Category: Rants

Untradeable Markets

Are the markets becoming untradeable? Everytime I hear pro traders and everytime I talk to others who trade on a daily basis, I hear sentiments such as, “it’s too unpredictable” or “this market is on no volume”, etc.

The market has had low volume, rally mode days, and a whole lot of shaking out stops. Some days the market rallies 100 pts, in the first 30 minutes then hold steady without volume the rest of the day. On some other days, it moves up and down during the day but closes the day almost where it started. In other words, it is getting hard to use technical analysis on many charts. It’s not impossible, but hard.

Consider AIG, it keeps moving up for no reason. Or consider GS. It keeps upgrading stocks to random buys. What is the point? What could google have changed in the last 4 months that GS would think it’s a buy?

Despite all these things, the main thing for a trader is to trade the oppurtunity. If the oppurtunity is for intraday, then trade intraday. If the oppurtunity is for swing trading, swing trade.

Yahoo Says Microsoft Should Buy It

So Yahoo says that Microsoft should buy it? Why? They were too good for the original 33/share price. Then they would do anything to avoid being bought over by the “bad” Microsoft and went begging to Google. Google also tried to unnecessarily “save” Yahoo from Microsoft. For what perverse purpose? What is the big problem? Yahoo acquires news technologies and their userbase for the purpose of making money. Google acquires new technologies (some really just a teen social phenomenon) and their userbase for the purpose of making money. So what is so bad here about Microsoft buying Yahoo and it’s userbase for the purpose of making money?

The article that reports the new “request for offer” is at: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2008/11/03/daily57.html

This might be reflecting the new Microsoft price of 21.69 currently. Which is really bad for the calls I’m holding.

Yesterday MSFT fell below MA 20 and gapped down today. Also continues to go down today. This may be a simple following the market thing or another expectation from shareholders of MSFT that they’ll do something crazy like buy Yahoo.

Personally, I think that MSFT will benefit from the added userbase of Yahoo and if MSFT revamps the really big and overly flash based ads on Yahoo that take 50% of the screen, then it will be a good money maker for MSFT. Even as is, it might be a good money maker. But it has a slightly cheesy look. But on the other hand, if paying a premium and having the share price nosedive is gonna be a longer term thing, then I don’t want MSFT to buy and get involved in rebuilding a search engine company that long since stopped being a search engine and has become more of a web portal. Not insulting Yahoo search capabilities, but just saying that even people who use Yahoo as their main search engine, use the word “google” to mean search. When they search on Yahoo, they say they just “googled” it!

Is Zecco Stealing From Customers? No!

So checked the account balance today. It should be $1138.02. It shows $1137.98. Looking at actual sale/purchase data, it should be $1138.035 or $1138.02 as it showed yesterday.

Maybe someone at Zecco watched office space and got the idea that they could steal pennies….

Calling them now to verify.


Update: So Zecco is not stealing from customers. Those are SEC fees. Total of 4 cents are missing. There have been 6 options trades in my account so far. First one to buy and sell 1 contract. That’s probably what they didn’t charge commission for. The next two were buy 10 then 8 to average down and then sell 18 (which executed as 10 and 8 block trades) exit. So roughly the SEC is charging 1% of .001% of the total trade value. Don’t see how that would add up to 4 cents. However, willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Will investigate it more.

Gotta love capitalism. Two .01’s add to .04.