Best Performing Energy Stocks

The list of energy stocks I follow isn't that large, but here's a screenshot showing the price change over various periods during the last year (sorted by 52-week performance).

Reading Roundup (XVIII) - Clowes (Again), Old-legacy Media's Slow Death, Vogue China, etc.

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

A Short Interview with Daniel Clowes, by Shoshana Berger.
["How did Clowes find his way down the unlikely path from comic-book geek to Hollywood A-lister?" I'm not obsessed with Clowes, it's just that he's my kind of nerd.]

Network newscasts may be dying, but they're doing it profitably, by Daniel Gross.
["With news available all day on cable and the Internet, the notion that a half-hour amalgam of over-produced, sound-bite-ridden reports, hosted by an old guy in an expensive suit, could make for an attractive program - let alone an attractive advertising vehicle - seems fanciful ... {But} old-legacy media - newspapers and magazines and network TV newscasts backed by advertising - are going to be with us a lot longer than we think." Good stuff from Gross.]

I picked up a copy of Vogue China at my local newsstand yesterday. It's 430 pages thick and features Gemma Ward on the cover along with a couple of Chinese models. It costs 20 kuai ($2.47), which isn't cheap by local standards. There are two Beijing restaurant reviews in this premiere issue: Original Kitchen (Jia He Si Fang Cai), which is in Oriental Plaza and is very pricey; and My Humble House (Han She), which is in Dongcheng District and is also very pricey (but looks more interesting than Original Kitchen).

In Beijing there are now several glossy magazines that feature half-naked men on their covers... one is called Fitmodel, I didn't catch the names of the others. I confirmed my suspicion with the newsstand girl: these magazines are overwhelmingly bought by men, not women. There's a huge and largely untapped market for homoerotic stuff here.

Latest Take on Crude Earl

Inquiring minds want to know Fuzzy's latest position in Crude. The period from the end of June to the end of July was filled with nasty whipsaws and small losses, and is best forgotten; now we can revel in the glory of capturing 735 cents (to date) since the last reversal.

Light Sweet Crude, 30-min. Chart