The Chairman had a nice profit going in NFLX only to be jammed out on a vicious break after 2 PM ... even though I had very few shares and a "breakeven" stop, I still suffered 12 cents of slippage exiting that sucker and ended up with a small loss. I'll return again tomorrow to do battle.

The Chicago Tribune has a nice archive of all the articles they did about the fall of Andersen, called A Final Accounting.

I see that Charlotte Chamberlain has initiated coverage of Archipelago (AX) with a Buy rating. She covers 19 companies now; I have trouble following even a third of that number.

An excerpt from Michiko Kakutani's review of In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman:

Thanks to Jim Stretch of WNCW for introducing me to The Beautiful South. They put out their first record in 1989 so I'm a little late getting around to them, as usual. (I discovered Tindersticks while watching an episode of the Sopranos, so I tend to stumble across good music instead of seeking it out.)

Ah, I see The Beautiful South is another incarnation of the Housemartins, a group I know well, but haven't listened to since high school. I thought they sounded familiar....

The coil scanner picked up PNC again. I last featured PNC in late August. It's a good example of how former resistance becomes new support. Have to keep an eye on how she exits yet another "box."

PNC, 78-min. Chart

The Chairman demonstrates the art of averaging down, down, down. Interestingly, the ISE Sentiment Index showed some serious bearishness last week, which is bullish. But I'm not interested in buying unless I can pay less than I did the last time. ;-)

Vanguard Total Stock Market VIPERs, Weekly Chart

You've got to love the Take No Prisoners action in the Notes last Friday. That's the kind of price movement which wrecks the best laid (short-term) plans.

10-Yr. T-Note futures, 5-min. Chart

Number of spam emails to the chairman@maoxian address during five and a half days away: 751. Number of legitimate emails trashed by the spam filter: unknown.

We had a nice (though quick) trip to the States. A few observations: support for Bush appears to be much stronger than I imagined. His most rabid supporters seem to come from the uninformed, uneducated, and just plain ignorant members of the population (a not insignificant number of people, unfortunately).

There's a creeping (and very creepy) militarism in the air that made me uncomfortable. I saw a poster with a cop (in SWAT gear toting a shotgun) and a camouflaged soldier (holding a machine gun)... the title said: Support our Troops both at Home and Abroad. Huh? Blurring the line between the civilian police and the military is dangerous business, and it's a terrible sign of where things stand.