So the market is happy with the jobs number?

During a much anticipated tennis rematch this morning, my buddy and I talked about the jobs number coming out today.  He thought the number would be much worse than predicted, I took the other side.

It is my feeling that since things have stabilized in my world, things were better across the board.  Turns out the consensus was actually pretty close to the number and we were both wrong.

The markets are so much about psychology.  That’s why The Phoenix Letter isn’t about the craziness.  It’s about the charts, the stocks, not the companies and the people.  We could care less if the company was selling ketchup popsicles to eskimos.  Doesn’t matter, charts don’t lie.

As usual we are confident this weeks picks are going to do very well.

The market is up a little right now – be happy for small miracles.

Good luck trading today.

The First Post

We have been reading blogs collectively since 1997, before the term blog was even coined.  At the time, it was called a weblog.  Seemed like kind of a weird thing to do.  Write down all of your thoughts, in a stream of conscience, that would eventually be read by others.

In the late 90’s there was a guy I worked with who collected really weird, little rubber pigs.  This job was my first out of college and I still had that frat boy mentality for messing with people.  When this guy would leave for the day, my co-workers and I would rearrange his little plastic pigs into extremely indecent positions.

He really didn’t have much of a sense of humor about his pigs.  They were the kind of junky thing you would get your kids while you left the supermarket for a quarter and they would have already gotten their moneys worth by the time you got to the car.

But this was the first guy I knew who had his own blog.  And although his writings were boring and he was the biggest tool to work with, he still writes in his weblog everyday and I still read it every so often.

This blog is not going to be any of that, we hope.  There are a few of us who will contribute to it from time to time.

The Phoenix Letter is a fantastic work in progress.  We love doing it, and we love hearing success stories from our readers and subscribers.

The idea of this blog is stay connected with you, sometimes with market commentary and sometimes with little quips about a sore knee, a great round of golf or the weather.

It is now 12 years since I first read a blog and this is the first post I have ever put up myself.  I hope it doesn’t suck and I hope you come back, often.