TGIF and TGIH

TGIH = Thank God I'm Home. Traveling is stressful ... ugh !

Yesterday was a delayed reaction to the Fed announcement - I think the late Wednesday reversal was beefers playing ping-pong, but Thurdays showed the real buyers had been active on the dip.

The dollar is rallying and commodities are falling ... they were quite overbid by large investment pools chasing the asset class, a bit late, as usual.

Alpah Fund is long about 150%. I will be doing some money management soon as some stocks like GOOG are getting too large. I really want to keep any single stock to less than 15% of the equity in my Alpha Fund, or less than 10% of the total assets. So when a stock has a big move, I need to sell a bit. Usually these are LT profits as time diversification usually gives favorable tax treatment for these partial sales. Sometimes I accelerate a sale if I had bought a lot more shares lower, so the sale can be a ST loss on early, higher priced sales. This will be the case for some of my big bank holdings. The point I am making is the time diversification has this secondary tax benefit in addition to its primary, risk reduction benefit.

Economic numbers are OK. The "touch & go" trajectory is still working.

PS: the times posted here are Pacific Coast time, as this is a Google-sponsored site probably situated on the west coast somewhere. I am writing this post just after 5AM ET.

Word of the Day

"Piquant" - adjective [$10]
Piquant means 1. agreeably pungent, sharp or appetizing; 2. pleasantly stimulating or disquieting, to the mind.
Sentence: The piquant writings of Ryszard Kapuscinki about his travels in the Third World as a Polish press corresondence contain wonderful first hand accounts of the period of revolution and turmoils there from the mid-1950s to more recent times.

"Picaresqe" - adjective [$10]
Picaresqe means (of a style of fiction) dealing with the episodic adventures of rogues.
Sentence: The 2008 Democratic presidential nomination battle might be described as a picaresqe confrontation between a knave and a knavette in seeking votes while trying to hide their true beliefs.

I saw both these words in the fine book, "Travels with Herodotus" written by Ryszard Kapuscinki, the famous Polish writer and overseas correspondent for decades. He's written many fine books - I've read two now. I heartily recommend them all.