Slope of Hope

Only half a year ago, Groupon was the talk of the town. It was the biggest, hottest IPO on the horizon,and it was the darling of the social media industry. Imitators were everywhere, but there was one giant that was far ahead of everyone else: Groupon.

Well, one glance at a stock chart will show you just how much the biggest, hottest IPO has been embraced since it went public. I offer you the following

Late last year, I paid a visit to Josh Brown ("The Reformed Broker") and had a pleasant chat. I went to his blog a week later and put up a comment, shown below, stating my belief that Facebook's IPO day would mark an important turning point in the market.

Below is the broad view of igold bugs ndex symbol $HUI, which shows how the analog has strengthened recently. The key, of course, is to break beneath that lower horizontal line. If we can do that, life gets interesting in a big hurry.

I believe the EUR/USD is going to approach parity within the next year. All the nonsense we've seen in Europe over the past couple of years is going to start giving way to reality, and even with Helicopter Ben's efforts to devalue the US dollar, the Euro is going to do a better job pushing its way down.

"Next up on CNBC - - an octogenerian fund manager who completely missed the boat on technology in the late 1990s and, since the early 2009 bottom, has underperformed the S&P by 50%. Stay tuned!"

So how many people do you think would stay riveted to their flat-panel Samsung to watch that? Not many, I'm guessing. But if the aforementioned gent is named Warren Buffett, the entire nation comes to a halt and hangs on to every word. A quick glance at Amazon yields 2,100 results when one does a search on his name (including the surprisingly-titled Warren Buffett Invests Like a Girl: And Why You Should, Too).

I'm not a very good hedonist, I guess.

Here I am in Las Vegas, and to my way of thinking, everything I hate about the human race is conveniently compressed into one tidy package.

And I ask myself: what's my problem? Why do I let places like this get to me so much? I mean, after all, why should I care what other people do with their time and their lives? What business is it of mine?

Originally published on Slope of Hope last month, I thought it was worth bringing over here to ZH....

If you're like most Americans, you hadn't heard of James Stockdale until he showed up for the 1992 Vice Presidential debates and made this famous line.......

As a companion to my post late last month of the GDX via my chicken-scratch, here's another poultry-created masterpiece: a trio of Euro drawings with my best attempt at marking the "matched" points of this analog. The charts speak for themselves. Whether or not this pans out a third time remains to be seen. So far, so good, though.....(as a side note, I originally posted this on Slope of Hope at the end of last month, but the analog still holds - - - what happens this week will either break or affirm it).

Nothing sums up the euphoria these days better than Apple, Inc.