Not quite settled in, but finally State-side
Posted by The Lonely Trader on May 25, 2008
Just about everything cultural, social and physical in Southern California urban spaces offends me. (I’m a Northern California boy.) In the past, I’ve lived in Coronado (1997-1998) and Palm Springs (2000-2004), and now we’re settling into the tippy-most northern part of San Diego County for a couple of years…into a housing development, no less. It seems unless we are rural, it is almost impossible these days to avoid the infestation of manufactured community. It’s an endless swath of strip malls, ticky-tacky houses, and billboards for inane television sit-coms, dramas and reality shows. And it’s a place where almost everyone has adopted poorly scripted traits from an airbrushed inventory of highly stylized personas. It is, indeed, the Super Fantastic Plastic Machine. There are a few communities that harbor some authenticity in the midst of this manufactured society, and wifeykins and I will do our best to find and contribute to them.
That said, I have always liked it here. Endless miles of two lane highways and one lane by-ways for the motorcycles and mountain bikes, taking us to some of the most scenic places on earth. After a long weekend of riding through the Sierras, I can head over to the Commerce and play Hold’em if I like (and indulge in a bit of “plastic” myself), or to the beach for a bonfire, or to a concert or an art show or a play. Or finally find fresh sushi! And almost everyone over the age of 18 speaks my mother tongue. Will I find time for any of this between my work-a-day job and trading? Probably not as much as I would like. Those of you who have been at this for awhile, and who are seriously working to “trade your way to financial freedom” while maintaining a respectable reputation at the office, know what I’m talking about. We are lucky if we get one day a week to unwind.
So I suppose it doesn’t matter if wifeykins and I are stuck being landless serfs and renting ticky-tacky houses for a coupla years. (The market still sucks for buying anyway.) I will concentrate on trading and it is good to be a long way from Cairo – I can hear myself think. (Finally!) If anyone wants to get together for a few beers in the SoCal area, drop me a line. I won’t make fun of you if a mohito, mint julep or diet cola is your thing. Just don’t order a merlot and expect me to keep a straight face.
I’ll be putting together some thoughts about the market and about my new model later on today — lots to think about. How has everyone been doing? I haven’t had time to check all the blogs, but I’ll get to it tonight. I’ve noticed some very good intraday swings beginning in the Asian session.
I have to say I’m disappointed that nobody has rogered up on coding some indicators for me. I thought there would be some good programmers lurking around this blog for sure…or maybe I didn’t make it prominent enough when I mentioned it. I really don’t want to use Rent-a-Coder, but I will if necessary. (Yes, that is a threat!)
Oh, I’m also considering joining a Trading Tribe. Anyone have any experience with one of those?
This entry was posted on May 25, 2008 at 5:17 pm and is filed under admin notes, distractions. Tagged: Asian trading session, Ed Seykota, intraday swings, kitsch, landless serf, malaise of post-modernity, manufactured societies, SoCal, social criticism, Southern California, tract housing, Trading psychology, Trading Tribe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
One Response to “Not quite settled in, but finally State-side”
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andrewunknown said
“It seems unless we are rural, it is almost impossible these days to avoid the infestation of manufactured community.”
Exactly. My wife and I talk about moving here and there to finally “settle”, but I refuse to live in the suburbs, the center of gravity toward which we are constantly pulled by family, career and other practicalities. I stubbornly refuse, though. The city or the country, but I won’t buy real estate in between. For the reasons you might guess: templated, homogenized, inauthentic, superficial, antiseptic, petty social hierarchies and in many places filled to the gills with pseudo-affluent, upwardly-mobile charlatans. None of that can happen in the city without it becoming excessive and transmogrified – there’s too much diversity (cultural, architectural, ethnic, demographic) to sustain what goes on in the suburbs in a convincing way – any time it’s tried, it’s so grotesque as to be laughable. The country is just the same, but rather than diversity, I think unvarnished nature – and the realization of what it takes to subsist in it – makes a mockery of petty human institutions.
So, we continue to rent. And you’re right on the state of the market there. I’m not interested in buying into buy the debt inherent to a rapidly depreciating asset (i.e. a house). Once the MoM decline in existing home prices begins to show a trend of leveling off, we’ll get serious.
Nice to see the blog back on!