CheetahhhhhhhBlog Mark III

Yeah well first of all, my predictions in the last post are proving true. The market should decline for another 2-3 or 4 days, while staying above its previous close. Then we can expect a steady 15% or so rise for about a month. I’m saying this for two reasons. #1, the SPX and RUT are showing a “head and shoulders pattern” which is very reliable for prediction. #2, the market historically tends to rise in April.

Vanessa is going to Capoocan for her town festival on the 5th of June. She’ll be leaving 20 May, and I’ll be alone here for 3 weeks. It’s OK, I’ll be busy with finals at the college.

Work is getting difficult, I must say. That’s the problem with planning to quit a job. Your motivation goes out the window. Nothing is actually different, but the job seems 200% harder.

We have vacation Apr 9-18th and Saudia is having a special, SAR1600 to Europe. That’s about $500. Good deal and I’m sorely tempted, because we could use a little change of pace around here. Unfortunately the expense of the trip itself is daunting. We went to Tuscany 3 years ago when the dollar was 1.25 to the euro, and it was quite expensive enough then. Spent about $5000 in 10 days, and we didn’t really do anything fancy, or go shopping. It will be even more with the euro hovering over $1.50 these days. So anyway I guess I have to resist temptation if I want to be a practical financial steward of this family. Shame though.

I really need a new laptop. My Dell XPS is sitting in my dad’s house in the USA with a broken video card. The video card is integrated into the motherboard and so replacing it will be expensive. When we get to the States in June I will, I think, order an Alienware laptop. In the meantime however I am using the office laptop and it stinks, with only 512 of RAM, which is ridiculous. If we lived in a normal place where you could do activities and such, this wouldn’t be such a problem, but here in Saudi, or primary outlet is our computers, and so a bad computer is really a bummer here. I have been tempted to drive to Jeddah and buying one, however, I am well aware that if I wait 2 months, I can get a much better laptop for much cheaper in the States. So I’m waiting, but it’s getting to me.

The Bug has prematurely entered his terrible twos. The terrible twos are indeed terrible, I must say. Primarily a toddler at this point is testing his boundaries and will scream uncontrollably if denied anything. It is wearing us out a little. Since Bug is a precocious child and has entered his terrible twos at 17 months, maybe they will pass precociously as well. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

I downloaded Billy Bragg and Wilco, and am realloy enjoying it. Wilco has always been one of the Cheetahhhhhhh’s favorites. Saw them in concert once actually.

I was wily enough to buy Citigroup at the open of trade yesterday, 10 call options, and made a 25% profit. What pleases me especially is that I timed the trade, both in and out, PERFECTLY. I sold precisely when it started falling. This is a difficult call and a trader’s biggest fear is selling too early or too late. Anyway it was an extremely pleasing night. I only wish I had invested more. Generally speaking I’m about 50% cash, because the market is so volatile at the moment.

There is some talk that we have hit the market bottom and there will be a rise. There is historical data to suggest that the market tends to rise a bit in early or mid April. I personally am doubtful that we have hit bottom, but then again, I am actually a very cautious investor. However until the EMA shows a clear uptrend, I think all talk is merely speculation, and you should make no business decisions based on it. Also I would argue that the bottom has not actually been tested; we never actually hit the Feb bottom again. I don’t mean to be contrary but if we compare the collapse of 2002-3 to now (recall that the current market collapsed after reaching the high of 2001), it is obvious that the decline has only started. Obviously there is a good chance that Federal intervention may avert a sustained decline like in 2002-3.

Furthermore we should keep in mind that the financial industry is completely unscrupulous and that much of the “news” we read is actually designed to get some poor working stiff in Iowa to put his money back in the market so that the sharks can gobble it up. So have we bounced up from the bottom, is the decline over? I reserve judgment until we have proof, and so should anybody with an ounce of sense.

Well things are good in Cheetopia. We’ve been watching Gossip Girl and enjoying it. Bug gets more rascally by the day and he also weighs 12 kilos now. Given I’m American and refuse to learn the metric system, 12 kils means nothing to me, but Van says that’s a lot. He does have a cute little pot belly. Unfortunately there’s not much more to report on the personal front. Life is so dull here in Saudi. Mind you, I keep busy with things like reading, etc, but it’s actually a challenge to blog sometimes, because we have so little actually occurring to report about. We’re quite excited to go to the States in June and are basically counting the days. We were thinking of taking a little trip to the Emirates for spring break in 2 weeks, but I nixed that due to the outrageous expense. The Emirates is not cheap, indeed I estimated conservatively that we’d need about $5000 for 10 days (including airfare). This is ridiculous when we could go to Switzerland or France for the same cost.

Visa had its IPO (initial public offering) 2 days ago and I bought $7000 worth. This was Wednesday. It so happens that this particular day, the market had a big fall, and I actually was losing a good chunk of money by the end of Wednesday. Thursday, however, the stock shot back up and I made some good money.

This was the first time I had purchased an IPO and unfortunately I bought right away at the open of trading. If I would have waited about half an hour for the stock to shilly-shally around, I would have made a much nicer profit.

Also because of the big drop on Wednesday, I was nervous about my profits on Thursday and placed a $1 trailing stop. Thus, also missing out on profits.

These points aside, Visa was quite profitable for the CHeetahhhhhhh. I would have stayed in longer without the trailing stop putting me out, actually. I may well buy Visa again on Monday. I anticipate it reaching about $75 in the near term. Mastercard quadrupled in value over about 15 months after its IPO, and has proven quite resilient to the bear market.

Today was a big day. I went whole hog with investment. I’ve invested small amounts in safe investments, such as mutual funds, but I had not taken the actual risky plunge into daily profits until now. I’ve been practicing for months and months and had been planning, in the back of my head, to start mid-march. Which was today.

Anyway I bought a put option on the RUT (Russel 2000 index) at 636PM Saudi time, and cashed out at 824PM with a 12% gain. I’m not going to say how much money I made because that’s nobody’s business, but 12% is damn good. I’m extremely pleased. A 12% gain would be satisfactory for a year with traditional investment portfolios. I made it in 2 hours and God bless. I wish I had some rum here so I could celebrate.

Sorry to my loyal readers for the lack of posts lately. Honestly, we have very little going on and so there is little to blog about. I am reading a lot, currently I’m reading the works of Peter Gemmell, which I’ve been enjoying. But mostly I am working on the stock market every day. I actually have 2 jobs now. One lasts from 930-230, and the other starts at 430PM which is 930AM New York time. I spend at least 2 hours a day on the stock market, often quite a bit more. I am trying to perfect my technique before I sink a lot of money into this endeavor. My brokerage account has the money sitting in it but I have been reluctant to go whole hog yet, partly because the market is very nasty at the moment and it’s hard to do well. Yesterday, for example: you would have to have been a Cray supercomputer to make money yesterday.
I got a job offer at an American university in Ras Al Khaima in the Emerates. Ras Al Khaima is the northern emirate on the border with Oman. The city itself has 2 golf courses, which would be nice considering there is no golf in the Hijaz here. Another good thing would be that Vanessa’s cousin is in Dubai, and my mother will be in Muscat next year. Anyway I am unsure what to do about this. By all accounts the UAE is a very nice place to live, and actually the UAE is a booming economy for expats. Indeed the UAE is the place to be if you’re an expat. About 20 years ago, if you were an expat and you wanted money, you went to Hong Kong. Now it’s the UAE, and everything about the country is booming, including real estate for expats. Well, as I said, I am a bit unsure what to do about it, I’m mulling it in my head.

Bug has started climbing everything, which is a bit disconcerting. Yesterday we found him standing on top of the laptop on the desk. For one thing he’s a big boy and will break the laptop. For another, he’s still a toddler and could fall and crack his head.

Yesterday we had out first brown-out (power failure) in all our time in Saudi. Everything went dark at about 9PM until midnight. The Bug got scared and called out “Daddy! Daddy!”