TGIF

The heat wave broke here and cool temperatures are returning. That's good as the Spring blossoms can survive a lot longer in moderately cool temperatures. The magnolia tree is covered with big purple & white blooms and the daffodills are in full glory. I have about 200 daffodills scattered in bunchs.

Perchance has Spring arrived for stocks, too ? The past two weeks have seen a congeries of accumulation days with solid increases in the major averages on good volume. Steady, grinding rallies with minor dips interspersed are also better for long term gains, too, as real buyers get stock at good prices. Rips up sponsored by beefer momentum traders aka virtual buyers are weak and can be reversed easily. Late yesterday saw some beefer ping pong as they hit the days highs prices. But this morning futures are up solidly.

Rotation from commodity plays seems underway as the dollar has firmed. As sketched in past posts, I see this coming Fed meeting as providing more dollar suppport to buttress the support they gave in the last meeting. All this market needs to begin a huge move up is a sign that home mortage defaults has peaked and that home prices are firming. I think that will occur this Spring.

Hence I am long 150% on margin in the Alpha Fund.

Word of the Day

"Divagate" - verb, intrasitive [$10] and "divagation" - noun.
Divagate means 1. to wander, stray; 2. to digress in speech.
Sentence: Modern political debates can be quite annoying as the politicians always divagate from the questions from the panel of correspondents or voters.

Here is a long quote from the fine book, "The Capitive Mind" by Czeslaw Milosz published in 1953 (the quote is from page three) where I first saw the word, "divagation". C. Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1980. The book is primarily concerned with the immediate postwar period in Eastern and Central Europe. I've written numerous blogs on this period as I've tried very much to increase my understanding of this crucial, yet understudied, period of the 20th century.

"It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many Euproean countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy. Their bread, their work, their private lives began to depend on this or that decision in disputes on principles to which, until then, they had never paid any attention. In their eyes, the philosophers had always been a sort of dreamer whose divagations had no effect on realilty. The average human being, even if he had once been exposed to it, wrote philosophy off as utterly impractical and useless. Therefore the great intellectual work of the Marxists could easily pass as just one more variation on a sterile pastime. Only a few individuals understood the causes and probable consequences of this general indifference."