Trader’s Narrative

The semiconductor index (SOX) is a high beta sector which can be a leading indicator of the health of the market. It found a floor in late November of last year, much earlier than the S&P 500 index. From there it continued to power ahead with consistently better relative strength:

But in August, while the general market powered ahead, the semiconductors started to lag. That by itself wouldn’t be a major negative for the market. After all, there are naturally short periods of time when the SOX gives up leadership. What stood out at that time was that the trend line starting from November’s bottom and stretching for months and months had been broken.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Dave, a reader, contacted me then:

I just realized yesterday that my canary-in-the-coal mines, my lead husky SOX is out-of-sync with SMH, XSD, PSI, IGW, & USD, vis-a-vis their June highs.

Again, by itself, that wouldn’t ring any alarm bells. But considering everything else that we’ve covered which paints a picture of a market dangerously overextended, this just adds to the many other reasons to be positioned for a correction.

There have been no updates for the past few days because I’ve been wrestling with my new browser and I’m extremely frustrated.

As “Papa Bear”, Bill O’Reilly might say if he were in my shoes, “F**king thing sucks! WE’LL DO IT LIVE!”

I’m frustrated, not just because I’ve been a loyal Firefox fan and supporter for a long time but also because I bought into the hype and downloaded the new version to help Mozilla set a new world record.

I just can’t believe an organization that has put out such high quality software in the past can jump the shark this badly. How many months was this in beta again? how many release candidates did we go through?

Here are the problems I’m having:

• pages won’t load!
• when they do, CSS is randomly missing
• if they do render, pages are very slow (my cursor stutters rather than glides across the page)
• the “awsome bar” is about as useful and interesting as Jar Jar Binks
• too many add-ons are not compatible

I headed over to the support forums and this is the page Firefox 3 presented me with (I kid you not):

And here is what google analytics looks like for me (click to enlarge):

I tried erasing the cache, cookies, etc. then restarting Firefox but no matter what I do, that is what Google Analytics looks like. I’ve heard from others that they can’t see Google Maps and others that MySpace (one of the most popular sites on the web) doesn’t render correctly.

Anyone else out there have problems with Firefox 3 or is it just me?

Oh and in case you’re wondering, I’m typing this from Opera (9.50).

I didn’t know I was a haxor… until now. I hope Andy won’t mind me posting this - since it’s just more publicity for his site!

Here’s how to get inside mytrade.com, without a beta invite:

1. Go to google.com
2. type in “mytrade.com”
3. click on ‘cached’, for the second result
4. click on the tab ‘stockpodge’
5. voila!

(top left: click on add content to open up the sidebar)

Here’s the proof that I got in (without an invite):

I browsed it in FireFox, IE and Opera and found considerable kinks that need to be ironed out. It was sluggish (especially when opening a feed) and did very wild things when I tried to move around the little windows.

MyTrade.com is simply another Ajaxian content aggregator. Similar to sanebull.com and instantbull.com. Probably more like sanebull than instantbull (what is up with these names?!) Anyway, I don’t see the point of sites like these but then again, what do I know?

Take it for a spin and give Andy some feedback.