Snooking, Tweeting and Missing You

These harmless snook in the picture have no idea of their appointment with my dinner table starting today. I'm in Southwest Florida with the family and thus far have been warming up with snapper and sheepshead off the pier, but the heavy artillery is being readied as we speak, and I am now going out for the fun stuff with my son JD, snook and redfish in the beautiful mangroves out in the back country on Sanibel Island.

Evidently I missed some fun long side action the last couple of days last week, but my mood is too happy and relaxed to be the cynic so I will just say that I hope everybody kicked ass last week and that you didn't find yourselves leaning the wrong way. I'm still trying to figure out how WFC had "record" earnings and am conflicted on what is really under the covers there. GS thinks it's a good time to sell stock again, smart move on their part, feed the ducks when they're quacking I always say. Why is it eerily reminiscent to me though of when Blackstone and Fortress jumped out of the gate a couple years back when they sold their stock.

I've been coming down here for fifteen year and fell asleep to the sound of crashing waves---and residential real estate prices, as I had the local 24/7 real estate channel on. Buzzwords and phrases that I heard ad nauseum were "reduced again" "very motivated seller" "owner will finance" free golf for life"........ Homes that I looked at down here four years ago are now trading at anywhere from 40 to 60% discounts and I'm talking sweet homes, on the water. Thankfully, I didn't listen to the bonehead realtors back then that were drinking mass quantities of their own kool aid, thinking housing values would be an uninterrupted ascent on the stairway to heaven. Florida has always been referred to as "God's waiting room" now I know why, especially if you bought at the top. I'd feel alot better being down 50% in stocks than I ever would be holding some of this stuff. I have the ability to make that back in stocks in reasonably short order, with housing I'm subjected to too many variables, quite a messy dynamic. This will last much longer than the geniuses on CNBC will tell you, I feel good putting my track record against theirs anyway.

Speaking of CNBC, (Crappy Nonsense By Charlatans--just made that up) they did a fairly good job of NOT telling the public the real deal about Stocktwits but I never expected anything "honest" from them anyway. Any entity that could make Cramer their "pointman" or "spokesperson" tells you all you really need to know. By my count, the network owes my buddy Soren Macbeth another 14:32 of fame as they ended the piece with a troglodyte from Morningstar, you know the mutual fund rating agency that had 5 stars on just about every fund they follow, even though over 90% of funds lost money in 2009. How dare they? That's CNBC. Thankfully they owe us nothing and Soren and Howard Lindzon and all the good people on Stocktwits know that. Others though, can continue to get cutting edge info from Joe " I wear orange polyester shirts from Botany 500" Terranova, Karen "deer in headlights, I'm just a value player" Finerman, Tim "I'm long every emerging market every day even though the world is burning" Seymour, Guy "if there is a big volume day in a stock it always means the bottom and buy USB everyday" Adami, and all the others on the show that don't understand that CASH and sometimes DOING NOTHING is also a phenomenal strategy.

OK, so I ranted a bit anyway, it's my friggin' blog.

I will be back at the screens Wednesday unless of course Somali pirates don't hijack me going back to New York. The newsletter resumes next weekend and I apologize for the two week interruption as I've travelling. I will post tomorrow most likely at some point, have a great weekend and I miss you all.