Sunday, June 22, 2008

Another Retest

First, kudos to the folks at Roku who created the Netflix streamer.  Very nice.  Received it yesterday, hooked it up today.  No problems.  Easy breezy.  Have a few movies and TV shows in my "Watch Instantly" queue at Netflix, and am ready to go.  Quality is okay at 480p.  And hopefully hi-def is on the way in the future.  So now, I can watch the most-recent DVDs in HD via my NFLX subscription, and catch up on stuff I've missed via streaming.

You know, when the market rallied off the March lows, I thought that was it.  I thought we were going to head higher and stair-step our way back to new highs.  My thought process there was that the bad news was mostly known and that earnings would rebound in the second half of the year.  The market had gone down around previous lows, and the bounce up seemed to be working fine.  Well, except for the volume.

What's changed?  Nothing really.  I believe what we're seeing is just pessimism.  High fuel prices are making news headlines every few minutes.  And while that's not a major impact to most of our budgets, it is something that we see and that we're aware of every time we go to the filling station.  Yes, we do cut back on Starbucks a bit.  But many folks have adjusted by using mass transit and by making that next car purchase one that gets better MPG.  In addition, we have campaign season going in full gear, and the party out of power is going to continue to try to spread gloom and doom to the best of their ability.  This is not the time to talk up the economy when you're trying to convince the voters to punch the chad with your name on it.

What to do?  I remain long.  We haven't had a recession.  GDP hasn't gone negative in any quarter yet, despite the predictions from the gurus, quarter after quarter after quarter.  Who listens to those guys, anyways?  This one may be flat, but folks are out there spending their tax rebate checks.  Look at Best Buy's recent report, for example. 

What else to do?  Focus on the fun.  It's Summer!  Don't let the gloomers get you down.

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