Love Your Spam

We've all seen the Nigerian pitch to share a few million from a deceased client. We've all gotten offers to make our manhood supreme, even if we possess womanhood. There is trouble with our bank account that needs verification. And of course, it is always time to get in on the ground floor before the company's stock takes off. 

Have you ever read these things all the way through? Hilarious at times but mostly they are good for a chuckle, well, if you have a geek side like me. To wit:

Good day,
We are interested in your Goods which you displayed in the site and we want to purchase some of the products on this site for our ref. please send us more information about your company for our ref. please send to our company official email address

Best Regards
Mr Edwin Martez
Purchasing Manager
Edwin Associates
Address: 479 Allen Avenue
By Charles Walter
State : stockholm ----the 51st state
Mobile Phone : 1-330-3436799 ----Ohio area code 
markt03@chanqtjer.com.tw ----Taiwan email address

The scary - and sad - part is that people fall for this stuff.

Nuts Passwords

All the talk about the government snooping on our communications sparked yet another rant. This time it is about security - specifically passwords.

I get it, the online world is fraught with hidden danger and identity theft is a big deal. I have no problem jumping through a hoop or two to prove I am me when I log into a website or call customer service via the old telly.

But as with getting a rectal exam at the airport before heading to the gate, some security measures are ridiculous. There is a limit up with which any sane person will not put (go read your Churchill). I have already cut back on my flying. Does Grandma's wheelchair really need a pat down? Am I really going to mix up a liquid bomb on board with my Evian, Starbucks and Enfamil?  At five bucks each, I am going to drink every last drop of those bad boys myself.

Wait, I said bomb! Hey NSA, my cell phone number is 516-647-7466. You know where to find me - trying to eke out a living, put two kids through college and raise a special needs child.

But let's take this to something more mundane and really only an annoyance - passwords. Why are some so simple and some so complicated? My first Libertarian reaction is that everyone is covering their collective backsides trying not to get sued. Hey, we made your password so strong that even you could not remember it. I  don't even bother with some of them anymore and opt just to reset the damn thing each time I use a particular website.

I think we all agree that simple passwords are really good enough for boring e-commerce sites like Poland Spring. They deliver water jugs to my door and if someone wanted to get into my account they could stop delivery or have the company dump 20 or more 5-gallon jugs at my door. Hey, go ahead and change my credit card to yours, I don't mind. Any password should be a-OK on this site.

Then there are sexier retailers such as electronics, jewelry and other products that can be delivered anywhere. Yeah, I don't want anyone monkeying around in there ordering flat screens and blue diamonds. They can require say at least six characters with at least one letter and number.

Finally, there is the heavy stuff - banks, social security, credit cards - where serious damage can be done in an instant. Eight characters with letters, numbers and maybe even capital letters is perfectly acceptable, especially since my browser saves them anyway.

So, why then does one bank and one credit card I have require the least secure version? Why does JetBlue say that if I change my password (reset it after forgetting it) that I cannot use any of the last 20 passwords I have used already. Forget that it is just an airline where the credit card and traveler name must match. I can see not reusing the last three passwords but 20? Come on, you are not that important.

I can understand why the New York State tax website demands exactly eight characters but why does E-Z Pass NY - the electronic  bridge and highway toll service - demand letters, numbers and capitals? Is somebody going to void my electronic tag? Maybe. Perhaps someone wants to switch their car to my account? Nope, I still have the tag. Or order themselves a tag? Nope, it will be delivered to my address.

I get why my online merchant account requires long upper and lower case with numbers passwords but so does Kohl's. And AT&T.

But here is the real pièce de résistance. My daughter's college account not only requires letters and numbers but also special characters. But not just any group of letters and numbers - no email addresses and names. OK, that's cool. But no actual words, either. So, "blunt@1234" is no good. Neither would "youhavetobekidding$3."

This is a college account, not a mortgage loan. I had to actually think of sounds and made-up words from when I was a kid so I would not have to resort to a random letter generator. And speaking of that, if the restrictions are that tight, why not just assign something to us when we sign up? The only reason to let someone choose their own password is so they can choose something they can remember.

I'd love to tell you what I ended up creating but I don't need the government looking at my daughter's grades.

So listen up on-line people, most of you are just not that important in terms of need for security. Identity thieves are not registering for classes or buying me a new iPhone.

Nobody is going to rush the cockpit now that they are secured. Nobody is going to take the time to crack the code of some website unless there is a payoff worth the risk (money theft, SEC or FDA rulings, the military).  Nobody is trying to blow up the passenger pickup area at the airport so how about stationing some of that security at the entrances to the LIRR train tunnel in Queens?

Can we please be reasonable and make the security commensurate with the risk?

Headline Corny

I've been writing a financial column for 12 years and I have the same pet peeve. In the endless search to stand out from the crowd and get people to click on my links, editors slap all sorts of "interesting" titles on my stuff.

My all-time fave was from the Barron's print edition many years ago when I wrote a bullish article (hey, it happens) on the stock market. The title? Wolf Whistle Bait.   Apparently, the market looked like a pretty girl eliciting whistles from the wolves, i.e. boys standing on the corner.

The more usual fare is less obtuse and filled with corn. Gold stocks shine! Oil stocks hit a slick. Teachers do it with class.

I have to put up with the single headline like that as I do understand the media needs to sell papers (register eyeballs). That translate directly into subscription sales and ad revenues. Got it.

But today on Fox Business during the rare actual business segment on the Imus in the Morning Show, I happened to catch the anchor with the quin-fecta (trifecta, quadfecta, quinfecta - look it up!) of corn.

Talking about the top five market sectors of the previous whatever.

Semiconductors chipped in with gains
Telecom services dialed in
Pharmaceuticals had the right prescription
Investors were thirsty for beverage stocks and
Oil and gas stocks gushed in the lead

Makes you want to bitch-slap the writer and the anchor for her complicity.

Ha Ha!

Last week when I was putting the finishing touches on my column entitled "Charts Show Speed Bump Ahead for Stocks" I added a little phase "which may have happened today" just before publication. The column is written before lunch but posts the the website shortly after the close so there are times the market screws me good. This time, I acknowledged the potential key reversal but did not say it was a definite.

My editor send me an email notifying me of the reversal (I already knew). But more important, everyone with any sort of technical analysis training saw that the market gapped up to a new record high but closed below the previous day's low. It is, or should I say was, a classic signal for the end of a rally. The final blow off on some sort of news where everyone finally agreed that stocks would never be lower again.

OK, a little exaggeration but you get the point. I thought to myself, "this is too obvious."

Everyone saw it. Everyone wrote about it. Everyone suddenly got a little scared. After all, sentiment indicators were screaming "sell" with their extreme bullish readings.

The next few days saw no real change. Then there was Memorial Day and when the US returned to work it was to a roaring gap up speedball of a rally on Asia and consumer sentiment. They're baaack!!! Wasn't that from Poltergeist? For you folks on Long Island, it could also be the Great Neck Nisan pitch guy. 

Up, up and away, uh wait a minute. The Dow was up 200 plus and then closed up 106. Looks good on the evening news but we technicians knew better. That was a fairly strong give-back and it avoided negating the key reversal.

But bonds tanked! So did utes and mREITS. OK, the great rotation was finally here. Pundits all over the place said money was fleeing bonds and heading to stocks. Whoopee!

And then Wednesday arrived and stocks continued lower. In the premarket, they had given back the rest of Tuesday morning's gains - and bonds stayed low. That's not rotation unless you consider a rotation from assets to cash and not necessarily the greenback. Could it be into gold?

The point of all of this is that the key reversal was too obvious and the bears got punished Tuesday morning. But the Tuesday rally was painted with the roaring 20's boom brush and it set up the bulls to get punished. Ha ha (it's from the Simpsons).

Now the market can decide what it wants to do now that everyone has been humbled.

Everything is perfect

An excerpt from this morning's Quick Takes Pro newsletter:

Everything is going right for the market now. Good news is good. Bad news is good. No news is good. And no bears are on television saying things are not what they seem. Perhaps they are what they seem but the lack of bears is very troubling for wall of worry watchers and anyone who believes the market will not accommodate such one-sided sentiment for long.

Yet as we say every single day, until the market shows an actual sign of reversing all we can do is acquiesce.

The In Your Face Move

This is from Tuesday's Quick Takes Pro newsletter in the "Today's Lesson" section. Enjoy!

The chart of Qualcomm really illustrates what has been becoming a bit too common in this market. False moves, fake-outs and a "whichever way the wind blows" culture is driving old school chartists crazy. Exceptions are now the rule and we wonder if technical analysis would have even gotten off the ground it if were invented today.

For those wondering about the captions, we try to keep the swearing to a minimum. Look what happened this month - a trend break that lasted more than just a day, a strong rally to prove it was false, and then a total collapse to be sure everyone lost money.

What we have is a broken trend and now a broken support. We have observed that the market does finally give proper signals after this sort of shake-and-bake, for lack of a better term.

As for the CeeLo Green reference, that is the cleaned up radio version of the f-bomb.