have on Friday, despite coming off 100+ points from the intra-day high, resulted in a mere 25 point loss.

If that’s not a profitable trading session, then I don’t know what is.

Having had a wonderful Thanksgiving Day dinner with family and friends, my two sons and I headed for the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers football game that evening.

I’m not much of a football fan, but I was even decked out in a Ray Lewis jersey, as were approximately 20,000 others, although none approached my inherent talent of frightening opponents with a mere sneer.

Since my kids are the social animal that I am not, it was very easy for them to get into the surrounding tailgate culture once we arrived at the off stadium parking lot.

Do I have to remind you that Pride and Prejudice examines the role of environment on behavior?

I was more of an observer.

Among the many things that I noticed at my first tailgate venture was that blue jeans come in a very wide range of waist sizes.

Realizing that there was really no substantive way to turn that observation into a tangible asset, I followed the lead and downed some whipped cream vodka and Baltimore’s best, National Bohemian, also known as Natty Boh beer.

By then, we were ready to enter yet another environment, this one much more highly structured and with highly codified terms of conduct..

The stadium.

But before we went to find our seats, both sons had to go to the Boardwalk Fries concession stand. But not to order anything, although we’d done that plenty of times before, but instead to look and see if Joe D, the co-owner was in house.

Sure enough. He was. Despite the fact that he presided over more than 100 Boardwalk Fries locations, he was right there in the middle of it all, together with his son Joey D and lots of others.

It’s been nearly 5 years, but both kids worked the Boardwalk Fries location in Raven’s Stadium to help raise money for their Fraternity. It was a good relationship. The fraternity brothers hustled a good product and Boardwalk Fries helped to support their fundraising efforts.

The work was also difficult.

But 5 years later both kids sought Joe D out because of good memories of a man that even a wizened set of eyes would recognize as someone who was commited to his product and its quality.

Why else would he leave a comfortable home on Thanksgiving evening to spend it behind a spattering fryolator and frequently unruly stadium customers?

Why? To oversee every aspect of the operation and to make certain that everything was up to the Boardwalk Fries standard, although truth be told, a bunch of happily inebriated football fans aren’t that likely to notice very much.

Boardwalk Fries isn’t exactly a household name. It’s not Amazon, nor is it Apple. But Joe D is Steve Jobs and he is Jeff Bezos. It’s actually repugnant to me to cite a book in my blog, much less two books. But Im certain by now Joe D has put in the requisite 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell defined in “Outliers” as distinguishing the really greats from the schlubs of the world.

They spotted and then called out to Joe D.

He saw the kids and came out from behind the cook area to speak to them. Hugs, sharing memories and stories. The guys eyes actually twinkled.

They really did. And then there were several rounds of hand shakes. You really felt that this guy sincerely cared.

We didn’t buy any fries, after all we were still stuffed, but my family loves a good french fry and still has fond memories of the fries Szelhamos made late in his life, when we were all stunned to learn that he could actually cook.

Joe D seemed to have something that you just don’t seem to see that often. Maybe its just the wizened me talking now, but his pride in his product and business was so blatant. He didn’t have Jobs’ aura or Bezos’ laugh, but he did.

Pride and Prejudice tells a story of development of character and morality.

After watching a great game and a home team win, we came home to enjoy a few days together.

On Friday I had the opportunity to make about 5 or 6 call sales for that day’s expiration, using Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Amazon, Caterpillar, Freeport McMoRan and Mosaic to pick up a few pennies for my troubles and stresses of the past week’s trading.

Once the market closed I stumbled upon Josh Brown’s posting “How do you have so much Time to Blog” on his site “The Reformed Broker“. It was yet another insightful post, but this one really struck a chord with me.

I would actually tell you to follow him on Twitter, but for some inexplicable reason he has me blocked.

Why, Josh, Why. Could Buddy Holly not bring us together?:

Anyway, among the things that he wrote about were his bygone days as a retail stockbroker.

I’ve written on many occasions that I was very fortunate to have worked with a wonderful broker. I really believed that he sought to protect and nurture my interests. We were at the same stage of life as we began a 25 year investing relationship.

Over the years I’d also had some highly contrasting experiences when infidelity resulted in trying some hot young broker or two, just for the thrill of it all. But when my trusted broker so unexpectedly passed away, there wasn’t much to think about. I didn’t think that it would be likely to find another “Bob”. Instead, I thought that it was far more likely that I would find, what Josh Brown so eloquently self-referred to as “a jerkoff retail stockbroker.”

Character and morality.

But it really went beyond that. The brokerage itself had no pride. It’s hard not to be a jerkoff retail broker when you work for a jerkoff retail brokearge house.

Environment.

Bob had pride, but despite the great example that he had set, I was left with a very deep prejudice against ever using a retail broker again.

Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos obviously had more than pride. They had a great products, business models and vision.

Most of all, they weren’t products of their environments. Instead, they helped to create all new environments. Look, they even refer to Apple as its own “eco-system.” Jobs idea of design was to make it part of its environment while still standing out from its environment.

Amazon is creating a fusion between physical goods and the eponymous cloud. Someday, if Bezos has anything to say about it, that 65 inch 3D LED you just bought won’t even take up space in your media room. It’ll just be somewhere in the cloud, along with your music, milk, burial plots and books.

As I think a bit about Joe D, Jobs, Bezos, Bob and Josh Brown, in addition to the un-named brokers that I referred to, I’m increasingly convinced that every investor needs to take pride in his portfolio and trading acumen. Regardless of what environment helped to form you, what is the chance that environment will put forward someone to take the same level of pride in your portfolio that you can?

Joe D hasn’t turned it over. Maybe someday it will be Joey D who has the same level of pride and commitment. For all I know, he may already have it, but why put Joe D’s talents aside?

Even when not slinging fries he’s slinging life lessons.

Monday is the start of yet another week. This one is being framed by speculation that Germany may leave the EU, the Euro may crumble and that french fries may contain more saturated fats than is recommended.

I choose to be aware of all of those possibilities but to act accordingly.

In this case, “accordingly” means in prejudice to conventional wisdom.