Back in the saddle

My apologies to the few of you reading this. Job search has been taking all my time the last few weeks. No excuse, I need to keep writing and I will definitely try harder. Now, let's look at today's market. It's 3:05 and "the market" is up 154 points. Big whoop, what's really important to me is that my holdings are up 1.4% for the day. USAToday says that the markets are up due to rising home sales. Soooooo, because your neighbors are buying houses, you buy stocks. Sorry, that doesn't make sense to me. As time goes on, I'm thinking more and more stock transactions are computer initiated, if stock X goes up, then buy stock Y. The article also said people are encouraged by higher earnings are The Home Depot (HD) and Walmart (WMT). Here's my unbelief, for this all to be true, 100 million investors would have to be glued to their TVs looking at housing starts and big name company earnings and immediately making the decision either buy or sell a bunch of stocks all over the place.

Earlier today Authentidate Holding Corp (ADAT) was up 12% for the day. It's now up just over 2%. What was the big news that caused this spike in this company with a market capitalization of $30 million? Beats me. According to Yahoo they haven't had a headline in 12 days. They have an earnings announcement in September. But they did get a new PR firm a few weeks back. I guess it's working. As I'm writing this, it's back up 11%. My guess is that when some other stock moved some computer algorithm said buy a poopload of ADAT, now sell it, now buy it again. Seriously, imagine the people who work there and maybe have their 401ks wrapped up in this company's stock. They must be going batpoop today.

Netflix (NFLX) is down 2% today, the only news I see is that HBO is going to the iPad and not to Netflix. Theroretically, 2% of the value of Netfilx was due to an impending HBO distribution deal. Um, yeah, right. Frontier Financial got a 13% haircut today. Why? Beats me. The last headline was June 9 about a shareholder lawsuit. My point is, if it was news driving this stock down 13%, we'd know. It's not people, it's Skynet....

Oh yeah, still following Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They're still in the $.40 range. Haven't repulled the buy trigger yet. I think they may shrink a little more.