It seems everyone’s calling top these days. Just off the top of my head I tried to think about how long it’s been going on and I thought about 1-2 months, and surely it’s been escalating lately, but as I happened to see the mentioning of this phenomenon in an earlier post I wrote this year it’s pretty much been around to some extent since this summer.

What’s been around since this summer? ‘Calling top’, what’s that?

Calling top is something mostly exercised by bloggers but also by TV pundits and analysts. It’s when you publicly state that you forsee date X to be the turning point of the market, to start a new leg down.

In the blogosphere, there are 10 bears for every bull and very few ‘call-it-as-I-see-it-day-by-day’ people. Some of the most followed blogs in the world have been bearish all through the bounce from March 9, and has since escalated their top calling on a weekly basis. Prechter’s been calling top twice now, once in August and once a couple of weeks ago. I wonder how many people sit with their shorted stocks, or worse; short term puts, trying to sweat it out. In any case, the last week it’s escalated even more and yesterday two of the most visited TA-blogs called top. Again. Will it be for real this time? Who knows. I certainly don’t.

I’m long the market, and I’ll probably miss the actual turnaround and sit long a bit into the next leg downwards. However, since it’s become such a sport now to call top, I’m going to dive in and give it my best shot, just for amusement. Not as an advice!

I predict we’ll see a range bound market with a slightly upward tilt until money comes with a price attached to it. As long as money comes with zero cost (extremely low interest rates) it is going to take an external, autonomous event of extreme proportions to turn this bull market around. Such events, no one can predict, so they don’t really count.

So, when interest rate hikes starts, that’s when I think we’ll see some serious signs of a turnaround. Not before. Until that time, it’s micro market actions that will rule i.e. a stock pickers market, rather than just being long the market as a whole.

Meanwhile, I’ve been in a guessing slump recently on my site aktiehajarna.se – where you get to predict the daily price actions of the Swedish market index – so I cannot brag about my track record of late in the market crystal ball area.

Aktiehajarna.se (Stock Sharks)

I’m a market nerd. I admit it. I couldn’t say for sure what the appeal is other than the prospect of making money, of course. If pressed, I’d boil it down to the competitive aspect.

If you think about it, the market’s almost the last place standing, where it’s good to be the best. It’s even encouraged. All other arenas have succumbed to a more PC attitude of “everyone’s equal”. Generally, I do think that’s a good thing but in sports and in the markets, you are still allowed to fight for yourself, still allowed to compete, still allowed to win.

So, it’s with this in mind I set up my latest project. In Swedish for the time being, since I’m a Swede and the Swedish market is where I do my trading. I’m calling it Aktiehajarna.se (which roughly translates into “stock sharks”) and it’s a site where you guess the market outcome, day by day, and compete against other ppl visiting the site.

Quite nerdish. Quite fun.

If it’s something that I find myself using in a couple of months from now, I may venture to translate it into English and make a version of it for S&P500. But right now, it’s tracking the Stockholm index (OMXS30) and you guess against that.

The design of the site is heavily inspired by StackOverflow, that I like a lot. It’s got a lot of logic to figure out which day is a trading day, which is not, when is the market open etc.

It hasn’t started all too well for me though. My girlfriend has beaten me to it as she became stock shark of the week for the second week of the beta test. This week has started just the same way. She’s totally in the lead. Again.

If this keeps up, I’m telling her to quit her dayjob and start making a living as an index futures trader.

From time to time there’s a great post coming out of the trader-blogosphere. This time from Tim Knight.

Read it here:
http://slopeofhope.com/2009/07/resilience.html

Finally someone told Morgan Stanley that e-mails as something other than formal or very asynch communication, is dead. They did the decent thing of publishing it to the broad public.

One shouldn’t gloat, but I can’t help but smile a bit at the hypster media gurus that speak of Twitter as the “be all end all” part of Internet. 

On a more serious note, I wonder if Google Wave will ever become something we use regularly. Can you see someone outside the deep tech community ever wanting to go through the hassle, when there’s already Messenger/Skype/What-have-you and indeed also Google Talk to use for instant messaging (the preferred means of communication of everyone I know, YES I choose it over phone), although I admit, Google Talk is in serious need of a UI facelift.

The real question remaning is of course how do we build upon this / utilize it, given that you believe that Morgan Stanley is correct in their observations? It’s certainly exciting to live in these times.

Morgan Stanley: How Teenagers Consume Media

In Sweden, there’s a general rule of 4-6 weeks of vacation during the summer. I’m no exception to that rule. I’m currently on week 2 of my 5 week vacation.

We live right near the ocean which has its benefits this time of year. I feel really privileged to get to wake up and have a view of the ocean right there when I open my eyes. Although at winter time there’s another story to be told.

Vacation time has so far been very much just that; vacation. I’m using my pen and pad to come up with some good designs for a site that I’m working on. So far it’s been a less than perfect result. I’m not giving up though, I’m just re-grouping.
So what about travelling? Haven’t decided yet. There’s still time.

Meanwhile I see that summer mode has hit PurposeGames.com as well. I guess we are all taking some time off from the computer screen. See you in a little while.

So it’s obvious that Twitter is a phenomenon. Everyone’s been signing up for one (or many) accounts. It doesn’t really matter that only a handful of those who sign up actually use it. It’s clearly been the top-of-the-shelf buzz maker for the last year or so.

Yes I have an account. But I don’t use it. Not yet, anyways.

I may not be the best “statistic sample of one” to measure the trend against, but the fact that I’m not a daily user of it tells me there are others who’ve done the same thing, and it makes me wonder why.

 I think it’s mostly because it is really at a plumbing / foundation concept at this stage, rather than a full fledged “ready-to-use” service, albeit a very popular foundation.

There are so many writers on twitter, so many different categories / areas written about at any given second so it’s becoming quite difficult to find your crowd to hang with and follow. However, it has great potential, as soon as someone figures out the services to build on top of it.

Obviously, there are a number of subsets of user types that are already making great things happen for them via Twitter. Jeremy Schoemaker for instance, uses it as an announcement tool for many of his online marketing adventures and is probably raking in a lot of money that way. Smart move. Kudos to him.

Others are using it to announce their actions in the financial markets. As you may know I’m nerdishly interested  in the financial markets, and a couple of services has already popped up out there acting as financial filters to Twitterers around the world stepping in and out of the market so you can follow the guru of your flavor without having to “know of him / her” beforehand.

I think that’s basically what’s going to happen around Twitter – or any other “mini-broadcasting” engine that will be available; it’s the services on top of it that will make the real hay.  

This poses a lot of questions around the business model for Twitter, but at least they have the attention of a lot of people now (traffic), so they’re in a great position to leverage upon their foundation concept and offer these services themselves. The only question remaining is how to go about making it happen. This is the area to follow for the coming months. I wish there was a Twitter channel for it that I could follow.

S&P 500 June 17, 2009 - Weekly Chart

The trading / finance / guru-wannabe blogosphere right now is 99 to 1 certain that we’re on the brink of a major correction. Downwards. Of course. Because anyone who’s a serious blogger on the markets is a perma bear.

So, everybody and their dog too is absolutely convinced that we’ll be – at least – revisiting 880 on the S&P500 which usually means that you’re discounting a visit to 850.

Just about here is where it gets kinda spooky. What’s that old contrarian trading rule again, “You can’t make money going along with the general conception”…

What to do then when the whole community seems to be sure that we are about to fall off a cliff. Well, why not go all in? Be the contrarian you’re longing to be. Be the contrarian that average Joe is already by not knowing better and just following the crowd.

The crowd right now is moving money into the market, and with such a downperiod behind us, my guess is that it’s going to take a little more than some 50 bloggers thinking that we’ll go down to move us in any other way than up.

That doesn’t suggest that we can’t see 880 on the S&P. But that’s small movement stuff that you couldn’t possible hope to catch / time if you are not a very active trader, which I am not.

So let me say that I’m continuing to be long the market. If not for anything else than to satisfy the uber-contrarian within me.

Ever since I gave up on Netscape Navigator as my default browser sometime in the late nineties (read: since IE came bundled with Windows), I’ve just not cared that much about checking out other browsers. Frankly, there’s just so much you can expect from a browser.

Or so I thought.

I’ve known about – and used – Firefox from time to time when I wanted to check some stats from a plugin or so, for a long time now. However, I never felt compelled to make it my standard browser since the plugins alone didn’t make it worthwhile. IE was there. It’s easy to start and has felt faster (or rather have had another style of loading images that appealed to me more than that of FF). All until now.

So what has changed? Well, mostly the really nice CSS 3.0 (or whatever flavor it is) tag support became available AND generally picked up by the developer community. Just look at the latest version of Wordpress – the admin interface that is – and compare it to IE8, which btw was a step down from IE7 which is still my favorite browser due to its light feeling.

Anyways, this is me saying I’m moving over to try FF as my default browser for a while. It’s finally worth it as the web is a more beautiful place with it, and NO Chrome just doesn’t cut it. Not yet anyways. It’s display of moz-radius and the rest is just awful.

I was interviewed about PurposeGames and the story behind it by a Journalist from El Periódico which is a daily paper in Barcelona.

Today it got published. You can read it here. (only in Spanish)

I’ve been developing an End-Of-Day (EOD) quote updater for my charting program Trader’s Workbench. I have the basic update functionality available from within the workbench, but as I felt that this might be something that other people could use, I would like to hear from YOU. What do you think about it?

Are people using this kind of tool (end-of-day quote updating tool) anymore or does every charting application out there now, come with a more or less obligatory quote update service?  Is there anyone left doing their analysis on End-Of-Day data?

I do, and I need a reliable quote source so I developed Quotes Library.

I went with the development paradigm of less-is-more. I wanted a software that did one thing really good, and that had an interface that consisted of as few buttons as possible.  I’m pretty happy with the result. Let me tell you about the characteristics.

Quotes Library does the following:

• Update your MetaStock Formatted Quotes from any source
• Recalculates stock quote when split occurs
• Export/Import from Excel
• Ability to create new files from scratch, filling them with data from any source

That’s all. I think that the most important part is in the first bullet above. Ability to update from any source. This means that if you live in India and are interested in your local markets, you can use this tool just as well as someone in the States interested in Nasdaq quotes or in Sweden.

How’s that possible?

I’ve developed this tool with a plug-in architecture where the structure of any webpage can be described in order to get the tool to work with the web source YOU prefer. So for any new source I need, I just add the rules to read the quotes from that webpage, and apply it to the already existing application, without recompiling the main application. Just releasing a new .DLL for the source in question. Pretty neat I think.

For instance, I use Yahoo when I add a new stock to follow. But the daily update of Yahoo is usually a little slower than my local source that only keeps today’s quotes. Then I can use etrade, Avanza, Nordnet or whatever source keeps today’s quotes, to get fresh quotes right at the close of the market, instead of having to wait for Yahoo to get today’s quotes.

So, the brilliance here is that without having to re-distribute the whole application, it could be used for any market, anywhere using any provider. You don’t even have to have an account with that provider which means the cost of using the Quotes Library tool is zero.

I don’t think it’s an immoral thing to do either, since Yahoo is distributing their quotes for personal use for free, and the other sources out there does the same but for today’s quotes. Not historical. All this tool is doing, is to make the collection of the already free quote data more efficient and automatic, instead of manually having to collect it.

That’s it. I’d really like your impressions of such a tool, and if you think it could be of interest to you. I appreciate it. Thanks.