Zzzzzz ...

Yesterday was a hot day here in Massachusetts ... I hope it moderates as the spring blossoms last a lot longer with moderate, cool temperatures.

Mr. Market was taking a well-needed nap yesterday. Some call it base-building, some call it consolidation, but what that means is that stock is being slowly accumulated on dips by real buyers from traders flippimg shares or from rotation. In other words, stock moves from weak to strong hands. After the S&P broke the slight downtrend line, consolidation is important. This sets up the market for a grinding move up as semi-perma-bears slowly capitulate and recognize their errors in thinking armagedon is coming.

I am doing nothing, except moving books to my new library in the renovated second floor of my barn/garage. I had a huge pile in the "Great Room" in the bunker here - it's sort of reminiscent of the armory in the great hall in the Tower of London. So I need to get the books to the new library so I can appreciate my sword & shell collection (and those aren't seashells !). Also that lets me re-sort the books that I expect to read & use soon, vs. long term storage for irregular access.

AAPL had fine numbers with conservative guidance, as expected. Those Mac sales are the key ... over time, I expect them to get 25% of the PC market since Windows sucks, especially Vista, which is total crap. Since Mac share is now at about 7%, that means years of strong growth. I'll re-buy that bit I flipped on a serious dip.

If CVX goes to 100, I'll let take long term sugar on shares I've held over a year, too. "Buy dips, sell rips" is the applicable investing rule for resource stocks. If you use time diversification and manage your position size, you can get long term gains on the large sales profits and good entries on the major dips. I've done that for several years on those stocks.

Next week, I expect the Fed to cut 25 bps and signal a pause. I think the dollar will then rally significantly and start a rotation to US stocks. The possibility does exist the Fed will not cut at all in the next meeting. That's OK with me. The 25 bps means little and 2.25% is low enough for the overnight rate. Enduring focus by them on other liquidity measures is more important.

A dollar rally might put an intermediate term lid on oil prices as speculators rotate out. That would be a plus.

Word of the Day

"Caco-" - a combining form [$100]
Caco- is a combining form meaning "bad", occurring in loan words from Greek (cacoemon); on this model, used in the formation of compound words.
Examples: The common example is cacophony or cacophonous. Others words including "caco-" are cacodemon, cacodyl, cacoepy, cacoethes, cacogenics, cacography, cacology, and caconym.

"Cacoepy" - noun [$1000] rare (stress on the 'coe syllable)
Cacoepy means bad or erroneous pronunciation; opposed to orthoepy. Hence, cacoepistic is the related adjective.
Sentence: George W. Bush suffers from terminal cacoepy when saying the word, "nuclear", which he always pronounces wrongly as "nu cu lar" instead of "nu cle ar" with a long "e".