Baby's English is getting better though she still says "ten-teen" for twenty, and "I want to be one" for "I want to be alone."
— C. Maoxian (@maoxian) April 14, 2016
Tweets for April 13, 2016
No Such Thing as an Expert on Asia
Some selected bits I liked from Stanley Karnow's appearance on Booknotes in 1989:
"... [a writer is] a bit like a sculptor with this enormous piece of granite ... you've got to chip away at that granite in order to mold that sculpture, and that is a very hard process.
I don't know any writer who thinks that writing is fun. It's hard work, and the way I do it is just as if I'm doing any other job. I get up in the morning and I have breakfast and read the newspapers and shave and shower and get dressed, but I go down in my cellar, where I have my study, and work. I try to get to my machine by 8 or 9 o'clock in the morning. Sometimes I'll run out of steam in the afternoon, but sometimes I'll go until midnight. But you have to treat it as a job; you have to be disciplined. You don't sit around waiting for inspiration. If you do, you're never going to get anything done because it's much more fun taking the dog out for a walk along the canal than sitting down there and writing."
"[MacArthur and Eisenhower] hated each other. They had terrible fights. Eisenhower was later asked, Did you ever know Gen. MacArthur? He said, 'Yes, I studied dramatics under him for seven years.'
Years later when Eisenhower was president, somebody asked MacArthur if he had known Eisenhower, to which MacArthur replied, 'Best clerk I ever had.' There was something incompatible about their characters. MacArthur was a monumental egotist, a talented man, a skilled man in many ways. Eisenhower was essentially a rather modest man, and they disagreed over policy. "
"The interesting thing about the Asians -- the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, Indians, Pakistanis -- coming to the United States is they're coming in with all the old American virtues -- family, hard work, risks and endurance, stamina. I think they're making a positive contribution to this country."
Tweets for April 12, 2016
Tweets for April 11, 2016
Tweets for April 10, 2016
Majoring in Jeffrey Hart
From Greg Fossedal's appearance on Booknotes in 1989:
"... we have this image of the Voice of America as sort of simply being the counterpart to Soviet propaganda. That it's sort of supposed to repeat democratic slogans and tell people how much superior democracy is ... the interesting thing is that the radios seem to have the most impact when they are concentrating on conditions within those countries. It doesn't do somebody in Hungary much good to hear that Americans are more prosperous. What they need is ideas and facts about how to incrementally reform the communist system ... our radio very aggressively and in some detail and with some thought behind it reported on those [incremental economic reforms in Poland and elsewhere]. And reported on how people were organizing in other countries and within Hungary how alternative parties were forming to the communist party. And this information was critical to the formation of those democratic movements."
Horizon Pharma Pre-Open
When something is moving pre-open (or after-hours) and I don't know why, I turn to StockTwits. If I had a Bloomberg Terminal, I'd look there first, but I'm on a $9.99 a month data feed, not an $1,800 a month one. Twitter itself is too full of ticker symbol spam to be of any use, and no "free" news source is quick enough to report anything.
Here's the timestamp for the 8-K: Accepted 2016-04-12 08:00:50. There are a lot of opportunities if you're paying attention and can act fast.
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Telecom Sector Looks Like a Short
Scrolling through the weekly charts I noticed an Idiot Wave set-up in the telecom ETF, ticker symbol IYZ. Just squiggles, you know, the zig zag pattern, so if you're into risking money based on these things, the reward looks decent. Weekly chart so would take months to work out probably. Not something a hyperactive day trader could stand to do, except in a very small, take-it-and-forget-about-it way.
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ETF Trading Portfolio Update -- April 11, 2016
No changes this week.