The Reasons I Journal...Pivotal Moments in The Market... and The Boom from the 2009 Bottom

I am in Chicago speaking at a CFA event. I am not smart enough to be one, but they are humoring themselves having a ‘social media’ guy talk about what they are missing.

They don’t really want to know. Ninety-nine percent are stuck in old workflows and institutional think and biases. Thank goodness, they can’t connect the new data sets and platforms of today to their thinking. Their loss.

In the last few days I have sold some of my Linked In and Google stock for my fund and clients. I have been busy but am hearing that $GOOG got slapped with a $1,000 target. The stuff that makes me cringe.

It’s fun watching the Dow Industrials hit all-time highs. The S&P is cooking near all-time highs as well. I am an optimist, glass half full guy so though I am never fully invested, I am participating.

In March 2009, I remember vividly what I was doing because the market was imploding and I was blogging a lot. My book ‘The Wallstrip Edge‘ was coming out and I was excited. I loved how it came out. Wallstrip was coming to an end so I knew the title was going to miss, but I was proud of the content. The markets were crashing but I was writing about the trends that would rule the coming years, security (Lifelock $LOCK now), Twitter, Facebook and Linked in. I wanted to call the book ‘The Twitter Trend’ but my publishers laughed at me…’We paid for Wallstrip’!!!

I am so happy that as we pass all-time highs on the Dow I can go quickly back to what I was writing about on March 9, 2009. I was on the beach,on vacation, but I had to check in to say I was buying a few things.

Today, I am long, uncomfortably (because of liquidity and my angel bent), but doing mostly the opposite on the liquid end. Yesterday I sold some $GOOG and $LNKD (on the Stocktwits stream) and today more $GOOG. Yesterday I talked about adding $FDX (I should have). So, I am not bearish, just remembering to be disciplined and sell when it feels great and easy and nibble when it fells plain awful.

An easy market would be one that had Apple at a trillion and Airlines in bankruptcy, but it’s the airlines at 52 week highs and Apple at 52 week lows. Confused yet?

While Airlines might be at all-time highs, the largest one in the worlld, American/US Air combined for the whopping valuation of $11 billion or ONE TWITTER.

My last two longs – Tesla and $MENT have not worked. I owned some shares in the leading Gluten Free Comapny $BDBD but took a loss there too. I was already quickly whipsawed out of $MENT. It’s a tricky tape for one that has the indexes at major highs.

This is NO Bubble.

A bubble looks like the Etrade commercials of 2000 and 2001 with Jackie Chan and Shaq promoting the idea of daytrading. It happened. The tracks were laid for Google, Apple, Amazon. They are the Kansas City Southern’s of the next 100 years (up 1000 percent since 2008 and the latest railroad to hit ALL-time highs). There is too much financial intervention. We will pay for the sins of liquidity, but the alternative is mostly silly as well. Being bearish is exhausting. As I was talking with my pal Josh Brown last night, we both understand that Americans just get out of their beds everyday. If they can’t they medicate to get out of said beds. When they get out of their beds…they spend.

The demographics are changing rapidly and this boom looks little like the past booms, but I am confident that we are in a boom. If the stock market drops 30 percent starting today, we are still in said boom. Booms are not a free pass to wealth.

This is just a friendly reminder to use the tools of today to network, connect and journal, jot things down in a way you can retrieve them, even if it’s only for your eyes only. Stack the odds of tapping the wells of this boom.

Come hang with anytime on Stocktwits to start learning about the financial markets today. It takes time to learn the language of the markets, but not as much as you think.