I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for these coaching movies. Can’t help it. I was a coach. Moreover, specific to this case, I coached girls and women primarily (volleyball, not basketball). Any guy who has ever coached girls will tell you how different it is from coaching boys. It’s a real challenge to make the adjustment. You have to handle individual players differently, and the team as a whole differently. You have to learn how to be tough on them, which goes against much of what is ingrained in us growing up. If you can do it, though, it’s incredibly rewarding.

Anyway, the movie is fantastic. Highly recommended.

You can see from the graph how the level of net shorts (Longs – Shorts) is at a low level it has touched a few times the last six months or so. What”s even more interesting to my mind is the 35% bullish (see the highlighted area in the table) indicating that 65% of the positions are short. That’s a big negative bias.

This sort of positioning suggests we may yet see higher highs in stocks.

Actually, from my perspective things now remind me more of the early 90s. That was the time of the RTC after all those thrifts were shut down across the country. In Rhode Island the governor shut down all the credit unions on New Years day 1990, which really did a number on the state economy for a couple of years. I was only a kid in the early 1980s, but I do remember it wasn’t a great time. The cities were in rough shape. I think anyone who was in NYC at the time would agree.

Seperate, former colleague Jamie Coleman at ForexLive posted  a fun look at the yen situation. The Japanese have always stood ready and willing to intervene in the currency markets, either directly or verbally. That, at times, creates some very interesting press and market action – as it did last night.

Here’s a chart of the 1mo rolling correlation between EUR/JPY and the S&P 500. Notice how at several points in the last year it’s been well short of strongly positive and has even gone well negative.

But that’s beside the point. Let me just say that my eyes lit up at the number since I’m developing my own novel. It’s one which will share a genre and some other broad elements with Brown’s work, which means it will likely appeal to a similar market – a big one from the looks of it.

It’s interesting to be asked for an interview like this. I’m not talking about part-time trading. Personally, I’ve always considered myself a part-time trader. Yes, I work in the markets as a professional market analyst, but that’s not trading. In fact, most days I have to make a point of remembering to open my trading platform if I think I might do a trade. Besides, I’ve long found that my somewhat longer-term positions have been the most productive for me.

No, the thing I find interesting is how I’ve been asked for and interview rather than maybe asked to write an article on the subject. I’ve published three articles in SFO – Trading Coaches Needed!, Juggling Too Much? Trend Trading Simplifies Analysis, and What’s the Bandwidth?. Granted, it’s been a while since I wrote anything for magazine publication. Maybe this is their way of trying to draw me back in.

By the way, SFO published a review of The Essentials of Trading when it first came out.

If you’re wondering what the big carry trade is right now, look no further than AUD/USD.

Now, bond yields made their most recent peak in June (again). Could we be in for another stock peak this month or next? If bonds don’t make a quick u-turn there’s going to be a strong case for it.

Now, as much as I compared the Clunkers program with the Y2K tech cycle, I don’t think the scope is anywhere near the same. Two things were part of the technology upgrading that went into Y2K preparation. One was necessity. The other was ample money from a strong economy. We have neither of those in this case. The figures suggest the annualized sales rate during the Clunkers run reached about 13.7 million. That’s a big bump, but short-lived and from a low base.

So the bottom line is that while I do think the automakers will see a sales lag for some time to come, it’s probably not going to drag on and on, especially if the economy picks up. They will feel the pain into next year, most likely, but my guess is not beyond mid-year if things continue improving as they have done.

Admittedly, I’d love to see more commenting on the blog. It’s a form of feedback to let me know what interests people and what they are looking for, and I like interacting with folks. Hopefully the next 1000 will happen more quickly than the first 1000.