James Lileks got his gazebo built.
In other news we all sat in the rain to watch baseball yesterday and a vole ran through our kitchen this morning. The vole ran straight into our cat who couldn't be bothered to even get up, let alone do her catly duty and actually snag the bugger.
Meanwhile, the futures are up this morning and the stock market will open with buyers outweighing sellers. One of the more amusing parts of toiling in the markets every day is hearing newsbreaks like: "the Dow was down today on war jitters..." or "the markets were up today on news that the Emperor of China scratched his keyster..." I call this Arkansas Marksmanship ( with apologies to the state the gave us The Clinton Plague). Arkansas Marksmanship is when you shoot your rifle into the side of the barn six times then walk over and paint a target around the bullet holes. Nice grouping, L'il Abner. The people that tell you "why" the market was up or down today are employing reverse engineering. They see what the market did and they try to come up with a plausible explanation. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. What they always are is meaningless.
Today's example before the market opens: the election in India this weekend. Will that fact make your stocks go up? Down? Not matter? By 4PM someone will tell you that your "stocks were_____ on news of the Indian election." Were they correct? Did most traders even know there was an election in India this weekend?
