For all the countless hours I spend working on this blog for free, I'm asking you to take a few minutes to answer a poll. OK, the guilt trip is over now! Honestly, if you'd be kind enough to answer a few questions, I'd genuinely appreciate it. (And, sorry, since the market was so dull today, this is going to suffice for my afternoon entry).

Let me first explain why I'm even doing this poll in the first place. Some of you know that I founded Prophet.net many, many years ago, and I sold it over three years ago. Frankly, not much of anything has happened with the site (with the exception of ProphetCharts' introduction), and I am hoping for the opportunity to completely redo and "relaunch" the site later this year.

The present idea I have is to relaunch Prophet as trading platform for chartists. So you'd be able to trade directly from Prophet, have all your trading information reflected within the site, and (naturally) enjoy blogs (starting with Slope, and expanding into others) within the platform. I personally find there is a huge, huge amount of "secretarial work" I have to do when trading (cutting and pasting symbols from place to place, moving items from list to list based on whether I have a position in them, updating cash balances, entering new positions into MarketMatrix, and so on).

So I've got a few questions to ask to help me see if I'm on the right track or if I should take a different tack. (Note: the term drawn object, used below, means something you'd drawn in ProphetCharts, such as a trendline, a Fibonacci retracement, a horizontal line, etc). Please choose an answer for each question, and click "Vote" for each one.

Lastly, if you are a current (or former) Prophet.net user and have any other specific suggestions for really fundamental ways to improve the site, I'd love to hear from you (or just leave a comment in the comments section of this post). Thanks, everybody!

Wow. We should have recognized this one all along. Abby Joseph Cohen was given the heave-ho from her very prominent, very public role into some similarly-named but not nearly as visible job at GS on March 17th. In other words, the loudest permabull on the planet was zapped by GS on the exact day of the market's low. How's that for a contrary indicator?

Unfortunately, that's not something we can make use of again, except insofar as public spectacles like that actually mean something.

I'll also mention that my little foray into being bullish on housing/financing stocks made me a few hundred bucks here and there, but I've sold all of these off now. There are breakout failures all over the place. I got lucky, but I don't think a long-term hold thing would bring anything but misery.

Hopefully a little later today I'm going to ask you to return all the love I provide in this blog by answering some survey questions. Stay tuned.