January 2004 

World Trade Center Memorial

A design called 'Reflecting Absence' shown here in an artist's rendering, has been selected by a jury as the memorial for the World Trade Center rebuilding project, it was announced in New York, January 6, 2004. Modifications are expected on the design which features two reflecting pools of water on the footprints of the twin towers. The jury took eight months to pick the winning design from 5,201 submissions. Photo by Lower Manhattan Development Corp/Reuters  

Department of Total Stupidity - Or Is This What Liberalism Has Become?

Well, my mother used to tell me that I should never say "Nobody would ever do anything that stupid," because as soon as I say that somebody will actually do it, and not only do it be claim that it is not stupid.

Consider this article.

It seems that the Nigerian Scam is all Bush's fault:

If you can't accuse a television producer of being an intellectual, you certainly can't describe a newspaper columnist as being one. Nevertheless, the Chutzpah Award for the year that just died must go to Polly Toynbee of London's daily Guardian for an enlightened rationalization and demonization that boiled over like volcanic lava. Toynbee fell for the infamous Nigerian scam and had to find somebody to be mad at, and it couldn't be herself.

She received a letter purporting to be from a 14-year-old Nigerian girl who needed money to pay to complete her education. Toynbee was touched. She sent the child a check for 200 pounds ($356) and immediately felt warm and fuzzy for her act of charity.

Warm and fuzzy soon evaporated. A perfect copy of her signature was soon attached to a form asking her bank to transfer a thousand pounds ($1,783) to an account in a bank in Japan. A suspicious clerk at her bank stopped the transfer just in time. The Nigerian bank scam is familiar to millions, and many of the greedy and gullible have been taken in by the familiar gross e-mails that clog computer terminals with offers of breast enhancement, penis enlargement and videos promising pornographic pleasure.

Toynbee's brush with financial disaster taught her a lesson that has eluded everyone else. She learned that the villain in the fraud is not a Nigerian scammer, but ... George W. Bush. "We reap from the Third World what we sow," she told her readers. "If some Nigerians learned lessons in capitalism from global oil companies that helped corrupt and despoil that land, it is hardly surprising they absorbed some of the Texan oil values that now rule the White House."

I like the ending sentence of the article:

We don't need the intellectual Dostoyevsky to help us with this one. Damon Runyon nailed the likes of Polly Toynbee: "Life is tough, and it's really tough when you're stupid."

Yet the Guardian pays this idiot to write for it.  So much for the looney left.

 January 8, 2004

I added a new signal, IWNMACD, to the signals page.  This is not backtested for long, since it depends on IWN.  Still, it looks very good.

The domestic market is looking strong, but rather iffy.  Still moving up, but the moves are somewhat tentative.  On the other hand, I have not been keeping up with the domestic averages so far this month, and hence I will be making some changes next week.

January 9, 2004

Job news was much worse than expected.  Yet mid-day, we have the Nasdaq and Russell 2000 up slightly, and the other two major indices down only a little bit.  The market is surprising, but it closed down overall.

 January 14, 2004

I sold all of PSPFX recently, and sent in a letter to have $130,000 transferred to my taxable account.  Today I will lighten up a bit on some under-performers, and tomorrow I will buy into the ALLM5 system.  See my FastBreak Systems page.

Many months ago, I put a remembrance of my grandfather, Charles Bollfrass, on this site in one of the journal pages. I deleted those pages from the site, since they are all rather old stuff. Before I did the deletion, one of my relatives from a part of the family with which I had lost touch did a web search and found the picture. I got E-mail today concerning that. Anyway, that motivates me to put up the picture again. He was a very nice man, and I still have fond childhood memories of him. He had a lunch/soda counter in the store, as did most drugstores in those days. When I had a sore throat, he would bring me a real milk shake. That meant milk and lots of ice cream. Very thick. Imagine my surprise when I went to New Haven CT to go to school at Yale and found out that there a milk shake was just milk with lots of bubbles. What a rip-off! Only a Yankee would charge for bubbles! That was one of the many things that convinced me that the East was a rather degenerate place.

Bollfrass, Your Druggist

“As Near to You as Your Telephone” (Remember when Drug Stores Delivered to your Home?)

 January 17, 2004

Last Tuesday, I sent in a form to Brown to take our $130,000 from this IRA.  So far, nothing has happened.  In the meanwhile, I have had $130,000 in cash doing nothing.  This is not satisfactory.  I think next year I will send in the form and then raise the cash several days later.  I don't know why this cannot be done electronically anyway.  Far too much sending of paper around.  This is supposed to be the electronic age, right?

Meanwhile, it is clearly time to get rid of some underperforming funds.  I am not pleased with the results at this point, although the most recent buys have been excellent.  I will put the money into Potomac Index funds.

January 20, 2004

Yesterday, towards the end of the trading day, Brown finally made the transfer.  I was able to make some trades in the taxable account before the market closed.  I am buying a combination of ETFs and closed-end funds, and I intend to take advantage of the ability to margin such things.

January 27, 2004

Jerry Lentz, here shown with his wife, Andrea, and daughter, Chloe, paid me a visit.  He used to live nearby, and did a lot of remodeling work on my house.  He came in town to see his sister and her humband renew their marriage vows, and then we spend some time together and also visited with another friend, George Eastham.  Jerry is about 26 years younger than I am, and George a bit younger still.  We used to ride bikes together, and work out at the YMCA.  Jerry has moved to Bend, Oregon, but George still lives nearby, and teaches Physical Education at a local middle school.  Both of these guys are tremendous athletes, and it was really good to see them again.  Jerry celebrated his 40th birthday by doing what was to be a 250 mile bike ride through the mountains around Bend.  Unfortunately, he only did about 225 before a tire got too badly trashed for him to continue.  At other times, he has been able to finish, however.

Jerry, Andrea, and Chloe - Christmas 2003

January 28, 2004

I sold the Potomac Index funds.  The market had a terrible reaction to the words that the Fed used.  No reason for such action, except that some people were looking for an excuse to sell.  This may be the beginning of the end of the buy condition that started mid-March 2003.  It has been a nice ride, but it has to end sometime.  Or we may see new leadership emerge - perhaps in the foreign markets.  But today, everything took a big hit.

January 30, 2004

Definitely not a good month.  I end it with a lot of cash.  The plan had been to move into another version of the system I have labeled M1, just starting on next Monday, Feb. 2.  However, a sudden market decline like this confuses the ranking system, and makes it somewhat unreliable.  At this point I am not sure I want to put new money into the market anyway.