A glass of whine

My lack of blogging in recent days has a little to do with the kids being off from school and a lot to do with the markets being more like school than places of business. I admit that the following is a brain dump so read at risk of wasting your time. 

As you may have guessed from Facebook posts and other communication I think that the whole system of trading and investing has turned into a farce. Either you are the cool kid or you are the nerd getting a giant wedgie.  (In case that was too weird, I mean Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Hedge Funds, HFTs, etc as the jocks and everyone else on the outside as the nerds) Did you finally catch the fever and buy silver last week? Or Netflix on the technical breakout Thursday?

"They" are selling you the path to riches with an BBM-ing baby and a guy tooling around town in a helicopter. Talk to Chuck! He'll help you trade, I mean invest. After all, we need advanced trading tools to buy mutual funds and a few round lots for our 401Ks. Retail stock trading jumped the shark two years ago (maybe four) and now investing has followed. It is not a casino. It the Roman Coliseum and we are not the lions.

Yeah, I am a little whiny today. And yeah, I am still stinging from last week's post S&P warning column - which was written as usual in the morning and posted on the site after the close - leaving me exposed to whatever happens in the afternoon.  I did not see Apple reverse to the upside before it was too late.

The funny thing is that I still see a major correction coming. There is too much kindling soaked in nitro to ignore and as each day goes by I have less confidence in the leaders - both sides of the aisle and anyone straddling it. It takes all my energy not to get political here but the speculator thing was just too much. Just who are the speculators, anyway? Was that ever answered? Is it me and my one crude oil contract? Or my 500 shares of GLD? Or the University of Texas taking delivery of billion in gold bars?  Evil educators!

Charles Payne had a gem of a post the other day - Mr. Obama saying, "there is enough oil out there for world demand" is an admission we don't need an alternative for supply reasons.  Don't get me wrong, I want to put solar panels on my roof and would support a wind farm off shore (and hydro in the East Rivier) but this is nuts. There may be enough oil for world demand but we are paying someone else for it. That's why oil prices are higher - we are afraid supplies will be cut off, not that they are too low.