Poor me.

I've developed cold symptoms and chest congestion that had me coughing hard last night and short of breath afterwards so I stayed home today, took medicine, rested, and hopefully will be better tomorrow.

I put in an order for a CERN put last night, but the stock opened a dollar lower and I didn't get a fill. The stock dropped another dollar during the day. I'd be up a couple hundred if I hadn't got stopped out when the price popped up over 40 the other day. Looking at the chart, it appears that was a weird price movement, and was probably one or two big orders intended to move he stock over 40 where a lot of stop loss buy orders placed by bearish folks like me would feed a rally in the stock, and run the price up further.

That's the problem with placing stop orders close to the market price, especially at a price where there's likely to be a lot of other stop loss orders. That price can be a target for speculators trying to move the market on a slow day. It doesn't do any good to be annoyed by that kind of market ploy. I just have to be more careful where I place my stop loss orders.

I didn't place any other orders because I felt some manufactured good news might come out today, which it did, in the form of Citibank's agreement to provide some relief to mortgage borrowers. As for tomorrow, the jobs numbers have been anticipated to be so bad, that a small reduction in the number of layoffs before Christmas might be taken as more good news, and keep the market up. Also, I don't underestimate the possibility of optimism related too Obama's inauguration, although Obama himself hasn't sounded too optimistic in recent days.

Yep, parsing the news is too confusing, so I'll just look at the charts.

Oh and one other item. Janett resolved to make some progress today toward her goal of being a tax practicioner this year, and went down to the office and completed eight training modulea and passed the test at he end of the day. Go J girl. Go J girl

Oh and another other item. Tomorrow the area controller is taking the accounting staff out to lunch to thank the staff for hard work during the recent closing. I'm nurturing a secret hope that it's really going to be a thanks and good luck lunch for me.

One more - I got a call from a person at the builders who were general contractor on the plant. It wasn't my usual contact and she explained that person no longer worked there, nor did two others who I've worked with. She explained that they had no ongoing projects and they'd laid off 23 of the 35 employees. This is a respected and successful builder. So it goes.