Last night

[solarbird]

In the post I made last night, I asked for a chart of the S&P500 against oil, rather than gold. wrog obliged, here. It's kind of what you'd expect, only a lot moreso.

BTW, somebody spiked the dollar down against almost everything really sharply overnight. It bounced of Can90.5¢, for example, off two cents from yesterday at noon. That's in 12 hours. (It's since hopped back up to 91.6¢, which is still below yesterday's daytime low.) Today we get another warning, perhaps, from China about their reserve holdings. LA la la.

And, for something completely irrelevant and much nicer to look at, NASA got a great solar flare image series, so you can watch a flare erupt. It's sped up about 5x - this is five minutes of footage compressed into 30 or 40 seconds. (I didn't time it and I'm not very good at time so that may be off a bit. But not a lot.) Click through, it's worksafe.

Comments

[dustin-00.livejournal.com]

Very impressive video.

Hopefully this will improve our chances of getting some reactor shielding on that thing before somebody gets hurt.

[arethinn]

Oh, okay. I thought you meant the Canadian dollar had somehow lost about 15 cents US value in the past two weeks and was really confused for a second.

WOW the us dollar is crap. I wish I had had the resources to have converted to a big Canadian bank account back in 2000 when it was like us$ = cad$1.50. and not approaching the other goddamn way around. *shakes head*

Do you think there's any chance it will rise again if we can, you know, orchestrate some kind of political coup?

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Gawdammit, but that chart done against oil looks dreadful, absolutely dreadful, and it puts late 2001 stock-market wierdness in a different light altogether (that was when our natural-gas venture up here finally cratered due to turgid markets).

Makes me glad that I am stuck in RMB, especially given Chinese remarks today about diversifying their foreign-exchange holdings. Did you catch those?

[solarbird]

Indeed I did. Did you note the little message sent in the overnights, as well?

And of course today you've got Fed governors out flapping their big mouths promising no rate hikes in December(!), which isn't going to be helping anything. Plus you've got Team Upside out there going on about how the credit markets are "healing"? What the hell is that supposed to mean? And stocks building ground for a rally? On what planet?

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Well, the uncharitable explanation is that they'd like to keep the punters sitting placidly at their desks, while beating their own quick escape from the markets. More and more we are staggeringly pleased that we bought some economic advice last spring and summer, and have acted on it.

Recall the old saying, "use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without" -- inherited that in needlepoint from someone long-gone, who survived the Thirties (Nineteen-variety); was she ever right!

Yesterday Elane was down at the post office in the morning (yeah, social butterfly...) and one of the younger loggers actually stopped her and asked her (the ardent non-punter) for stock-market advice. Loggers wanting to play the markets with their paycheques, what's next, the newspaper-carriers, too?

[solarbird]

Loggers wanting to play the markets with their paycheques
Puts.

But really, more, "a tad late to that game, aren't you, mate?" Nothing like buying at or near market peak.