Jane's Addiction, "Stop"

Vacation time for me. Not sure what you can expect here at the blog. Probably something, because when I walk away from this desk and interact with people, odd shit tends to happen.

The RO Report, "Living Manliness" Edition

A muddy day. No volume. Yes, you see the NYSE traded close to 1.2 billion, but it was OPEX Friday. So chop those 200 million extra shares at the open and we're the lowest volume day of the year, again... Still, the RO made lemonade out of the lemons... or, pebbles out of rocks... or Poland Spring out of tap water...

Anyway, I'm just gonna get to the numbers. I don't have too much color. I was busy doing manly shit all day... like hanging molding and ripping nails out of walls, just for the fun of it.

Out of 21 traders, 11 were positive, or 52%. I was #10 out of 21.

Here are the top 5:

1. Trader B, $4,980 on 322k shares traded.
2. Trader C, $4,095 on 158k shares traded.
3. Trader Z, $3,530 on 80k shares traded.
4. Trader F, $2,985 on 80k shares traded.
5. Trader #1, $1,519 on 18,600 shares traded.

And the bottom:

1. Trader D, -$1,888 on 79k shares traded.
2. Trader U, -$808 on 100 shares traded.
3. Trader H, -$764 on 5,800 shares traded.
4. Trader J, -$706 on 39,800 shares traded.
5. Trader T, -$420 on 2,100 shares traded.

Living Manliness

This morning, after I went surfing, I stopped to get some coffee. I was feeling charitable, so I picked one up for Judy as well.

When I got to the counter to pay, I even decided to pick up a blueberry and banana smoothie for my daughter. I was in a really good mood.

Anyway, so I had two large coffees and a smoothie. I paid, and the woman asked me if I wanted a carrying tray.

"No thanks," I said. "I got it." I felt really green, and I could see that my masculinity was almost too much for the woman to bear... I stacked the three cups and head for the door.

My car was probably 200 feet from the coffee shop. It became clear to me as I walked down the steps, that the cups were in a rather precarious position and that the bottom of the paper coffee cup was digging uncomfortably into my thumb.

But I soldiered on, carrying the cups in that position, through the pain, and even managed to smile at a couple of people as I passed. I could see, by the expressions on their faces, that they thought I was one "bad customer" carrying the cups like that.

When I got to the car, there was an indent in my thumb. I didn't even complain about it much to myself in my head. I just told myself, "shit like that happens to tough guys" and I got in my car and drove home, ready to battle the markets.

Dinosaur Trader... trader, tough guy.

Paraphrasology

-Don Delillo

He drove along turnpikes and skyways, seeing Manhattan come and go in a valium sunset, smoky and golden. The car wobbled in the sound booms of highballing trucks, drivers perched in tall cabs with food, drink, dope and pornography, and the rigs seemed to draw the little car down the pike in their sheering wind. He drove past enormous tank farms, squat white cylinders arrayed across the swampland, and he saw white dome tanks in smaller groupings and long lines of tank cars rolling down the tracks. He went past power pylons with their spindly arms akimbo. He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the transit cranes stood in rows at the marine terminal and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays--all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality, and of course he thought of Dinosaur Trader.