Lots going on this week:
- Adding to my comments on retail a couple of days ago, I stopped by Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) yesterday to pick up a couple of essentials. It seemed quite slow for a pre-Christmas week evening. Their latest earnings report notwithstanding, I think this is a further sign of things being very slow. Still, I wouldn't short them. Might consider a paired trade against Circuit City (NYSE:CC). As Macke notes, you don't want to short the leader in a business, regardless of what you think of the macro picture.
- It's nice to have sorted things out so that I can go back to my regular bar again on weekends. And quite a weekend it was. Met somebody quite nice on Friday. Then discovered how really wonderful one of my neighbors is on Saturday. The only fly in the ointment was the woman I've been most interested in lately deciding to show up there on Saturday with her girlfriends just as I was making the new connection...
- Barry Ritholtz has an interesting comment about how distorted real estate information has become. This meshes well with my long-held observation that price data during these slowdowns is misleading at best. Numbers like median prices become meaningless when markets slow down significantly and there's insufficient volume across all housing types to create a significant sample.
- Barry also comments on something I mentioned a long time ago, which is that many websites -- RealMoney among them -- have begun really spamming their subscribers with ads, email, etc. RealMoney has become less and less readable by the month in recent years, and this latest advertising mess makes it practically unreadable. I've noted similar problems at Minyanville, where some of their current advertising seems to be tripping my anti-intrusion software and causing the whole site to crash. Ultimately, not what you expect from a site you pay several hundreds of dollars a year to read.
- Snow in Utah is suddenly looking really good.
I was supposed to ski a couple of weeks ago and held off for lack of good coverage. Right now the base is still lower than I like, but not all that bad for pre-Christmas. Sadly, we're now into the expensive holiday period so I have to hold off.
With that observation I'm going to wrap things up. The next week is going to be fairly quiet, and I may not have much to say. Cabo with a friend is suddenly looking like a New Year's possibility, and snow in Utah after the New Year is almost certainly a must do.
Should I not return in the next 10 days, Happy New Year to all!
-btc
