Two quick profit-taking trades to report on this morning. I’m trimming a little bit of my MRVL and SNDK call options. I’ve got big gains in both and am only selling about 1/5 of each, but I am going to lock in some profits on these and free up more cash.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a “Revolution Investing Must-Reads Round Up” and I’ve gotten a few requests from both Marketwatch readers and from TradingWithCody.com subscribers. So let’s run through a few recent headlines and put our trademark “Flip It” analysis behind each one.

In China, Dead Pigs With Morning Tea Is Nothing New and Parts of Japan smothered in Chinese air pollution – China’s environmental and health issues seem to be hitting some sort of a tipping point here. With air you can’t breath, water you can’t drink, milk powder you can’t give to your baby — these stories aren’t going to get better any time soon. I think the China Environment Crisis is likely a coming Black Swan event. It can lead overnight to all kinds of economic, social and health crises that serve to freak out the markets.

The US Dollar: Keeping Up Appearances – Key phrase in the article is in the conclusion, and it aligns exactly with my thesis of buying physical gold and silver now and getting ready to short paper gold and silver at some point in the future (see Gold paper is dead; long live gold) – “how far the Anglo-American financial system is willing to go to keep up the appearance and dignity of a stable global reserve currency in the dollar, even while the dollar is being used and abused by the financiers like a 12th Avenue hooker? I think you know that I believe that the paper metals markets are an accident waiting to happen, particularly with regard to silver.”

Indicator Update: Plenty of Opinion, Little Data – Great read from probably the best market timer and trends follower I have ever read, Jeff Miller. He’s got some doozy ideas in this one.

HPQ and the Case of the Missing Bad Mouth – I wrote an entire newsletter about why I always listen when the one and only Robert Marcin speaks about “value stocks.” Marcin is one of the most opinionated, outspoken and funny money managers you’ll ever read.

Bill Black: Which Aspect of the FDIC’s Litigation Failures is the Most Embarrassing and Damaging? and Google Search Results for “Bank Settlement” – The endless settlements, bank bailouts, hidden and explicit subsidies for the Too Big Too Fail Banks have killed me on my shorts in these names. I’ve been patiently waiting to build up these short positions and I recently scaled into some GS and MS puts. But man, does it depress anybody else to see the 107,000,000 (that’s 107 million) results that come back when you type “Bank Settlement” in Google?

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