Lack of Memory

A major problem with Babblevision and most of the press is their lack of memory when putting pundits on TV to blab.

Dennis Gartman is now being canonized. Uh ... I remember him in the prior copper run to $4 stridently saying that $4 copper would never be seen again in our lifetimes. D'uh ? He's got a big mouth and makes pronouncements that are often right ... and often wrong. Making that prior pronouncement really showed a profound ignorance of the driving factors in the price of copper over the long term.

Maybe he's just a trader. Fine, but Babblevision should put his comments in context ... and then toss out his big mouth fundamental longer term comments. Or run the old tapes of his errors to give the viewer a fair basis to assess him.

I read on Barron's Online he says stocks are not cheap. Hmmm ... that violates my memory violently. I looked for the reasoning in the article and it was crap. Sigh ........

I received a newsletter from Mrs. B's broker. There was actual data [ mirabile dictu ! ] on US equity mutual fund flows. The current period is one of only three periods in the past 20 years with negative net flows. The prior two times were great buys, viz. 1988-1989 and the mid 2002-early 2003 period. I will stick to my own thinking and assimilate the facts.

So far, nothing shows this is other than a mid-cycle slowdown, the Fed easing is bullish and stocks are very cheap. The objective moves are to sell gold, silver, Treasury bonds and TIPs - the "high-priced assets" and buy stocks, municipal bonds and corporate bonds - the "low priced assets. Uh ... that's sell high, buy low.

Tomorrow I plan to sell more silver ... and buy stocks. I'm going to keep doing this [or sell gold]for weeks/months at current prices.

I think Hillary will win Ohio by enough to carry her campaign to Pennsylvania, which she will win and then it's on to the convention in a dead heat with Obama. That is an objective prediction of Bunkerman (not gaming) as she seems to be geting traction in unexpected (and expected) places.

Words of the Day

Today I have three "M" words and one $1,000 word I learned yesterday from a philosophy lecture on audio CD.

"Mendacious" - adjective [$10 - this card has my handwriting from age 16, I think ! ]
Mendacious means 1. given to or characterized by deception or falsehood which often is not intended to genuinely mislead or delude; 2. lying, untruthful; 3. false, not true.
Sentence: Mendacious statements of pundits on Babblevision are so common as they pump stocks they own, but are not actually buying at extant prices.

"Malfeasance" - noun [$10]
Malfeasance means wrongdoing or misconduct esp. by a public official.
Sentence: The malfeasance of the Clinton administration was shocking as Bill and Hillary even sold pardons to drug dealers.

"Mendicant" - adjective and noun [$10] - note this word is NOT related to mendacious/mendacity as they have different roots.
Mendicant means [adj.] 1. begging; 2. (of a friar) living solely on alms; [noun] 1. a beggar; 2. a mendicant friar.
Sentence: A US politician's part - or full - time job is being a mendicant to obtain campaign funds. Mendicant emails even by Hillary's daughter flood the Internet.

"Retrodiction" - noun [$1,000 ! ] also "retrodictive" - adjective; "retrodict" - verb.
Retrodiction means the explanation or interpretation of past actions or events inferred from the laws that are assumed to have governed them.
Retrodict means to infer by retrodiction.
Sentence: A scientific theory is supposed to be both retrodictive, in that it explains how things came to be the way they are, and predictive. [from Great Ideas in Philosophy, Part 4, page 28 notes under Darwin].

I note that the human-causal theories of global warming are not retrodictive, hence are not a vaild scientific theory.