Monday, October 06, 2008

The Problematic Fiat Ain't Papal



I just now saw that the market was at one time down 800pts this afternoon. I'm sure many of you think that on a day like today I would cancel all plans and be trading away.

Wrong. I am checked out on trading - especially considering the short-selling ban. I can't short any of the house-of-cards financials and I am afraid to cover any of my extant shorts because I don't know if I will EVER be allowed to re-establish them.

Today I did my normal routine with the kids. We did some workbook pages, some math, and some coloring with my little one. Went out to eat lunch and then it was off to soccer. I didn't get home from the park until near 6pm and will sleep like a baby tonight - as I am now a long-term passive disinvestor.

It seems Pope Benedict XVI may have been reading Marginalizing Morons. In a speech today he echoed my summary judgment from the end of yesterday's post Open Season On Morons...



"He who builds only on visible and tangible things like success, career and money builds the house of his life on sand."

And he also said:

"We are now seeing, in the collapse of major banks, that money vanishes, it is nothing. All these things that appear to be real are in fact secondary. Only God's words are a solid reality."

Pope B has IM'ed me a couple of times over the years but I wasn't aware he had time for my blog.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They haven't banned synthetic shorts so those financials might still be ripe for the plundering.

CaptiousNut said...

You are correct; they did not.

Hard with my brokerage to enter in a "long put short call" spread order though. They don't see it as a riskless spread. Many brokers don't let you *sell options* in any way without a lot of capital and/or margin.

I had plenty of short exposure already. If I didn't, surely I would have been doing synthetics over *buying expensive puts*.