It is late Saturday morning in Paris, and tomorrow morning I leave after having been here for two weeks. For a notorious homebody like myself, this is the single longest time I've ever been in any one place that wasn't home in my life.
The trip has been made possible – and quite a pleasure – by my kind host, Royal with Cheese, host of the ETF Corner. He provided housing, transportation, many meals out, tour guide services, and emergency computer repair trips. The man is a Slope Saint, and I'm very grateful. He made Paris a lifelong memory.
I also wish to extend my gratitude to Leisa and the guest contributors for preventing Slope from becoming a ghost town. Far from it, the traffic has actually been quite strong during the past two weeks. Although this will probably be my final post before I'm back in Palo Alto on Monday morning, I wanted to at least express my appreciation once more to Leisa. Her chance request to help out on the first day of my trip turned out, for her, to be a two-week commitment, and in some ways she's handled Slope better than I ever have.
As for the market……what can I say? Ironically, I scheduled this trip in early February of this year to honor my pledge to Royal that I'd like out to Paris when the market finally started to break. In fact, that was the market's bottom, and we've been doing nothing but climb ever since. The guys over at EWI seem to have reduced their expectations from (1) Apocalyptic to (2) Maybe-the-Dow-will-lose-100-points-one-day. It's pretty sad.
My bullish declarations on XHB turned out to be well-founded, as real estate continues – – inexplicably – – to go bananas. And my bearishness on HHH is working out, as that ETF was able to fall a meaningful amount even on Friday. But, generally speaking, the overall bearish case is getting increasingly fragile, as major ETFs keep exploding to new highs driven by forces that seem beyond the explanation of charts.
I'm going to look at the market with fresh eyes on Monday, once I'm back in the land of Goldman and the home of the Geithner. Until then, thanks, everyone, for making my vacation free at least of my concerns about this blog. It went well.
