My favorite part of this blog is reading the comments from you folks. One individual, however, has made it his life's purpose to keep creating fake profiles and spamming the blog. It is time-consuming and demoralizing.

Because of this, I have cranked up the level of security to require everyone to authenticate their email. When you try to post a comment, it will (one time only, assuming this works!) ask you to authenticate your email address. It should send you an email, and once you click the URL, you should be good for life. I am hedging my words here a bit, because you never know if there's a bug in Disqus I'm not anticipating.

Even if you have nothing to say, try to post a comment here to make sure it works (not everyone has to do this; I'd just feel more comfortable if I see a few dozen comments successfully posted).

Hopefully this will be the end of Ned.

Every few weeks I do a spotlight session from 1:30 to 2:30 Tim Time (PST). Join me there via the Investor Toolbox if you're interested.

The trolling from Ned is getting a bit tiresome. There is a beefier level of authentication which Disqus permits, which is email verification. (The reason Ned keeps coming back is because he just creates new identities, none of which really email authentication). I might turn this on to see if it works, so don't be shocked if suddenly you can't post. It will be temporary.

As usual for Fridays, I'm probably going to "go dark" until late tonight. This was kind of a bizarre week, with almost all the attention focused on banks and the world of FAS/FAZ. I hope you had a good one.

I know it's been a defiant mo-fo, but I just love this short.

I am buying a decent-sized chunk of FAZ (I think this is a first for me; I'm not sure if I've ever bought FAZ in the past). Setting aside the technical reasons, let's just agree on this: we all recognize that the massive bounce in the likes of BAC and C is of the deceased feline variety. Nothing has really changed.