Support and Resistance: The Greatest Trading Tool

A good article on trading in general and on support and resistance specifically.

Despite all the hype from the internet marketers who try to sell you the latest trading 'secrets', the fact is there are NO secrets.

• Identify setups which provide the potential for lower risk and/or higher probability trades.
• Enter and manage those trades in a consistent and disciplined manner.
• Minimize risk.
• Manage your money.
• Manage your emotions.
• Journal your results, and review them to identify what's working and what's not working.
• Keep doing what is working, and
• Improve what is not working.

If you're not trading successfully, it's because you're not doing one (or perhaps all) of these things.

This is not my idea of good performance. This is 1400 entries. It used to take about 10-20 minutes. What's going on?

Update 2008-10-30: Here is just the entries. Yes, 144 minutes for the 1400 entries in this weblog. That's 10 per minute. I thought Movable Type 4.21 was supposed to be faster?

Update 2008-10-31: In an effort to assist my website host, webhosting4life.com, in isolating the problem< I republished my website this afternoon. It took a really long time: 251 minutes.

I've provided a number of ideas for them to explore:

It appears that the queries are all causing table scans. I've looked at the phpmyadmin system variables for MySQL and they are consistent with large numbers of table scans due to missing keys in searches.

If no activity was found on my database, then perhaps the MySQL activity is from another user. These MySQL settings are both database and global settings:

• Slow_queries
• Handler_read_rnd
• Handler_read_rnd_next
• Select_full_join
• Select_range_check

All of these values are exceptional and all suggest queries that are not properly hitting indexes, causing table scans. Again, I recommend looking at the slow queries log.

Right now, 10% of the queries to the database my website uses have taken more than long_query_time seconds. That seems a really high ratio.

Update 2008-10-31: Another personal best: 19 hours, 47 minutes.

I upgraded to 4.21 from 4.1 in the past day. I have tried to republish my weblog with a new style, but the republish times are horrific (1400 entries across 4 years):

• ??? seconds for entry (ran for about 80 minutes before stalling on the completion screen)
• 2353 seconds for author monthly
• 1335 seconds for category monthly
• 843 seconds for monthly
• 161 seconds for category archives
• 73 seconds for index templates
• 16 seconds for page

That's 80 minutes without entries. For comparison, it used to take only 15 to 20 minutes to republish the entire site before.

I've looked at the phpmyadmin system variables for MySQL and they are consistent with large numbers of slow queries, probably caused by table scans due to missing indexes in searches:

• Slow_queries has crept up from 526k to 574k slow queries.
• Handler_read_rnd from 4641k to 5341k
• Handler_read_rnd_next from 955M to 1116M
• Select_full_join from 9373 to 10k

However, my weblog is hosted (on Windows under IIS6, no less) and I don't have access to any raw MySQL logs. I can't run MySQL from a command prompt. I have no way of telling which queries are causing the slow down. Also, I cannot upgrade the perl version.

Ideas for discovering the problem:

• instrument the perl code to record SQL queries & time to execute
  ...except I don't know what perl code executes the SQL queries. Plus, the code goes directly to the DBI/DBD perl module to execute SQL. It would mean patching the code in a zillion places.
• add indexes to MT tables in MySQL
  But indexes on which columns of which tables?
• add foreign keys to MT tables in MySQL
  Again: where?

Anyone with an idea is welcome to leave a comment.

Fairfield / Westchester Code Camp

On Saturday November 8th, 2008, the Fairfield / Westchester developer community will be holding our second Fairfield / Westchester Code Camp! The event will be hosted by The University of Connecticut School of Business, at the Stamford Campus.

The continuing goal of the Code Camps series is to provide an intensive developer-to-developer learning experience that is fun and technically stimulating. The primary focus is on delivering programming information and sample code that can be put to practical use. The event is free.

I'll be there!

Probably a big mistake. I can't see any published pages anymore. If you are reading this, though, then I've solved the problem.

I ended up installing a lot of Perl packages to get things working:

• version
• Text::Balance
• IO::Compress::Zlib
• IO::Compress::Base
• Compress::Raw::Zlib

Wow. Now publishing my website (say, after a style change) takes hours.

A friend of mine, Jeff Linderman, asked me to post this so that there is a record of his prediction. The text is taken from an email submission he made to two major financial publications. When he gets his own blog, he'll post the content there. Until then, you heard it here first.

The summary: Jeff Linderman, underground financial pundit to the few and vastly unknown to the many, highlights the link between systemic leverage and misleading aggregate economic growth over the past five years. His conclusion? A modern-day Depression cannot be ruled out.

Jeff Linderman: economic downturn could become a depression

Update 2008-11-12: Jeff Linderman now has his own weblog on blogspot, Economic Vesuvius.

By semi-popular demand, this is a compendium of musings on our current and future social/financial/economic state of affairs...with input from family/friends/colleagues. Its purpose is to fill a void in mainstream media coverage which, by definition, appeals to the masses and is generally devoid of critical or semi-controversial analysis. Expect to see discussions of financial topics in anything from equity markets to commodities to FX; economic topics such as retail sales and personal consumption/industrial production; and social/cultural behavioral phenomena as it relates to our present and upcoming quality of life.

Update 2008-11-13: Jeff Linderman beats Soros to the punch: Soros says deep recession inevitable, depression possible.

Marketplace Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch explains a number of concepts in current financial news by way of extended metaphors. Very instructive videos.

• The credit crisis as Antarctic expedition
• Getting naked in short selling
• Untangling credit default swaps
• Crisis explainer: Uncorking CDOs

• naked capitalism
• infectious greed
• the big picture
• seeking alpha

Presentation on the development of the Microsoft Office user interface. It's really cool how they thought and produced informed decisions from the data they accumulated.

Hiring Technical People blog

Current reading

• C# in Depth

  In programming, there's no substitute for knowing your stuff. In versions 2 and 3, C# introduces new concepts such as lambda expressions and implicit typing that make the language more flexible and give you more power. Using Language INtegrated Query (LINQ)--also new in C# 3--you can interact with data of any type directly from C#. Simply put, mastering these features will make you a more valuable C# developer.

  C# in Depth is designed to bring you to a new level of programming skill. It dives deeply into key C# topics--in particular the new ones. You'll learn to reuse algorithms in a type-safe way with C# 2 generics and expand the functionality of existing classes and interfaces using C# 3 extension methods. Tricky issues become clear in author Jon Skeet's crisp, easy-to-follow explanations and snappy, pragmatic examples. With this book under your belt, you will easily learn--and then master--new frameworks and platforms.

• .NET for Financial Markets
• Pro .NET 2.0 Windows Forms and Custom Controls in C#
• Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform
• Concurrent Programming on Windows

  Duffy aims to give application, system, and library developers the tools and techniques needed to write efficient, safe code for multicore processors. This is important not only for the kinds of problems where concurrency is inherent and easily exploitable–such as server applications, compute-intensive image manipulation, financial analysis, simulations, and AI algorithms–but also for problems that can be speeded up using parallelism but require more effort–such as math libraries, sort routines, report generation, XML manipulation, and stream processing algorithms.

  Concurrent Programming on Windows has four major sections: The first introduces concurrency at a high level, followed by a section that focuses on the fundamental platform features, inner workings, and API details. Next, there is a section that describes common patterns, best practices, algorithms, and data structures that emerge while writing concurrent software. The final section covers many of the common system-wide architectural and process concerns of concurrent programming.

• .NET Multithreading

  If you need high performance, or a rich user experience, you should consider multithreading. With .NET you can develop stable and robust multithreaded applications with minimal effort. .NET Multithreading teaches the basics in an understandable and practical way. It then focuses on .NET's mechanisms for multithreading and shows how easy it can be to develop applications with them. The book covers several design approaches such as one-thread-one-class, the asynchronous design pattern, and using queues as buffers between threads. It explains best practices and how to avoid common multithreading pitfalls such as deadlock and race conditions.

  This book is written for intermediate .NET developers who know C# or VB .NET, but are not assumed to have a background in multithreading. It is rich in examples that will help you understand the subject and produce multithreaded applications that have the power of C++ while keeping the ease and reliability of .NET.

• NHibernate in Action

  NHibernate in Action begins by describing how to implement persistence in a layered .NET application. The book then quickly springs into action by introducing NHibernate through a classic "Hello World" example. It explains how to configure NHibernate to specify the mapping information between business objects and database tables, and then explores the internal architecture of NHibernate. A complete example application is progressively built with Agile methodologies in mind, which shows readers all kinds of entity and relationship mappings and how to perform CRUD operations. The book also covers advanced techniques like caching, concurrency access, and isolation levels. The Hibernate Query Language (HQL) and criteria query APIs are thoroughly detailed with optimization tips.

  The last chapters of this book discuss various development scenarios, how to implement the layers of an NHibernate application (covering Windows and Web development), and which tools are available for these tasks. They also provide some solutions for data-binding objects to .NET GUI controls, integrating services, and interacting with components using DataSets. Finally, they explain how to build a complex application involving advanced session management and distributed transactions.

• IronPython in Action

  IronPython in Action offers a comprehensive, hands-on introduction to Microsoft's exciting new approach for programming the .NET framework. It approaches IronPython as a first class .NET language, fully integrated with the .NET environment, Visual Studio, and even the open-source Mono implementation. You'll learn how IronPython can be embedded as a ready-made scripting language into C# and VB.NET programs, used for writing full applications or for web development with ASP. Even better, you'll see how IronPython works in Silverlight for client-side web programming.

  IronPython opens up exciting new possibilities. Because it's a dynamic language, it permits programming paradigms not easily available in VB and C#. In this book, authors Michael Foord and Christian Muirhead explore the world of functional programming, live introspection, dynamic typing and 'duck typing', metaprogramming, and more.

  IronPython in Action explores these topics with examples, making use of the Python interactive console to explore the .NET framework with live objects. The expert authors provide a complete introduction for programmers to both the Python language and the power of the .NET framework. The book also shows how to extend IronPython with C#, extending C# and VB.NET applications with Python, using IronPython with .NET 3.0 and Powershell, IronPython as a Windows scripting tool, and much more.

• LINQ in Action

  LINQ, Language INtegrated Query, is a new extension to the Visual Basic and C# programming languages designed to simplify data queries and database interaction. It addreses O/R mapping issues by making query operations like SQL statements part of the programming language. Adding to its power, LINQ is extensible and can be used to query various data sources. It offers built-in support for querying in-memory collections like arrays or lists, XML, DataSets, and relational databases.

  LINQ in Action is a fast-paced, comprehensive tutorial for professional developers who want to use LINQ. This book explores what can be done with LINQ, shows you how it works in an application, and addresses the emerging best practices. It presents the general purpose query facilities offered by LINQ in the upcoming C# 3.0 and VB.NET 9.0 languages. A running example introduces basic LINQ concepts. You'll then learn to query unstructured data using LINQ to XML and relational data with LINQ to SQL. Finally, you'll see how to extend LINQ for custom applications.

  LINQ in Action will guide you along as you navigate this new world of lambda expressions, query operators, and expression trees. You'll also explore the new features of C# 3.0, VB.NET 9.0. The book is very practical, anchoring each new idea with running code.

• Effective REST Services via .NET: For .NET Framework 3.5

  Effective REST Services via .NET begins by discussing contemporary technologies and laying the groundwork for why REST services are so exciting and useful. It describes how they work and how both client and server-based code can access data using REST services. It details the URL, which is fundamental to accessing REST services. It then provides examples of the use of REST services in both desktop-based and Web-based applications.

  The second half of the book delves into how to create REST services using existing .NET technologies, including ASP.NET (coupled with IIS 7.0), services hosted by the new ASP.NET model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, services hosted by the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). The book finishes with coverage on exciting new technologies such as cloud computing (codename AZURE) and others.

• C# Query Expressions

Google video on lock-free hashtables

Talk on implementation of a lock-free hashtable in Java on a multiprocessor box -- like 100 to 700 cpus.

Transactions in .net

Answer to a question from StackOverflow:

What are the best practices to do transactions in C# .Net 2.0. What are the classes that should be used? What are the pitfalls to look out for etc. All that commit and rollback stuff.

The TransactionScope Object Makes ADO.NET Transactions Easy

This article shows you how easy it is to use transactions with previous versions of .NET, and how you can use the TransactionScope object to auto-enlist database operations in a transaction. Other kinds of things, such as COM+ objects, can participate in transactions as well, but this article focuses on ADO.NET transactions.

ShortStories

A website dedicated to short selling.

.NET Message Passing Interface

MPI.NET is a high-performance, easy-to-use implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) for Microsoft's .NET environment. MPI is the de facto standard for writing parallel programs running on a distributed memory system, such as a compute cluster, and is widely implemented. Most MPI implementations provide support for writing MPI programs in C, C++, and Fortran. MPI.NET provides support for all of the .NET languages (especially C#), and includes significant extensions (such as automatic serialization of objects) that make it far easier to build parallel programs that run on clusters.

[Via Lab49]

Here is Jim Cramer, pumping a bunch of tech stocks on 2000-02-29, just weeks before the NASDAQ topped. Here is a quote to take you back to those days:

It is no secret that the Dow, made up principally of companies that can't raise the bar, is down 12% while the Nasdaq, which is made up of companies that can raise the bar, is up 12%. And in the self-fulfilling jungle that is Wall Street, only growth can maintain growth!

So where are they now? Three still trade on the NASDAQ, two are on the pink sheets, and five don't trade with these symbols -- probably out of business. ARBA trades for about 1% of its bubble-high of $1500, INSP is at 0.5% of its high of over $1500, and VRSN trades for about 10% of its high of $300.

What about the Old Economy stocks he singles out to diss? Freeport-McMoRan acquired Phelps Dodge in 2007 for $25.9 billion in cash and stock, so I'm just going to guess that that's a positive return. Just by eyeballing the other charts, I'd say that these are the returns over the same period:

• MRK -50%
• PFE -75%
• X +150%
• UNP +200%

On balance, I think you'd have to be ahead with the Old Economy picks that Cramer sneered at.

The Term Paper Artist

The term paper biz is managed by brokers who take financial risks by accepting credit card payments and psychological risks by actually talking to the clients. Most of the customers just aren't very bright. One of my brokers would even mark assignments with the code words DUMB CLIENT. That meant to use simple English; nothing's worse than a client calling back to ask a broker -- most of whom had no particular academic training -- what certain words in the paper meant. One time a client actually asked to talk to me personally and lamented that he just didn't "know a lot about Plah-toe." Distance learning meant that he'd never heard anyone say the name.

Expat interviews

We interview people who are living abroad. Here you will find the thoughts and observations of expats living in countries like Thailand, Philippines, Holland, India, Australia and a lot more. We find that it's always exciting to know about what motivated people to live in another part of the world, how they generate their income, how they manage to live there, and what they've learned from their experiences in a land that's become their new home.

So I thought, "Wow, the Nasdaq 100 traded a huge range today." I looked at the stats for the past two years and realized that every day in October, the trading range (high to low as a percentage of the low) has been one of the top 25 values in that period. In fact, every value is in the top 20. If you look at the trading volume for that time, 8 of the 12 trading days in October rank in the top 25. It's amazing how volatile the market is compared to its historical averages.

Excel spreadsheet of QQQQ range and volume

Update 2008-11-01: I updated the spreadsheet to include all of the data in October. Of the 25 days in the past two years with the widest trading range, 19 were in October. The first of October was ranked 117th and the thirtieth of October was ranked 47th, but no other day in October was outside the top 30 days in the past 516 trading days.

Better Than Buy-And-Hold

Buy-and-hold is not only the riskiest possible strategy, it doesn't even qualify to be called a strategy. Buy-and-hold is actually the absence of any intelligent exit strategy and is mostly adopted by default. Buy-and-hold is only recommended by unknowing pundits who are out of touch with the modern marketplace and are willing to advise their followers that taking unlimited risk and being in the market 100% of the time is a good idea. Obviously, that mistaken advice has proved to be very costly.

[...]

Here are three suggestions on how to implement an effective trailing exit strategy:

• Identify the direction of the current trend. If the trend is up you will want to set the trailing exit a safe distance away from prices so that you do not exit while the stock is trending up. You want to let profits run. If the trend is down, set the exit closer to prices to cut losses and preserve capital.
• Keep an eye on volatility and adjust the exits farther away if volatility increases and then move them closer if volatility decreases. The exits need to be kept outside of normal up-and-down price action that changes with volatility. Volatility is presently at record levels so give the upward trending stocks plenty of room.
• Before you exit, make sure you have a plan to re-enter the stock if the uptrend resumes. The trailing exit provides a very valuable yet inexpensive form of loss insurance. The price of that insurance is that your exit may occasionally get you out at a point where the stock stops going down and turns up. Rather than miss the uptrend and blame the protective exit for the lost opportunity, simply buy the shares back. Worst case, you will have paid a small price for protection from a possibly catastrophic loss. Your exit did its job.

Understanding the TED spread

One measure that is being used to summarize the strain in financial markets is the TED spread. This is calculated as the gap between 3-month LIBOR (an average of interest rates offered in the London interbank market for 3-month dollar-denominated loans) and the 3-month Treasury bill rate. The size of this gap presumably reflects some sort of risk or liquidity premium. I was interested to break the TED spread down into identifiable components to try to get a better understanding of what may be responsible for its recent behavior.

[...]

One can break the TED spread down into separate components using the following accounting identity. Let LIBOR3 denote the 3-month LIBOR rate, LIBOR0 the overnight rate, TARGET the fed funds target, and TBILL the 3-month Treasury bill rate. The TED spread is defined as

TED = (LIBOR3 - TBILL)

which can be rewritten as

(LIBOR3 - TBILL) = (LIBOR3 - LIBOR0) + 
    (LIBOR0 - TARGET) + 
    (TARGET - TBILL)

NPR on the TED spread

The TED spread is at the epicenter of the storm.

Metafilter 2008-10-14

Bloomberg rates

• Bloomberg 3-month LIBOR quote
• Bloomberg TED spread quote
  Watch the TED spread to see the state of the crisis. You're looking for lower numbers, preferably below 50 to 100 basis points.

2008-10-14: The 3-month yield was only 12 basis points. This is phenomenally low, indicating a great deal of fear in the market.

I'm going to be keeping my money out of the market until the TED spread returns to a more normal rate, like 50 to 100 basis points.

• The Mystery of the Failed Live Meeting Launch

  Crap. Ok, it's Procmon time. Who owns this dialog box? I give the dialog a good shake while Task Manager is open. That's a low-tech way of answering the Who's Process Is This question - grab a dialog with the mouse and shake it around the screen...the process that owns it will start using a little bit of CPU.

• Time Saver - Using Watir as a Startup Program in your ASP.NET Projects

• Scott Hanselman
• Oren Eini (alias Ayende Rahien)
• Jon Skeet: Coding Blog
• Lab49

Build Your Own 'Lazy Portfolio!' 6 Rules

It's time to talk about lazy portfolios. The idea is that you come up with a good diversified portfolio and stick with it. The point is to keep your agonizing about the market to the bare minimum. This article touches on the practice and ideas behind it.

Bears that Won't Go Away

WSJ graphic of alternating bear market/stagnation and bull market. Compare these bear market dates to How This Bear Market Compares:

• 19 Jan 1906 - 24 Aug 1921
• 03 Sep 1929 - 28 Apr 1942
• 09 Feb 1966 - 12 Aug 1982
• 14 Jan 2000 - current

The Financial Crisis, as Explained to My Fourteen-Year-Old Sister

Kevin: Imagine that I let you borrow $50, but in exchange for my generosity, you promise to pay me back the $50 with an extra $10 in interest. To make sure you pay me back, I take your Charizard Pokemon card as collateral.

Olivia: Kevin, I don't play Pokemon anymore.

Kevin: I'm getting to that. Let's say that the Charizard is worth $50, so in case you decide to not return my money, at least I'll have something that's worth what I loaned out.

Olivia: Okay.

Kevin: But one day, people realize that Pokemon is stupid and everyone decides that the cards are overvalued. That's right--everybody turned twelve on the same day! Now your Charizard is only worth, say, $25.

How This Bear Market Compares

The NY Times provides an interactive graphic for comparing the current bear market to market declines in previous ones:

• Aug 1929 - Jun 1932
• Feb 1937 - Apr 1942
• Apr 1946 - Jun 1949
• Nov 1961 - Jun 1962
• Oct 1968 - May 1970
• Dec 1972 - Oct 1974
• Oct 1980 - Aug 1982
• Jun 1987 - Dec 1987
• Jun 1990 - Oct 1990
• Feb 2000 - Mar 2002
• Sep 2007 - present

101 LINQ Samples

[VB.NET, C#]

DbLinq Project: Linq Provider for MySql, Oracle and PostgreSQL

It is an O/R (Object-Relational) mapping tool, with some similarities to Hibernate or LlblGen. LINQ is type-safe, queries get compiled into MSIL on the fly, and your C# WHERE clauses are translated into SQL and sent to SQL server for execution. In short, it makes design of data access layers safer and faster. In C# 3.0, linq code looks like this:

var q = from p in db.Products
         where p.ProductName == "Pen"
         select p.ProductID;

I am really looking forward to trying out a Linq-capable driver for MySQL. Then I'll be able to use LinqPad [LinqPad.net, internal link] on my database.

Running Queries On Multi-Core Processors

PLINQ is a query execution engine that accepts any LINQ-to-Objects or LINQ-to-XML query and automatically utilizes multiple processors or cores for execution when they are available. The change in programming model is tiny, meaning you don't need to be a concurrency guru to use it. In fact, threads and locks won't even come up unless you really want to dive under the hood to understand how it all works. PLINQ is a key component of Parallel FX, the next generation of concurrency support in the Microsoft &174; .NET Framework.

Using technologies like PLINQ will become increasingly crucial to ensuring the scalability of software on future parallel microprocessor architectures. By utilizing LINQ at choice places throughout your applications today--such as where you have data- or compute-intensive operations that can be expressed as queries--you will ensure that those fragments of your programs continue to perform better when PLINQ becomes available and the machines running your application grow from 2 to 4 to 32 processors and beyond. And even if you only run that code on a single-processor machine, the overhead of PLINQ is typically so small that you won't notice a difference. In addition, the data parallel nature of PLINQ ensures your programs will continue to scale as the size of your data sets increases.

Optimize Managed Code For Multi-Core Machines

The Task Parallel Library (TPL) is designed to make it much easier to write managed code that can automatically use multiple processors. Using the library, you can conveniently express potential parallelism in existing sequential code, where the exposed parallel tasks will be run concurrently on all available processors. Usually this results in significant speedups.

TPL is being created as a collaborative effort by Microsoft &174; Research, the Microsoft Common Language Runtime (CLR) team, and the Parallel Computing Platform team. TPL is a major component of the Parallel FX library, the next generation of concurrency support for the Microsoft .NET Framework. Though it has not yet reached version 1.0, the first Parallel FX Community Tech Preview (CTP) will be available from MSDN &174; in Fall '07. Watch http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar for details. TPL does not require any language extensions and works with the .NET Framework 3.5 and higher.

Chesapeake CEO Sold All Stock to Meet Margin Call

Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Chesapeake Energy Corp. said its chief executive officer, Aubrey McClendon, involuntarily sold ``substantially all'' of his common shares of the company's stock over the past three days to meet margin loan calls.

"These involuntary and unexpected sales were precipitated by the extraordinary circumstances of the worldwide financial crisis,'' McClendon said in today's statement. "In no way do these sales reflect my view of the company's financial position or my view of Chesapeake's future performance potential.''

McClendon, 49, owned 33.5 million shares, or 5.8 percent of the company's common stock, according to a Sept. 30 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He was the company's third-largest shareholder.

One word: wow.

One of the technical indicators I track is the percentage of NYSE stocks trading above their 50-day moving average. Usually, when this indicator hits 10-15%, it's the bottom of the bear rally, and usually the top is at 75-80%. Currently, this indicator has been holding steady at 1% for the past two days, the lowest number I've ever seen. And yet, I don't see a reason to believe we've seen the bottom yet.

Steven Rambam, a private investigator, maintains that the combination of self-contributed data and the mechanisms of business have brought about the explosion in public availability of personal data. Or as he puts it, "If you know how to use the Internet, 75% of an investigation can be conducted sitting in your pajamas."

• Privacy is dead. Get over it.
• Video part 1
• Video part 2

"Top hedge funds suffered in September" is a bit funny:

Copper River, a well-known fund that focuses on short selling, lost more than 50% in September, while Tontine Partners, run by Jeffrey Gendell, fell by almost 60%, according to investors.

What is a tontine, you ask? It's

an annuity scheme in which subscribers share a common fund with the benefit of survivorship, the survivors' shares being increased as the subscribers die, until the whole goes to the last survivor.

In the past month, the only ETFs that are up are in gold, silver, and the short-leveraged index ETFs. It's not pretty.

Here are recent articles at the Wall Street Journal encouraging people to stay invested in the market. I'll revisit these in a few weeks/months to see whether this was good advice or not.

• As Dire as the Times May Seem, History Isn't About to Repeat Itself
• Now Is the Time to Think Long Term and Buy Stocks

This animation shows all the scheduled flights around the globe throughout the day. Flights depart and arrive, and the presentation is graphical on a map of the world. Very cool.

Lori and I were just in California and visited wineries on the Central Coast. Here are some wineries we visited and wines we bought.

Paso Robles

• Turley

  We liked the Juvenile and bought a bottle for a party we were going to. It blew us away. It was much better than when we sampled it.

  • Juvenile 2006
  • Old Vines 2006
• Terry Hoage

  Terry Hoage was my favorite vineyard and I ended up buying 6 bottles there.

  • "Skins" Grenache 2006
  • "The 46" Grenache-Syrah 2006
  • "The Hedge" Syrah 2006
• L'Aventure
• Jada

  Jada was Lori's favorite vineyard and my second favorite. Their specialty is a Rhone Valley wine: lots of syrah, mourvedre, and grenache. The Hell's Kitchen is fabulous.

  • Jersey Girl 2005
  • Hell's Kitchen 2006
• Denner
  Mourvedre 2006
• Linne Calodo

San Luis Obispo

• Saucelito Canyon Vineyard
  Zinfandel 2006, Arroyo Grande Valley
• Piedra Creek

  The Piedra Creek visit comes with a story. We had not intended to go there, but started to take recommendations from other vineyards, based on the description we provided of what we liked. The people at Saucelito Canyon recommended we call Piedra Creek for a tasting. We drove over and sat on their house's back porch where Margaret poured us samples. The atmosphere was very personal and pleasant. The owners have been making wine for 25 years and been married for 56, if I recall.

  The Zin Santo is very sweet -- more of a dessert wine because of an accident in the sugar level. Highly recommended.

  • San Floriano 2006
  • Zin Santo 2005
• Domain Albert
  Margarita Vineyards Syrah 2006

If you are visiting San Luis Obispo, you have to eat at Novo Restaurant. The food and wines are spectacular. The outdoor patio is set under broad trees on a deck beside a creek.

Update 2008-11-07: almost forgot a special purchase we made. We bought a case of Panza claret 2004 (sold out) from Quixote Winery in Napa.