Focus on Financial Firms in this Sunday Night's Chat

I will be featuring the charts of my favorite financial stocks in the Sunday night chat. We're still not maxing out the chat server so I'm considering a change of time for the chat (send me your suggestions for the best time). In any event, everyone's welcome to this free weekly event, and I hope to see you Sunday night at 8PM ET.

Reading Roundup (VII)

Articles I've recently read with my comments in brackets and other miscellany:

China Says It Will No Longer Peg Its Currency to the U.S. Dollar, by David Barboza & Joseph Kahn. ["... at about 7 p.m. Beijing time today, the Central Bank said that it had slightly increased the value of the currency against the dollar and that the yuan now would be managed against a basket of unidentified currencies ... The Chinese government said the initial appreciation of its currency would be modest, only about 2 percent of its value against the dollar, but that it would allow the yuan to fluctuate within a narrow band against a basket of foreign currencies." Some of us have been looking forward to (and positioning ourselves for) this revaluation for a good long time. 2% ain't much, but it's a start.]

Milk Chocolate Dipped Pork Rinds: A Low Carb Dieter's Dream Come True [Ugly kindly pointed out these, um, things on his site. They look absolutely disgusting, but I guess that's the point. I dip my pork rinds in my glass of beer and nowhere else.]

"If you are a breakeven trader, then you are light years ahead of the crowd." [My friend Eyal has started a blog, which you should check out. His posts excerpting the Wisdom of Humble1 are especially worth reading. Hum, are you out there somewhere in the ether? Get in touch!]

Daniel Gross: A Moneyblog [Dan Gross writes the Moneybox column at Slate; I just learned today that he has a blog, and have added him to my Blogroll.]

I talked with the local Coke distributor yesterday to complain about the Vanilla Coke shortage. She agreed that it was a crisis and explained that the "freshness" (xinxian) factor was a big part of the problem. She promised that once the "freshness" wears off, I should be able to find a bottle. In the meantime she said I should try the Friendship Store since they always have some in stock (because no one shops there anymore). Back in 1990 when I was a student here, my classmates and I would go to the Friendship Store to buy Nutella -- the closest thing you could find to junk food back then. Now of course there's wall to wall junk, and tens of thousands of obese children to boot.

Gimme Revaluation Play

I guess the most obvious trade after the RMB revaluation news hit was getting short the Treasury futures. The best entry that any Dummy can see is below 111^15. Congratulations to those who caught it -- I was fast asleep.

10-Year T-Note futures, 15-min. Chart