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Strategies & Market Trends : One trade a week -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mike head who wrote (50)	4/7/1999 11:03:00 PM
From: Mike McFarland	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89

Mainly I dropped Curagen and Hyseq because the weakness in Incyte was freaking me out. I'll be starting a gene patent thread soon, maybe my nerves will calm and I'll re-establish positions...as it sits right now my first purchase will likely be Incyte. After CRGN gets the new CEO maybe I'll check for a pulse and get back in that one. Too much trading I know, have to let them cook and not get discouraged. Probably I'm going to just go nuts one day and send a check off in order to fill an empty, neglected account, and then I can set aside thinking too much about my current picks and add several more with new money--I would like the whole market to tank and drag everything down some more, but biotech is pretty dang cheap, at least the 2nd and 3rd tier, as you know. *Now on to something I know a little about: To answer your question... Weather disturbances move off the coast of Africa and work their way in the tropical easterlies. East winds occur in the tropics as part of the general circulation of the atmosphere...Hadley cells and such. (recall that westerlies occur in the mid-and upper latitudes because of a thermal gradient--which is not present in the tropics. The equation for that is called the Thermal Wind equation...which can be found in Wallace and Hobbs, and Introduction to Atmospheric Science). Anyway, our extra-tropical cyclones, let's just call them frontal* systems, are created by baroclinic instability--which is the jargon associated with those thermal gradients that drive most of the weather in the mid-latitudes. Tropical systems are barotropic disturbances--so those are the key words from which to work if you want to go straight to the index of a meteorology book. The short answer is winds blow from east to west in the tropics. Note--effects such as the warm ENSO phases (El-Nino) can create anomalous westerlies (or at least weakened easterlies) which means less hurricane activity in the tropics. We have La Nina conditions now (cold enso) and so should see at least normal tropical activity in the Atlantic this summer. Actually, I am simplifying quite a bit, and have not addressed low level wind versus upper level, but that is enough for now. I really don't know an awful lot about the tropics, got one chapter in all of my schooling. --Mike