CheetahhhhhhhBlog Mark III

The Cheetahhhhhhh and his lovely wife have 3 wedding anniversaries. Nov 8, when we were married in Manila city hall. Nov 9, when it was actually officially recorded as happening (it happened very quickly on the 8th because I paid them 30,000 pesos). And then Jul 28, the anniversary of our wedding in church. So anyway yesterday was the 1st anniversary of our church wedding.

We had a little party here in Tropical Cheetopia. Vanessa invited 3 people but 30 showed up. This is Capoocan and you have to plan on people coming who aren’t invited. For example at our wedding party we invited 200 but planned ahead with food for 400. Actually 500 showed up and we had to scramble to get another pig to kill. Anyway Vanessa was happy with the party.

Today is Vanessa’s birthday. She’s turning 17. She’s nervous about how her teen years are almost gone. No actually she is 29 and I remember I was very disturbed about being almost 30. Vanessa is definitely disturbed. She got a new cell phone for her birthday, a fancy Japanese model that carries 2 SIM cards. She got a pink Asus Eee computer for her anniversary yesterday.

Not a lot of action. There was a 7-inch spider in the bathroom which everyone was too afraid to chase out including me. It was really deadly looking and you could see in its 600 eyes how it was plotting when to attack. I wanted to spray it with poison but Vanessa said that’s bad luck. I was really nervous using the bathroom for 4 days and just kept hoping it would go away. Last night it finally did, thank God.

The Bug has turned into a singer and runs around piping out his impromptu compositions. My favorite so far has been his Opus #3, “Book.” The Bug likes books. His song goes something like, “la de de de la de de, book, la la la de de da…”

There is literally nothing to do here in Capoocan because the beach at Carigusan was destroyed by the typhoon. I sit out on the patio a lot drinking beer and watching people. This seems to be the main source of entertainment for everybody. That and hitting the sheets, which is why everybody seems to have so many kids. Indeed Vanessa’s friends are all pregnant again and asking us when we’re going to have another. We have our hands full with Bug quite frankly, though we are planning on having little Claire Alexandra some day. I am a big believer in planning and raising a kid properly requires intensive planning, if you didn’t know, from a financial perspective. Every extra kid I have will require me to work several more years. This isn’t actually what is holding us back, however. What’s holding us back is we need a nanny if we’re going to have little Claire. Vanessa actually did an impromptu interview with a relative and she is keen to be our nanny. I have to think about how eager I am to pay a nanny’s salary and to fly her out to Dubai.

We’re in Capoocan, at our little bungalow. It’s nice to be home. I had tiles laid in the house and in our patio and our little courtyard, and it sure snazzes up the joint. Well actually in the tropics, having tiles under your feet is very pleasant. The hurricane–er, typhoon–that hit Capoocan a few weeks ago damaged our roof and there was a lot of leakage into the house. It’s repaired now but at some point I need to repaint the interior, which is annoying.

My house was quite inexpensive by American standards but by Filipino standards here in Leyte, I’ve sunk a mint into the joint, and I have some plans for the future. We have about 2 feet of empty space on the side and back of the house. On the side I want to plant a little bamboo forest, which would be pleasant and would block the view of our neighbor’s hovel. In the back we’re probably going to build a piggery for my mother in law.

The Bug has passed an interesting cognitive stage. He is now constructing primitive sentences. I was drinking my morning coffee and he came to look and said, “Kashee, noo noo noo”. He knows coffee isn’t for babies. He’s a pretty fancy boy here in Capoocan, he has a new baby pool in the courtyard and a new digging machine scooper thingamajig to ride around on.

Prices have skyrocketed here in Capoocan and everything is twice as expensive, particularly things like rice, which is the staple food. This is because of the cost of petrol. Leyte is actually a fairly remote jungle island, if you look at a map, and everything needs to be shipped in. Leyte is actually rather costly this year, I must say. I remember reading about a traveler in French Polynesia and he remarked how everything was outrageously expensive, for the same reasons. It’s actually cheaper from my point of view to be in Manila. If I was willing to eat fish, rice and mangoes every day, this wouldn’t be an issue. But I had to buy Italian food in Manila and ship it here, and the shipping costs have doubled if not tripled, so I’m eating $45 plates of pesto fettuccine if you compute total cost.

Add to this, I have some strange jungle rash.

Anyway rash and the cost of pesto fettuccine aside, it’s nice to be home. I’m currently sitting on the patio drinking San Miguel Pilsen, which one of the Philippine’s better exports. One of the neighbors and the school copied Vanessa’s house painting scheme and I suppose imitation is the truest compliment. The Bug is outside scooting around on his scooper cart and he has a good dozen local children surrounding him. We also have a new puppy in the house, named Guard. And we have internet now, I bought a GSM SIM connection, basically using the cell phone system. It’s expensive and slow but I’m grateful for any internet out here, considering we still can’t get a phone line installed in the house.

I went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of plastic storage boxes. In the tropics, if you don’t continually use things, they start to grow mold, and eventually (I imagine) decompose into hummus for the jungle. So I spent some time yesterday oiling leather and cleaning mold and mildew. We have to store everything in plastic boxes after we leave.

It’s nightfall and the Bug and Vanessa are embarking on the nightly promenade, which is just like the Spanish tradition.

I have a lot of time to kill here on the beach. When you have a toddler, you can’t do a damn thing, if you didn’t know. Even going to restaurants is a real chore, because The Bug can’t sit still for more than 10 seconds, and grabs everything, and runs everywhere. I can’t wait until he’s older and I can instill a little discipline. However with a toddler the only constructive thing is distracting him. Some of my colleagues at work in Saudi were advising me to start disciplining him, but I think this is ridiculous. I don’t know the consensus from child psychology but it seems to me that spanking a toddler just teaches him to be afraid of you. SO ANYWAY we can’t do a damn thing. There are lots of things to do in Bora, mostly water sports, but we have to confine ourselves to restaurants and the beach. Not complaining, this is fine. I’m not one of those people who needs activities and entertainment. I can entertain myself quite well. My Sony Reader has about 2000 books loaded for example.

Anyway I’m giving Anne Rand’s Atlas Shrugged a go again. This is attempt #3. Last time I got about 3/4 through it. For some reason I never forget about this book and always mean to return to it. The book is obviously an indictment of socialist and communist ideals, and a pretty scathing one if you bother to think about it. But it’s also an indictment of economic corruption and the centralization of economic planning. After Saudi, it paints an interesting perspective. Saudi is a very strange place and almost impossible to give a concise picture of, however, I can tell you this: most westerners are absolutely amazed that anything at all gets accomplished in that country. And indeed almost nothing does get accomplished. This is because of a variety of factors that are too tedious for me to recount, but in regard to Atlas Shrugged, one is the rigid institutionalization of a certain way of thought. I’m not going to be more specific just to avoid any Bin Laden-type incidents. I think you all know what I’m talking about. But we have a society that is rigidly controlled by a certain way of thought, one which actually results in a situation like Anne Rand describes in Atlas Shrugged. Like Dagney Taggart, I would find myself searching for “sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland.”
Anyway here I go, Atlas Shrugged attempt #3. Maybe I can finish it this time, have been wondering what happens.

We have been having a lovely time in Bora. Not much to blog about, as our days generally consist of picking a restaurant for lunch, swimming in the ocean, and then settling in for the night. We moved into a suite on the ocean because the hotel owner was grateful for a whole month of business (it’s typhoon season, and so the low season for tourists). I’m sitting now at a bamboo table on a terrace over the beach.

I was complaining to an American here about the stock market, which STINKS, and how I’ve lost a bit of dinero. This fellow had lost $30,000 in July, so I don’t feel so bad I guess.

I have been breaking my own trading rules, and rules of common sense in trend following, and continually trying to find a bottom in this terrible stock market. I have gotten burned real good as a result. Like most traders I have a set of rules for entering and exiting a position, and one of the first is that I will never try to guess a top or bottom.

I have become very negative and discouraged about the market and am staying out until I see something I can work with. At the moment I would not be surprised if all the big American banks fail and the market crashes to Great Depression levels. Naturally if I had any real evidence that this would happen, I would sell puts and make a fortune. And actually this sort of disgusted feeling is precisely what leads to panic selling that leads to the bottom. However I am following my own damn rules and waiting for clear evidence to appear on the charts.

First of all, while writing this blog entry, my computer crashed twice. It has Windows Vista and a bare minimum of programs in an effort to make the system more stable. I’d like to go on record for saying that Miscrosoft has lowered the bar even further with Vista. It is the most unstable SOB I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with. Indeed I tried to install XP but this new laptop of mine requires Vista for its drivers. I once again fail to understand why I ever switched from the Mac. I used to be a real Mac zealot actually.

Anyway regarding the inflation of food prices which everyone, I’m quite sure, has noticed. I blogged about it back in October and now, today as an investor, I’m just kicking myself, because I notice that the price of grain commodities has soared. Why didn’t I make the simple connection back in Oct.????? I don’t know, it just didn’t click in my brain.

RE: my financial notes of the previous blog. #1 you need to look slightly long-term with this commentary, ie into January. I anticipate these trends starting in July. #2 we could easily see one further dip downward in the stock market, sellers might not be exhausted yet. #3 my analysis is based partly on contrarian analysis. If everyone is selling, the smart money is going to start buying.

Today I’m going to buy a Jan 09 put in FXE, as the Euro looks to be starting to decline versus the dollar. Indeed I’d say the Euro is starting to reprice itself in anticipation of Mr. Loco leaving the White House. My analysis here is simple. If the prestige of, and confidence in, the USA is low, then people don’t want to hold dollars. They’re going to hold Euros or Sterling or Yen. If the prestige of and confidence in the USA is high, people will want to hold the greenback. If you don’t follow this logic, then just think back to the Good Old Days when Bill held the reigns. Remember how nice and strong the dollar was? Of course you do. I predict an inverse relationship between the value of the dollar vs euro and the number of days Mr Loco has remaining in office. Also I’m not the only one thinking this, it’s hard not to notice the Euro has broken its upward trend (for example click here).

Finally you may be asking, why is the Cheetahhhhhhh working on finance when he’s on vacation in Bora? Well, like most people involved in investing, I never actually stop working. The Wall Street Journal made a little joke about it recently. To stop reading the news and studying charts would be to fall hopelessly out of touch.

We’re in Bora at the Blue Mango Inn, and loving it. I think Vanessa’s family or Filipino news or both are a little bit paranoid, indeed the American owner of the hotel said “Filipino families are the worst advocates of tourism in the Philippines.” There is no visible typhoon damage and everybody including the locals is swimming, so I’m not worried about the pesticide ship.

Boracay is paradise. When you imagine the South Seas in your head, you’re picturing something like Bora. There are more remote and pristine places to go, but then you’re at a hotel in the jungle with nothing else. This would be nice in certain circumstances. However Bora offers the best of both worlds, with lots of good restaurants and more affordable hotels. Also one of the big problems with remote places is nothing is available; for example you may not be able to find deodorant or certain medicines or internet access or your preferred foods. For example, at my house in Leyte, we actually have to fly periodically to Manila to get me and Bug food (we prefer Italian food). This makes eating in Leyte expensive and difficult. Anyway Bora is in some respects a de facto suburb of Manila and so everything is available here, which is a real plus.

Bora has a the South Seas beach vibe that you crave. The outside world seems completely irrelevant and your senses are consumed by the wind off the ocean the smell of salt air and jungle. There is no need to plan anything or worry about anything.

Actually I am still a bit in touch with the real world this time around, because I have investments to monitor, plus the stock market (the Cheetahhhhhhh predicts) should make a big move at some point this month. As I mentioned previously, we are currently invested in C, SPY, FXI, and GE, and getting hammered with all four. I think the stock market (when I say stock market I am referring to the SPX incidentally) has hit resistance and will form a triple bottom, and so should begin a good rise. This may take a while to happen however, and of course I could be completely wrong. I anticipate that the US$ will begin a slow rise and that gold and oil will begin a slow fall. This is the Cheetahhhhhhh’s prediction for July. I will not go into technical reasons why, but I have a lot of reasons for this based on technical analysis (ie, statistical analysis). Also there is a bit of simple common sense involved in my prediction. Oil prices are ridiculously high and can’t be sustained at this level, indeed most financiers are referring to the “oil bubble”. And it is indeed a bubble just like the real estate bubble or the e-bubble. And all bubbles burst. And the oil bubble is the primary thing holding the stock market down. I am actually on the verge of buying options in DUG incidentally, just waiting for confirmation. Also less than stellar economic reports from Europe are starting to pull the Euro and Sterling down versus the dollar, and the Euro generally moves in an inverse relationship with the US stock market.

We are on our way to Bora and I am sitting in the Philippine Airlines terminal. This is a much nicer terminal than the domestic airport, which is like a cattle farm.

I didn’t make any remarks about flying first class from Saudi. First of all, we were lucky. It turned out that 2 economy class tickets to Madison WI cost the same as 2 first class tickets to Manila, so I didn’t have to pay anything extra. I was very pleased about that. I inquired about first class upgrade to the States and that would have been about $10,000 extra, so forget it. Anyway first class is nice, though I am way too cheap to actually pay for it myself, considering first class costs 3 times an economy ticket, generally speaking. The food was quite good compared to the nonsense they serve in econo. Also the seats fully recline, which is a real bonus when flying across the Pacific. Also the stewardesses are much friendlier and service-oriented. Anyway I give my first first class flight an A for making flying a little bit less tedious.

People are often surprised to hear me say that I don’t like flying. They’re surprised because I travel so much. I like being in foreign places, yes. Getting there, however, is really tedious. And with these new security measures arising every day, air travel has really become a big damn pain in the ass. I remember the good old days when you’d fly from WI to Florida and you had free booze for the whole flight. I remember one time I staggered off the plane to my awaiting grandma and was almost too drunk to see straight. I think my grandma was too worldly to bother commenting about it. Anyway these days you don’t even get booze. Or for example we are flying to Bora right now and allowed 10kg each, and since I refuse to learn the metric system, I don’t really know how much that is, but I think it is nothing. I think my laptop weighs 10kg. I had to pay 4000 pesos extra for all our luggage. Just a small example of how air travel has become a real pain.

We’re still in Manila because we were waiting for my nicotine gum. We’re flying out tomorrow.

Our summer vacation has turned out to be very difficult and complicated, I must say. First there was all the difficulty of actually getting out of Saudi, and having to completely rearrange our plans to go to the States. Here in the Philippines I would have thought that most of our worries were over, however, this turned out to not be so. First there is the typhoon issue. Boracay was apparently mildly damaged by typhoons; according to the hotel guy, they lost a lot of sand, and a few boats sunk, and the grass roofs of many nipa huts blew off. This is OK, we’re not overly disturbed by any of this. But then there is the pesticide ship. During the last typhoon, a ship loaded with pesticide was sunk in the inner sea of the Philippines. The Philippine islands all cluster around an inner pocket of sea, and there is where most of the best beaches are, such as Bora and Puerto Galera, and indeed our house in Capoocan, Leyte. Anyway the pesticide is leaking into the inner sea and the ship also sunk 15 miles from Bora. We were busy trying to find an alternate location, but this is very difficult on a budget. If money was not an issue, then it would have been easy, we would have probably gone to El Nido, which incidentally looks like paradise. However I am a teacher, not a rock star, and so El Nido is a tad expensive for my taste. Anyway the hotel guy in Bora claims the pesticide is a kind that does not dissolve in salt water, and in any case, the current flows in the opposite direction. Maybe so, we don’t know. So we’re going to Bora but we’re not going to eat any fish, and we won’t swim in the ocean until we have some definite confirmation it’s safe. Maybe we’ll have to stay at a hotel with a pool. This would actually be a pity because we’re looking forward to the Blue Mango resort, which is American-run, cheap and homey and has a hammock right on the beach under palm trees.