Greetings from the McDonald’s of East Palo Alto, which has replaced the sketchy Sports Page Bar as my hangout for doing posts. I am the only non-day-laborer here. Honest. I plant myself here because it’s right next to the newest SuperCharger station, plus it has good WiFi. And they play nothing but music from the early 1980s. So I’m a happy guy. Oh, and I don’t have the prospect of mowing lawns the rest of the day. Instead, I get to write posts for you good people.
Last week was a maelstrom of activity. I mean, setting aside barn-burners like tweets that caused global financial mayhem, just the scheduled stuff was action-packed:
The week we face ahead is, shall we say, a little quieter. This, plus keep in mind that earnings season is doing to be dying down in a big hurry.
This is fine by me! I’d rather not have a knot in my stomach every time a scheduled event comes up. Of course, that’s not the real risk. It’s those surprise tweets that send everything into a tizzy.
Still, it was the weakest week of the year, so it was my strongest. My life remains a careful balance of building up Slope as a business, developing new products, dealing with any bugs or problems that come up, writing posts, and doing the dozens of duties, dogly and otherwise, required in my personal life. It’s an interesting juggling act, but one which works well as long as I’m in the rhythm of it.
As for the ol’ portfolio, it remains aggressively short, but I definitely have some dry powder, but just to ease up on the risk some, but also to take advantage of any new opportunities which pop up. The one area I’ll scold myself – – and this happens every time there is a really meaty selloff – – is my lack of patience with setups that took time to develop, but in the end, were catastrophes for shareholders. FLR and AXL leap immediately to mind, as I have long touted those as great setups, but I didn’t stick around long enough to benefit. I hope some of you folks did, though!
