Tonight's Chat: Swing Trading Strong Stocks Using the Holy Grail Technique

Don't miss tonight's chat at 8PM, eastern time. The topic will be how to identify strong stocks in strong sectors, and then how to enter and exit swing trades in them using the Holy Grail trading technique. It should be a good session, everyone's welcome, and it's free!

Reading Roundup (XV) - Wong Kar-wai's Latest Triumph; An Ugly Dog, a Horny Author, and an Eccentric Comic Book Creator

Articles I've recently read with my comments in italics, and other miscellany:

Al Frank's Buckingham Buys Homebuilders, Welcomes "Bubble Talk"
["'We still like the homebuilders and we like the bubble talk too. The second we stop hearing about a bubble is when we start to worry' ... The Prudent Speculator, a 10-page report printed on manila paper, has 11,000 subscribers. A yearly subscription costs $295 ... Buckingham, who has been an editor for the newsletter since 1990, said his first homebuilder purchase was... D.R. Horton in February 1999. He bought shares of Toll Brothers... a month later." He bought at the right time and held on, which is exactly the opposite of what most people do. 11,000 subscribers at $295 a pop, yow! via Vinvesting.com]

Desire and Loss in the Curve of a Back, by Manohla Dargis.
["2046... [is an] ecstatically beautiful film... an unqualified triumph. [Wong Kar-wai] is less interested in love than in its wreckage, in the sighs, tears and agonies that sometimes follow in love's wake ... [Wong] isn't the first and certainly not the only [movie maker] to pry cinema from the grip of classical narrative, to take a pickax to the usual three-act architecture (or at least shake the foundation), while also dispatching with the art-deadening requirements (redemption, closure, ad nauseam) that have turned much of Big Hollywood into a creative dead zone." Manohla also makes the good observation: "From the way he photographs the women in this film and elsewhere, the director appears particularly fond of how the opposite sex looks from the back." Any movie which has Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li, Maggie Cheung, and Wang Jing Wen in it is an automatic "must own" for me.]

Seeing the light, by John Freeman:
["Perhaps it was the near miss with a Bad Sex Award in 2003 for his novella The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro, but Theroux bristles at the suggestion his material might be labelled pornographic. 'The kind of sex I'm writing about is ecstatic sex,' he says. 'It's not, you know, running in and nailing the woman next door. It's the ecstatic form of it. Where in a heightened state of stimulation, so many things are possible.'" Paul Theroux is my favorite literary horndog. via Maud Newton]

Sam, the World's Ugliest Dog
[A Chinese Crested Hairless... poor bastard.]

A comic book hero, by Dan Glaister.
["I would never trust anyone else to work with my artwork. I can't relinquish absolute control. I have an OCD thing about having drawn every single line in every one of my comics. The great appeal is to be able to say, I did this whole book all by myself. It's a little module that I created." Daniel Clowes, creator of narraglyphic picto-assemblages.]

I called the credit card people to have a late fee removed. I missed the payment date by a couple of days, so they tried to tack on a $39 late fee. I thought that was a little high considering the payment I missed was for $14.95. ;-) You need to know the secret for getting these things taken off, and the code word is: CUSTOMER COURTESY.

Baidu, How Do You Do?

I didn't stay up to watch this thing start trading last Friday, which I sorely regret. Just a couple hundred shares bought at the obvious Dummy spot would have been worth several thousand bucks. The action must remind everyone of the headiest days of the internet bubble. Ah, that old magic of a tiny float combined with market orders from an oblivious public... they ain't Google, folks.

BIDU, 5-minute Chart