Interesting day so far!

I went ahead and sold my FAZ for about a 5% one-day profit (about $5,000) since, frankly, I'm just a touch squirrely holding a 3x ETF in an environment like this. I am short a small position (10 contracts) the ES right now at a price of 907.50, stop at 916.25, and I also got blown out of FXP for about a $10k loss.

I went through my IRA holdings (that is, the little-bitty, high-risk, all-long positions) and, generally speaking, I like what I see. There are a couple that have run up quite fast which make me somewhat nervous:

I keep tightening up my stops on these longs, but in some cases, I am keeping them on a little bit of a longer leash, since I think the prospects during the coming weeks (and, hey, even maybe a couple of months!) are pretty encouraging. Such as………

As of this writing, my positions (all bought December 1st) in this portfolio are up an average of 23.77%, and I confess (with my head held low) that I've already harvested profits from a couple, even though they didn't get stopped out, which would have made the average higher.

The market continues to be very, very tough to read, and this insane "Detroit bridge" isn't helping. Stay sharp!

Sorry, no new content. I'm just really busy this morning. I'll think of something later.

I've been wanting to do this post for many, many months, but I've always held back, because I didn't want to give the subject helpful publicity. But now that he's off the Internet (again), I feel OK proceeding.

This is about a young man named Casey Serin who lives in the Sacramento, California area. I first learned about him a little over two years ago when I was on a (rare) business trip and picked up the copy of USA Today sitting in front of my hotel room door. On the front page of the business section was a large photo of Casey with an article about his real estate activities.

By "activities," I mean the purchase of over $2 million in various houses the then-24 year old individual with no meaningful income had purchased. In retrospect, the article about Casey was the most fantastic canary-in-a-coalmine story ever, because it showed how this completely unremarkable person was able to easily get loans (which he himself called "liar's loans") to buy properties, all with the hope of "flipping" them for a profit.

Now, at this point, those of you familiar with Casey are probably interested that I'm even mentioning him (the rest of you are probably wondering where the charts are). The reason this is such an interesting topic to me is, one, how indicative Casey's experience was in the context of the "Emperor has no clothes" mentality of real estate investing during 2002-2006, and two, because of the astonishing subculture that grew up around Casey.

Oh, before I go any further, let me introduce you to the subject at hand (the lovely woman to the left is his wife, who divorced him following all the real estate insanity):

The USA Article described how his properties were in various states of foreclosure (or getting there). While he had obviously intended to make a lot of money (as he frequently referred to it, "passive income") off real estate, it wound up wiping out whatever money he did have, destroying his credit, and, in the end, destroying his marriage.

When the article came out, Casey had started a web site called I Am Facing Foreclosure, which is where the entire subculture really began. His posts were mildly interesting, but the real action (sort of like Slope) was in the comments section. It didn't take long for an army of "haterz" to develop, and over the course of the next couple of years (and a few different blogs under different monikers), a bizarre and contentious relationship developed between Casey and his audience.

There are many, many blogs on the web about Casey's own blog (which has been shuttered………again) but for me the crowning achievement in all of this is Caseypedia, which is a brilliant collection of over 700 (!) articles about everything imaginable regarding Casey Serin – from his car to his hair to the blue ball he used as a chair (which recently appeared for sale on eBay, in an attempt to squeeze a few dollars out of whatever notoriety might remain).

For me, Casey represents everything that was wrong about real estate "investing" in the recent era – – its laziness, overconfidence, and cluelessness. If nothing else, click on the Random Article link on Caseypedia a few times to get a sense of the place. It's brilliant, and my hat is off to its creators.

Oh, and good luck trading today.

By chance I saw someone was asking how often I update my watch lists. The answer is: constantly, and in real-time. You can pretty much count on those lists representing my holdings at any given moment.

As for the market, I find this graph of the T-Bill rate fascinating, since it shows the continued willingness of the investing public to accept 0% returns instead of risking it on just about anything else.

On the one hand, there have been some really beefy returns on battered issues over the past week or so. I've taken profits here and there, but I've still got many long positions; here is one of them, which is spite of today's drubbing overall, held its own decently well.

At the same time, many issues have pushed themselves to the point where they are attractive shorts for the umpteenth time. As regular readers know, I bought my first FAZ ever for the first time today, and it wasn't a small position, either. Here's a good example of why I think the financials are heading for some weakness:

I continued to watch the EUR/USD very closely. This has been surprisingly strong, although it still has not broken out yet.

I have done quite well with the ES over the past couple of days. There is a bunch of trading from 895 to 915 that I think is going to act as a barrier to much upside action. I've trimmed my short position to 10 contracts on the ES, and I've tightened up my stop. There aren't any big economic reports until Thursday, but at that point you'll basically have four big days in a row packed with reports.

Take note of how abruptly the Dow turned yesterday once it reached the 23.6% level (shown here in bold); the bulls are eventually going to push their way higher, but not after getting severely bloodied. It's going to be a really slow, tough, ugly slog higher.

I've noticed many indices and ETFs are bumping against their 50 day moving averages. EEM is a very heavily-traded example (and notice the doji harami pattern).

The $NDX has this same relationship with its moving average, in addition to a decent shooting star.

As for energy, yesterday's rise seems to have been a one-hit wonder, but it's still really – – dare I use the word? – – cheap. Any sustained push higher on energy's part will do very powerful things for the market in general. It, like the EUR/USD, merits close watching.

I had been sort of ticked off at the market last month, but it's getting to be fun to trade again. I've got a terrific mix of long and short positions, and things……..for the moment………..make sense if you stay on top of the charts. Casual observers of the markets are guaranteed to be confounded for a long time to come.