Pump-n-dump Denninger

Blackberry took a dump on nasty-bad earnings this morning, and everyone over at ZeroHedge was laughing out loud at Karl Denninger and his expected losses.  Of course, ZeroHedge is rife with gold bugs and inflationistas, so they were only too glad to gloat at his pain.

But then someone mentioned that he had exited his positions prior to earnings, that he was flat.  Just a lowly stock-pumper and platform fanboi now, I guess.

His BBRY Tickers no longer state a position, although I think he picked up some calls today.  Who knows.  So what kind of pain did his sycophants on the board take today?  Will they follow Karl on this buying opportunity?

Face it folks, the value of BBRY is in the toner in the copier machines, and in its buyout value for pathetic, irrelevant Microsoft to launch their desperate mobile initiative number XXXIV (this time, for sure!)  They're done.

At the very least, pump-and-dump Denninger can do better than to encourage his flock to go long a broken mobile company into the maw of a consumer slowdown and epic recession.

So, you TickerForum people, insist that Karl post his positions again, especially if he's going to continue pretending that he's a member of the board, a gifted oracle to be consulted by their C-level executives.

If Karl is really a man, he'll go stand up for himself over in the Thunderdome of ZeroHedge.  But I doubt that ... what a douche.

The upper channel wall and the .786 retrace is at 1634 Wednesday.  Low volume melt-up into the July 4th holiday ought to do it.  Then we plunge again.

SPX 06-28 wave 4 triangle

Charts 06-28: Wave ii of c of 4 in tomorrow

I put 28 miles on my odometer walking to work this week.  Look at this chipboard palace they are building in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, WA.  Instant tenements!

39th St & Greenwood Ave N

Here are the Last Men at the End of History, waiting for coffee in South Lake Union in their idling carz:

Tomorrow, looking for this to finish up early, possibly on an opening gap up, similar to what I am counting as wave (i) here.  Here is a decent, legal ABC count for our wave ii of c of 4.

SPX 06-27

Charts 06-26

Ideally, we'll close the gap at 1628 tomorrow at 3pm Eastern before reversing.

SPX 06-26

Books: some recent acquisitions

First, try these Google searches, they're great:

"at * we are passionate about *"

50 million+ hits returned, right?  Now this one:

"at * we are passionate about innovation"

282,000 results returned.  These are the great horrid clichés of our time.  Too funny.

I'm so worn down by the fanatical overuse of "innovation" and "innovative", particularly among the promoters and publicists of all categories of business, that I went out and ordered a 1st edition of Edward Shils's classic essays on Tradition this week.

Edward Shils, Tradition

A great response to the cult of Progress that rules today, the late Professor Shils reminds us of what is lasting or permanent, why it is important, and why we need it.  I had this in student paperback, but I decided to get the hardcover ed. before the Treasury complex collapses and things go full-on Mad Max.

I bet Jim Kunstler would appreciate this book, a lot.

I picked up a first of Shils's Torment of Secrecy, too.  I mentioned this book and Fukuyama's comments on it last week.  I had not read this old book (1956) before, but am enjoying it now.

Edward Shils, The Torment of Secrecy

This one, I already had on my shelf; I read it many years ago.  It was sort of a gateway drug to finding Mises's Human Action and discovering the Austrian School of political economy.  The book occupies that strange land of very formal social theory in the mid-Twentieth century at places like Chicago and Harvard.  It's dry but good reading, if you have a taste for what they were trying to do here, establishing a "general" theory of human action and of society.  The book is still in print on Amazon.com.

Parsons and Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action

Finally, I found a nice copy of a Theodore Dreiser novel, a memorial edition published in 1946 after his death.  Mencken wrote the bawdy introduction, which proceeds to point out all of the flaws in both Dreiser the man and this greatest (in Mencken's estimation) of his novels.

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy

I actually stumbled across this volume at a bookshop in Pike Place Market, where they mostly sell tourist books and trade paperbacks.  "Here's a hot one," I asked the bookseller as I checked out.  "Moving a lot of Dreiser today?"

We're big on the American realist novelists here in Deflation Land, the Dreisers, Frank Norrises, James T. Farrells, the Nelson Algrens.  They are always welcome.

Financial markets?  We're still heading up, end-of-quarter window dressing and all.  There are two gaps overhead -- and I bet we close them both before selling off again, per the chart I posted last night.