Google Public Data Charts

I stumbled upon Google's Public Data Explorer.
The most alarming when looking at our GDP was how much person consumption is (10.7 Trillion) vs the net exports of NEGATIVE 0.56 Trillion. How long can the country consume and not produce enough?


Even with the U3 Unemployment rate for 16-24 yrs old is horrible ~17%

20% Discount on Gold - Chart

Here is a chart from late 2009.  Gold ran from the summer 904 low to Thanksgiving 1227 high.   A 35% gain.  In early 2010, gold fell to 1044.   A 15% drop.

The chart below show gold has dropped 20% from the late summer highs.  

Think of this as a 20% discount off gold.  What is happening is normal and has allowed you to save cash during the rally and use it to buy today.   Think of yourself inhaling and exhaling and then look at then charts.

Useless Stock Headlines

http://www.finviz.com/ is a great website. The news portion aggregates the other websites and blogs for the latest posts. One of the sites is http://finance.yahoo.com/news. Here is a useless headline "Five ETFs to Watch This Week". The target audience is the retail crowd in which can only go long and does not know how to trade. I read the article as we want you to watch these ETF's, react to a price spike and buy. There is no plan. There is not target price to enter. There is not OCO bracket order (one cancels the other) which defines your risk as once your order is filled, you will either be stopped out or your profit target hit. Regardless, your equity broker wins with the commissions.

TV News Weather Hype

Over the weekend stumbled upon the local news and the weather segment. The forecast was amazing sunny upper 70s from New Year's Day until Friday. A perfect week! Yet, all the hype or worry was about temps dropping into the mid-60s by the weekend. I can see if there was going to be a major storm, but going form the 70s to 60s and still sunny is not alarming, yet at the end of the weather segment you were left with that nervous feeling. Why can't they say the next 6 days are going to be flawless and enjoy? (BTW, the forecast for next weekend is the lower 70s). This is why I use http://weather.gov and http://weatherspark.com for the forecast since it is plain text and no hype.