The Haiku of Finance for 11/30/20

Volatile return

Hedge move in both directions

Wide premium range

The Limerick of Finance for 02/08/15

Currency hedging sees high demand
Damping dollar swings no one had planned
Greece and oil posed a shock
Traders sped up the clock
Europe's flames of uncertainty fanned

Updating the Alpha-D for 09/22/14

I experienced an involuntary change in my portfolio holdings last week.  The cash-covered put position I had sold under GDX in my IRA was exercised against me when the market price declined past the strike price.  My holdings of GDX are now slightly larger than before, at a purchase price that is very low for this ETF's historical price.  This is no problem for me.  I knew the risk and I don't mind owning a little more of a cheap partial hard asset hedge against inflation.

My other option positions on FXA, FXC, and FXF expired unxercised.  I am still long those ETFs.  I have decided not to write any new covered option positions this month on any of my securities.  I may have pushed my luck enough already given the macroeconomic headwinds building against this very calm market.

I am still long a put position against FXE, as I believe the euro is doomed.  The G20 is getting increasingly concerned about Europe's potential for renewed growth.  I believe they know more than what they reveal in public.

I sit mostly in cash, awaiting something that breaks with a loud noise.  The list of other potential hard asset hedges I have considered for my own portfolio will have to wait until their prices are low enough for me to revisit them.

Nota bene:  I am seriously considering getting a lot more cryptic with these discussions of my own portfolio.  Talking about my money might be more fun for me if I take extra steps to discourage people from copying my actions.

Updating the Alpha-D Portfolio for 06/23/14

This weekend's options expiration made me get busier than usual in attending to my portfolio.  My long positions in GDX and FXC rose through the strike prices of the covered calls I wrote last month.  Those securities were called away and I repurchased them all in a wash sale, with no net change in the number of shares I own.  I wrote a new batch of covered calls on all of my holdings in GDX to expire next month, but I wrote no options on FXC.  I am pleased to note that the gold mining sector is beginning to recover from its doldrums and that Canada's rising inflation rate makes currency traders think Canada will raise interest rates.  Those are not the specific reasons why I own GDX and FXC but they do move those ETFs' share prices from time to time.

My covered calls on FXA and FXF expired unexercised.  I renewed the covered calls on FXF but I could not find a way to make any lucrative covered calls work on FXA.  I maintain those positions in the Australian and Swiss currencies against eventual US dollar hyperinflation.  That's also why I maintain my long positions in GDX and FXC.

One difference for me this month is the selection of additional options.  I wrote a cash covered put position under GDX, which I haven't done in a while.  I am risking the possibility that the economics of the gold mining sector are able to rebound.  If I am wrong, then I may at some point be forced to buy some more GDX at a very low price if shares are put to me.  I considered writing puts under FXA and FXC because I was looking for a way to make some extra cash, but it just didn't prove economical for me given this month's option chains.  I may regret not writing covered calls this month on FXA and FXC but the premiums were just too paltry to risk the shares being called away.

Oh yeah, I'm still long a put position against FXE, expiring next year.  If the euro cracks up I should make a small windfall, and if it doesn't then I will buy more long-dated puts.  I'm still sitting on a pile of cash.  That pile awaits a major market correction.  I note with satisfaction that public statements from the Fed and IMF indicate that crisis planning is in full swing.  The beginning of some market crisis will be a trigger for me to consider committing my cash to something.

Note bane:  This is not investment advice.  I have to repeat that admonition because there are still some idiots in the world who mistakenly tell me they think I'm an investment advisor, even though the home page of my Alfidi Capital website says I'm not.  People are idiots.  

The Haiku of Finance for 04/29/14

Big bank bad bond bet
Exposure to inflation
No hard asset hedge

The Haiku of Finance for 04/26/14

Essence of finance
Calculate cost, risk, and hedge
Estimate profit

The Haiku of Finance for 03/10/14

Hedging with futures
Substitute for adverse move
Not a pure play bet

The Limerick of Finance for 02/23/14

The improper use of a hedge
Puts volatile assets on edge
Such approach to risk
Deserves a good fisk
Options should steer clear of the ledge

First Consideration Of World Oil Price Components

I got thinking about the components of the market price for oil after I finished my analysis of the US Navy's renewable energy policies in my latest Third Eye OSINT article.  That article was oriented to military affairs, and this article is for business.  I'll develop the complete breakdown in a longer report to publish at Alfidi Capital, but I'll start here with some basic components.

Production cost.  This varies by wellhead but investment banks covering the oil sector figure some broad averages each year.  The best way to look at production cost (for my purposes anyway) is by country and then by type of oil:  light sweet, heavy, shale, etc.  The EIA has a good breakdown of oil and gas production costs in the US.

Transportation cost.  This includes shipping by ocean carrier, pipeline, and rail.  Oil imports to the US move primarily by ocean carrier and pipeline.  The Association of Oil Pipe Lines (AOPL) has a general breakdown of the traffic but I don't know when that data was published.  Barge movement plays little role for unrefined petroleum but is a major transportation mode for refined petrochemical products.  Platts breaks down oil shipping prices by seaborne routes.  I'm too cheap to pay for Platts' data so I'll have to wing it with open source data I find for free.  FERC's oil pipeline page shows that their indexing methodology for rate changes is tied to the BLS Producer Price Index for Finished Goods (PPI-FG) plus a statistical adjustment.  I find it interesting that the AOPL mentions several alternate methods FERC may use to adjust its approved pipeline rates.  That AOPL link is so intriguing I used it twice in a paragraph.

Security premium.  RFF studied the oil price security premium in 2010.  I mentioned this study in my Third Eye OSINT article (see the link up top).  Platts analyzed a security premium specific to the Middle East in 2011. 

Other factors.  Stanford's Energy Modeling Forum studied oil price determinants in a 2010 workshop.  Their conclusions considered asymmetric information, inventories, and futures market speculation.  I have not yet decided whether insurance cost gets its own special treatment or should be counted as a subset of production and transportation.  I should also account for the US tax code's oil depletion allowance.  The International Energy Agency's (IEA) statistics site has a lot of pricing and volume data but I will dig deeper to see if they have cost data.  Likewise, the Oil and Gas Financial Journal has plenty of current market data but for this project I need to see if they have cost breakdowns buried somewhere.

This analysis is by no means mature.  Like I said above, it's more suitable for a longer report.  These components matter for both the West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude prices.  I'll develop each of the ideas above from the perspective of an energy contract trader who must hedge the price of oil.  I want to understand energy price movements so I may use futures contracts to hedge my own portfolio.  Financial engineering techniques for energy and other hard assets may prove very useful to me during a hyperinflationary period in the US.  

Forgetting FX Invest West Coast 2013

I attended last year's FX Invest West Coast thinking I could benefit from the thinking of serious currency investors.  The main thing I learned last year is that much of this finance sub-sector is driven by quant philosophies that have little to do with finding value in the real world.  I tried to register several times this year but never got a final confirmation to attend.  Maybe someone who attended last year took offense at what I wrote about stupid quant people wasting their time with Rube Goldberg trading mechanisms.  I stayed away today but here's my blind-item critique of the FX Invest West Coast 2013 agenda.  I have no idea what they actually said, or if they even showed up, because I wasn't there.  My comments below refer to publicly available information that relates to the topics of the scheduled program items.

CalPERS had something to say as an opener.  My blog article of what CalPERS had to say last year really laid into them so I can't imagine what they could have said today.  CalPERS lost my respect ever since they switched from activist investing in undervalued companies to doubling-down on illiquid, leveraged products.

FRBNY spoke on PVP settlement and replacement cost.  The New York Fed has all you need to know about their payment versus payment best practices in a 2010 white paper.  The standard definition of replacement cost means little in currency investing unless it applies the BIS best practices for reducing foreign exchange settlement risk.

BlackRock was supposed to say something about currency beta and whether active or passive investing in currency matters.  I just shake my head whenever somebody uses beta to measure anything other than a single security that belongs to a broad index.  IMHO anyone who uses active strategies in currency is merely gambling, not investing.  Currency is cash, and cash is for passive holdings until it finds an active use in some other asset.

A bunch of panels discussed BRIC currencies, ECB policies, and electronic trading platforms.  Folks, I've discussed all of those things on my blog and no so-called "expert" can hold a candle to my level of thinking.  I haven't blogged about swap execution facilities (SEFs) but I don't use them.  I suspect that the wide use of SEFs will eventually reduce the alpha that active currency managers can generate by allowing more traders to arbitrage away pricing anomalies.  It will be just like Reg D destroying the alpha available to managed futures traders.  Kiss those big bonuses goodbye, quants.

The Indian rupee (INR) has done badly this year.  No kidding.  Quants need to stop trying to day-trade this currency and start looking at India's macroeconomic fundamentals.  India's central bank is considering radical plans to play games with its gold reserves in an attempt to stabilize the rupee and India's current account deficits.  Raising short-term interest rates is the right thing to do.  You'd think quants would see that as a buy-and-hold opportunity, but quants don't think that way.

One speaker showed an interest in discussing emerging market currencies as an inflation hedge.  I've discussed that on my blog but I only like currencies from countries with low debt-to-GDP ratios and a strong rule of law.  Throwing emerging currencies into the mix just won't do it for me.  You'll end up owning currencies from Argentina, Venezuela, and other places where demagogues confiscate wealth and hyperinflate the economy.  No thanks.  I would have been squirming in my seat if I had to listen to a formal talk on the glory of EM currencies.

The one topic I might have liked would have been currencies as alternatives to bonds.  My currency ETFs are paying me a better yield than my US dollar cash holdings.  Like I said above, only low debts and strong rule of law matter in finding currencies to use as hedges or income alternatives.  Once hyperinflation destroys the US dollar, my currency ETFs will enable me to buy US dollar assets cheaply.  Currency is cash, and foreign currency in a hyperinflated economy enables wealth accumulation.

This FX Invest West Coast conference is still in progress as I'm writing this article.  I didn't miss much besides free food and coffee.  It may be just as well that I sit this conference out if they can't have me as a speaker.  I would probably offend everyone in the room with my strongly held belief in the limited portfolio role for currency strategies.  Currency is cash, and cash is productive in only limited ways:  investing in assets or paying expenses.  Currency can also hedge cash exposures but those exposures must be committed to something serious.  I have lots of cash sitting in my portfolio because not many assets in the capital markets are attractively priced and I have very few expenses to pay.  I'm too cheap and too smart to be of use to many of the numbskulls in the professional currency investing circuit.  It's their loss and they'll never know it.  

Hearing John T. Reed's Seminar At MoneyShow SF 2013

John T. Reed was back this year for another lively talk at the MoneyShow San Francisco.  I've followed his writings for several years and I attended his talk at the 2012 MoneyShow.  The dude shared a wealth of minute details assembled from research he conducted for his book How to Protect Your Life Savings from Hyperinflation and Depression, 2nd Edition.  I got the first edition and I've taken many of his suggestions very seriously.

John's talk this year introduced a ton of tips from his book and his recent exploration of the US-Canadian border.  His overall approach is still familiar to his longtime readers, that managing hyperinflation or depression risks is like having homeowner's insurance.  "Being early is the same as being wrong" is a bad strategy only if it's pursued at high cost or high risk, like hedge fund manager John Paulson's gold strategy.

John wants us to owe US dollar denominated debts and not own dollar-based fixed-income instruments.  Liquidity is important to pay US bills during hyperinflation and owning hard assets isn't enough.  John's book goes into detail on liquid hard assets that are suitable for barter but bill paying requires access to currency.  The currency of choice should not be contaminated by US hyperinflation and must lie beyond the reach of US capital controls.  I believe CurrencyShares ETFs held in US brokerage accounts can accomplish this goal but John prefers solid currencies held in banks.  My readers know that I am long FXA, FXC, and FXF in my own US accounts (that's money from Australia, Canada, and Switzerland).  Check out his writings on the subject; he explains his approach better than I can.  I intend to have a Canadian bank account open just as soon as I determine which one has the strongest capital adequacy numbers under the Basel III accord.

Speaking of currencies, John expects the currency markets to be the harbinger of US hyperinflation if non-US investors decide to sell dollar holdings all at once.  Foreign investors and central banks that get fed up with Fed QE will cause a run on the dollar that will shock Americans in no time flat.  We can then watch the graphs at MIT's Billion Prices Project turn sharply vertical and stay that way.

John adapts his real estate knowledge into concepts that work as inflation/deflation hedges.  He likes life estates, Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECMs), and a special concept he calls "reverse defeasance" that converts US dollar annuities into foreign currency lump sums.  He also expects hyperinflation to destroy the value of long-term leases in commercial properties, so landlords should protect themselves by only making month-to-month lease agreements that they can can raise to keep up with inflation.  John considers REITS in self-storage and timber harvesting to be acceptable inflation hedges in a liquid portfolio.

I only had one comment during John's talk.  Buying preserved food is a good hedge against rising food prices but I mentioned that we need not worry about the expiration dates on canned goods.  I've read about studies conducted by both the US Department of Agriculture and US Army that validated the nutritional content of ordinary canned food more than forty years after the canning date.  Here's an NPR story from 2012 that validates the discovery that canned food retains much of its quality for decades, based on research that was done in the 1970s on canned food from the 1930s!  The USDA even has a handy-dandy Complete Guide to Home Canning, in care of the University of Georgia's National Center for Home Food Preservation.  I wonder whether Uncle Sam will be able to keep this excellent research funded during hyperinflation.

Hey John, here are two action items to consider for one of your future articles.  They make sense to me as additional tools your readers can use as inflation/deflation hedges.

Item 1:  Home food production with aquaponics.  Backyard gardening is a diet supplement and affordable alternative to paying inflated prices in stores.  Consider an aquaponics installation as a closed-system production method that produces food constantly regardless of weather or available space.  Aquaponics systems can be maintained indoors, out of the view of potential food thieves in the neighborhood.  The only downside is that buying the implements may attract the attention of law enforcement agencies who monitor gardening shops to see who's cultivating illicit stuff.  Maybe it would be wise to invite the local chief of police over for a tour of one's aquaponics installation so the brass knows it's legal.  Here's a YouTube video produced by Purdue University demonstrating aquaponics.  I think this can be done in a garage, basement, commercial warehouse, or self-storage unit.

Item 2:   Common stocks in hard asset sectors.  Thanks for mentioning my currency ETF ideas in your Reed Theory Fund article.  There are other things investors can select if they don't want to abandon their IRAs or other tax-advantaged US investment accounts.  Common stocks in companies that generate revenue from hard assets - specifically mining, energy, and agribusiness - already have geologically confirmed hard asset inventories that they liquidate on world markets.  Some of the world's largest basic materials companies are domiciled outside the US and earn revenue in currencies other than dollars.  BHP Billiton (mining, energy) is in Australia and Potash Corp. (fertilizer for agribusiness) is in Canada, two of your choice countries.  These types of stocks typically pay cash dividends and have option chains available for covered call writing.  If desperate consumers in Europe, Japan, and the US crave food, fuel, and basic commodities, these types of producers stand to benefit.

Excuse me, but I need to get over to my bank and pick up a few rolls of pennies and nickels as soon as the MoneyShow is over.  Those are John's equivalent of put options that retain their face value in deflation but have tremendous intrinsic value in hyperinflation if changes to legal tender laws allow investors to unlock the coins' melt value.

Full disclosure:  John T. Reed did not compensate me in any way for this article.  I do not receive any royalties from his books or other engagements.  I'm sharing these insights because John does great work and investors need all the information they can handle.  

The Haiku of Finance for 03/22/13

Option hedging plan
Plot out the break-even point
Long and short combo

Options "Inside Baseball" From the Condor and Butterfly

I attended one of the Options Industry Council's advanced seminars here in the SF Bay Area last night.  I wanted to see how they presented options strategies and needed some refresher education on spreads.  I don't need to rehash the structures of condors and butterflies here. Think of this as an "inside baseball" look into aspects of the financial sector that sometimes escape public notice.

The audience was sufficiently mixed to reflect the Bay Area's diversity.  Every ethnicity was present among the 100 or so attendees but they were overwhelmingly male and older (mid-50s and up).  I noticed that almost everyone in attendance wore a pressed collared shirt, including me.  This one wardrobe choice contrasted markedly with a particular real estate seminar I once attended, where everyone dressed like a slob.  These folks also asked intelligent questions.  It was obvious that this OIC crowd was upscale, educated, and successful based on their sartorial details and knowledge.  These were serious makers, not ignorant takers.  Quite a few had attended these seminars before.  I had to miss the session on "Greeks" the previous day but a lot of these folks were there and their questions reflected what they learned.

The instructor was a trading floor pro with a background on the major exchanges.  He mentioned the Silicon Valley Options Group as a source of wisdom for traders, so that's one more thing I need to go experience on my very long list.  One funny guy in this class quipped about a trading strategy we wouldn't learn today - the "albatross."  Unlike the condor and butterfly, it's the one that doesn't fly.  Har-de-har-har.  Investors can use that line for every trade that doesn't work out.

Option types are proliferating because IMHO financial innovators need things to invent after they get bored with hedge fund algos.  Guess what . . . mini-options are now available representing 10-share lots.  I haven't seen them in my online brokerage's execution page so maybe you need a specialist to trade them.  I think that's one way for smaller investors to write covered calls on stocks with three-digit prices without overconcentrating them in a portfolio.  Other special options on stock splits, reverse splits, and other corporate actions have been around for a while.  Those can look cheap but have huge exposure.  I found out the hard way some years ago on that score.  It was cool to learn that weekly options now have 20% of all option volume.

Here's something about options brokers I never learned when I worked in a large retail brokerage myself.  A live broker always executes the buy leg of a spread first, then the sell leg.  Why anyone would call a live broker today when online brokerage orders offer instant execution is beyond me, but some old-school technophobe fogies must need it.

The market for reverse conversion strategies helps keep calls and puts generally in parity through options arbitrage.  I've known about put-call parity since long before I wrote a special report on what it can indicate about the state of the market.

Pin risk occurs when a security closes very near the strike price of an option at expiration.  This forces an option to be assigned when the counterparty orders it executed.  It usually aligns with a huge open interest option position because the supply and demand for a security at that price will make it "pin" to the strike price of that open position.  It's really a risk factor caused by stock investors hedging their positions close to expiration.  Large investors who "pound" a stock near expiration may have covered calls and don't want the position called away.  This can be costly and I wonder if large investors think about whether the cost of opening long puts or shorting the stock is worth preserving an unrealized gain.

I was surprised to learn that most option traders don't hold butterflies to expiration but close them out.  I'd like to find research confirming that discovery.  They also tend to unwind an open spread one leg at a time.  These oddities make me wonder if option traders just wing it (huh-huh, pun on condors and butterflies) when they enter a position.  I've unwound only a handful of option positions in my life.  The vast majority I held to expiration.  That's just the way I am.  I don't second-guess myself halfway through the execution of a strategy in which I have confidence.

Expected volatility has a big influence on whether spreads are profitable.  I personally do not forecast the movements of stock prices or other things because the future is unknowable and many forecasting methods in finance are little more than voodoo.  Some of the investors here revealed that they use technical chart patterns as stock forecasting tools to select their option strategies.  Oh boy, that's just great.  I consider that to be an amateurish and faux-sophisticated way to approach investing.

There are some ways that an open short call can be assigned to an option writer before expiration, like when it's in-the-money just before the ex-dividend date and the declared dividend will be greater than the short call's time value.  Market makers are the decision-makers on early assignment.  Pros seek out big open call positions close to the ex-date because they want to assign that call and collect dividends, which is often called "trading dividends."  I traded dividends myself (without options) when I was a beginning investor but it's a habit I outgrew when I discovered fundamental methods of analysis.  It's also worth noting that the risk of early assignment is only present for stocks and ETFs that pay dividends, so a no-dividend policy obviates this risk.

Did you ever wonder why some spreads are called condors and butterflies?  I never did but the instructor told us anyway.  A real live butterfly is narrower than a condor, measured by wingspan relative to the body.  The analogy to options is that a condor spread is wider because it stretches across four strike prices instead of a butterfly's three.  'Betcha didn't know that.  I didn't care all that much but maybe someone out there does care.

Condors work best when there's lots of liquidity in an options chain with narrow spreads.  The iron butterfly can have higher margin costs than its condor counterpart.  These insights beg the question of why anyone would choose a butterfly over a condor.  Beats me.  The iron butterfly gives me the impression that risk-seeking investors would prefer it over the iron condor.  The thing about condors that deters me from using them is the chance of a "blowout trade" happening when an investor is tempted to keep shorting the condor's wings while the stock price keeps dropping.  Ah, no thanks.

My own preferred option strategies are covered calls, cash-covered puts, short straddles, or simple directional bets for speculation (like my recent bet against the euro).  I don't need NASDAQ Level 2 quotes and I don't need to see the up-to-the-nanosecond national best bid and offer (NBBO) to decide to execute any options strategies.  I suspect that many options strategies are like the technical indicators that drive some forecasting, in that they exist only because market makers and analysts want them to exist.  It's a way to create a body of knowledge just to make pros look knowledgeable to outsiders.  There need to be more academic studies on things like the ROI of condors and butterflies to determine whether they truly add value to a portfolio.  The audit trails inside the longest-lived hedge funds probably have enough data for many such studies.  Civilization needs serious studies because I'm just not convinced that more complex strategies add more value to a portfolio than simple hedges.

None of the sample strategies the seminar examined had any losing trades.  Of course not!  Real trades do lose money from time to time.  Mine certainly have.  I've done enough options trades over the years that the winning trades more than make up for the losers and my net worth has grown as a result.  The sting of a losing trade creates a long and indelible memory for a serious investor.  I've learned from each of my losses.  Read about a few of them in my older blog articles.

One final episode amused me.  One guy standing near the soft drink table in back said he thought the ongoing financial crisis in Cyprus wouldn't hurt the U.S. economy.  So many people are oblivious, even among serious investors!  He truly believed that Americans would keep buying housing no matter what happened on that Mediterranean island.  I wasn't inclined to run through the dominoes of Cypriot bank insolvencies, a forced euro exit, Continental bank runs, more PIIGS euro exits, activated Fed-to-ECB swap lines that risk a run on the dollar, and all of the other grey swans my regular readers have seen me write about for years.  I just shook my head and grabbed a soda.  That was the only option I needed last night.  There will be many chances in the near future to execute other options.

The Haiku of Finance for 12/17/12

Debt would make some sense
Buying a cash-flow asset
To hedge inflation

The Haiku of Finance for 10/17/12

Show me currency
Low-debt and high-growth country
Useful dollar hedge

The Haiku of Finance for 08/17/12

Liquid hard assets
Small lots of useful items
Inflation hedging

The Haiku of Finance for 07/13/12

Huge JPM loss
Blown trade is on Dimon's head
No control at all

The Haiku of Finance for 06/29/12

Buying currency
Countries with low debt ratios
Hedging inflation

Alpha-D Update for May 2012

Here it is again.  My options from last month all expired unexercised.  It's always nice to hang onto cash earned from conservative hedges.  I have renewed my covered calls on FXI and GDX to expire next month.  I also renewed a short cash-covered put position under GDX, which I am increasingly likely to do as the price of GDX keeps dropping.  I realize I'm risking having more shares of GDX put to me but I don't mind doing so if they're getting cheaper.  A bigger pile of a hard asset ETF is one thing I wouldn't mind holding as the U.S. approaches hyperinflation.

I mentioned recently that I'm strongly interested in adding natural resource MLPs to my portfolio as a hard asset hedge against future hyperinflation.  I still plan to do so at some point but I'm much more skeptical now that using ETFs of MLPs is a viable way for me to do so.  Those ETFs have some odd ways of recalculating their daily NAVs that have the same effect as using leverage.  I hate leveraged ETFs and want to stay as far away from them as possible.  I may just go for a few reasonably priced MLPs and their associated operating companies (i.e., pipelines).

I'm also still looking for long positions in currencies of countries with low debt/GDP ratios and high transparency.  If I can't find correspondent banks in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Canada then I will need to look at currency ETFs.

I also wonder whether an agribusiness stock will perform adequately as a hard asset hedge.  People still need to eat even if the domestic currency they use to buy groceries is depreciating.  Maybe owning a farm or  even a backyard greenhouse is a substitute for such a stock; the big difference is that I would literally eat the yield.

My remaining California muni bonds mature in about a month.  I will not replace them with any fixed income instruments at all, although I would consider the sovereign debt of the three countries I mentioned above if those bonds were available to U.S. investors in their pure individual forms.  I am still not sure whether an ETF of TIPS will keep up with a hyperinflating U.S. dollar until I finish analyzing the fine print.  I do give myself a lot of homework but it's worth my time if it protects my net worth from chaos in the U.S. economy.

Nota bene:  I am not a financial adviser, planner, or counselor.  Please bear in mind that the above discussion is not any kind of financial advice for investors.  Like I've said in my legal disclaimers, nothing I say in any of my materials constitutes investing advice.  I do not tell other people what to do with their own money.  Enjoy my discussions as a form of entertainment.  

The Haiku of Finance for 05/16/12

JPM losses
Hedging corp bond quality
Guess how much remains