ok, since you're playing coy I will follow you over here to reveal my flabbergasting earthshattering news.... Drumroll please...
Having been there at the top, I am now prepared to call a bottom. Why? Because on Thursday the markets will plumb depths beneath which there can be nothing lower. They will celebrate something as far removed from productive tech activity as it is possible to get, meaning that they will have hit ground, and have only skylight above.
What could possibly inspire such certainty? How can I identify such an event in real time? Well, let's just say I have some inside information. See, this guy I know--a wise-ass, an amateur, the sort of fool who dabbled in trading out-of-the-money G&K calls on margin back in the day--is going to be rather busy on on Thursday morning. Nursing his wounds? Playing with his children? Trying to hold down a day job in this disastrous economic meltdown? Nope. He's going to be...
wait for it...
are you ready?
OPENING THE FRIGGIN' NASDAQ!
Yup, that's right: around 9:30 am EST Thursday, this tool will up there live on tv, visible several stories high in Times Square and on Bloomberg and other silly places, ringing some bell and officially starting the trading action on those hallowed primates and royalty that we used to obsess over so avidly in a past life. Seems like the Gods of the Market feel it's worth celebrating the launch of some silly website he's connected to.
Unbelievable, I said when I heard about it. You? That? There? C'mon, you must be joking!
No, I was told. This is it: this is for real: they want me to do it.
Can't be, I shouted! There's some mistake! Why would anybody want you to do that?
Don't know, he replied, not my decision, I'm just supposed to push the button or ring the bell or do whatever they tell me to do.
But you'll look like the friggin' drooling baby on those ETrade commercials, I insisted. This is sacred stuff! Serious people make serious money in those precincts! Unserious people lose even more serious money! It's a descration, I tell you, it's sacrilege, it's an abomination!
Tell it to them, not me, he said. I wouldn't ask to do something like this myself, I think it's ridiculous, they're the idiots who want me to do it.
Fine, I grumbled. Go ahead and make a fool out of yourself, go ahead and make a travesty of a mockery of a sham out of the trivial pursuits I wasted so much life and blood and treasure on all those many years ago. I'll content myself with profiting from your embarrassment, or at least letting my homies profit from it by alerting them to the arrival of the bottom so they can get in on the ground floor. 'Cause if a clown like you is ringing the bell and opening the friggin Nasdaq for operations, well, then the end has got to be near.
So I contacted SI Bob, got my dormant account reopened, and came straight over here to tell you folks so you could make some money to afford all those fancy digital cameras and snazzy zoot suits and snooty wine and other toys y'all like to play with.
God's honest truth. As Damon Runyon used to say, you could look it up...
:0)
TIFKAT (the investor formerly known as tekboy) |
