Odds and Ends

Odds and Ends, for a Sunday in February.

Basketball

My daughter Alana's high school basketball team (Charleston Collegiate) went 8-0 in their conference. They are now playing in the South Carolina SCISA State Championship Tournament. They won their first tournament game and play again Tuesday. If they win Tuesday, they advance to the quaterfinals next weekend. It would cost me about $2,000 to fly back east to see her play in that round. That's about a 15 cent move on NNVC.

Also, a month ago Alana's coach called me here in Washington to tell me that the prior night, with her team down 14 points with 3 minutes to go in the game, Alana hit 4 straight 3-pointers, a jump shot and 2 free throws to win the game for her team. I've never been so proud of her, and told her so. That I missed that moment in her life, haunts me still.

Basketball II

About three weeks ago the Gonzaga star forward, Josh Heytvelt was pulled over in a traffic stop and ultimately arrested when police found a bag of mushrooms in the vehicle. The pretense for the stop varies from police reports on a broken taillight(note singular) to defective taillights (note plural). The pretense for the search was first reported to be the "odor of marijuana" and later changed to "the bag of mushrooms was in plain view in the back seat." Student accounts say that Heytvelt had just left a party in a private residence and police were selectively pulling over vehicles looking for drunk drivers. Heytvelt was not charged with anything related to the car, or his sobriety, or even given a field sobriety test, he was only charged with felony possession of psychedelic mushrooms. You other defense attorneys know what happened, an illegal stop and an illegal search. But heck, they were only college kids, no harm, right? Except once a certain NBA draft pick, Heytvelt is now suspended indefinitely, his BB career in jeopardy if not gone altogether and Gonzaga will now be lucky to make the NCAA tournament at all. Yes, the team that beat North Carolina last fall.

Up all Night

Reading Trend Following by Michael W. Covel. The sub-title is "How Great Traders Make Millions In Up or Down Markets." My favorite chapter so far is an analysis of the great stock market bubble burst in 2000-2002, including the Sep. 11th drop. Billions lost, investors wiped out, companies reduced in market cap by 95%. Those were the losers, but who was on the other side of those Long trades? According to the author, with empirical evidence, Trend Followers. I'm only half-way through the book, and if the rest of it is just as riviting, I'll write more later. Meanwhile, here is a link to the author's website.

Your Comments and Questions

I am getting a lot of comments and questions from readers, overwhelming in a way. Please understand that I am trading during the day and it is hard to get to them all in a timely manner. Then I post a new Blog, like this one, and questions on the previous Blog, although still there, sometimes slip through cracks of day-to-day mayhem. Should time allow, I'll go back into the archives and bring forward all the unanswered questions and post a special FAQ Blog. So don't take my not answering your question personally, it's my bad, not yours.


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