I’m baaack, to humbly quote the great MJ.

I do think my  Great Pyrenees approves of the new baby. So does lobo btw. Family and pets rules!

Now, back to work.

Markets are U G L Y (Dow industrials down 200 as stocks’ slide steepens) and they ain’t got no alibi. Not that I’m terribly surprised by this development, as we have been preparing slowly but surely for exactly this type of a pullback right about now. Just a couple weeks ago, in How can Facebook be cheaper than a whiskey maker?, I wrote –

Feet to fire, I would guess that late January or early February brings out some panic selling over who-knows-what and you’ll get your 5%-10% pullback. And think about this right now — it WILL NOT be easy to buy into the next panic sell off.

Is it easy to buy right now? Probably still a little bit too easy for my liking. I don’t think there’s enough pain, fear or pullback here to get terribly excited about just yet. If the DJIA gets below the rather arbitrary level of 16,000 there might really get to be some profit-taking for the near-term, measured in weeks, I would guess. That is, if the DJIA would really drop a bit more in the next few days closer to 15,500, I’d probably be looking to start scaling back into some of the positions we’ve trimmed out of near the highs. No need to rush in for me given my current positioning and analysis.

If you don’t think you own enough stocks at the current time, as usual, I’d suggest just nibbling on a few here to get started, buying maybe about 1/4 or so of a “full position” whatever that might be for you personally, and then slowly scale into more until there’s a better buying opportunity.

Where We Are At in the Global Precious Metals Markets – A Framework – This is truly a must-read for every investor. And a reminder of why I bought yet more gold coins again a couple weeks ago. LINK  Best quote from Arthur Cutten’s, proprietor of Jesse’s Café Américain, article, “In a very real sense we should remember that gold is gold, and the price of gold is more like a currency exchange rate than the price of a commodity.  And so one can think of this entire scenario as a major defense of the dollar at some ideal exchange rate to gold, in much the same manner that the Bank of England sought to defend a particular valuation of the pound.” Which leads us to a similar topic, at least in my view of the world…

“Why Bitcoin Matters” – I’m not always a Marc Andreesen fan, but this write up he did on bitcoin touches on all kinds of important reasons to believe bitcoin could work long-term. My favorite music analyst, Bob Lefsetz called this article The Most Important Thing You Will Read All Day a couple days ago, and I probably agree. Indeed, some of the very reasons I outlined back when I bought put a small part of my portfolio into bitcoins back when it was was a small fraction of today’s price are covered here in an easy-to-understand manner from Andreesen. I’ve talked about how bitcoin’s in a positive feedback loop which in turn is leading bitcoin to hit critical mass several times before and why there doesn’t have to be an inherent value in the bitcoin for it to have value as a means of exchanging value. Read both Marc’s and Bob’s articles, as they are very important. Bob hits the nail on the head with this statement for sure, “But no one in the media gets [bitcoin]. They’re too busy speaking of the seesawing value.” Which leads us to this…

Emerging markets continue to sink — it’s Argentina’s turn Friday – Currency manipulations create black markets in Argentina. And currency manipulations create demand for alternatives like gold and bitcoin here in bigger, more developed economies like the US and China.

Juniper Networks Jumps As Q4 Shows ‘Solid Momentum’ – I added Juniper to the portfolio about nine months ago and continued to scale into more as it stagnated there last summer. The stock is up more than 60% from my lowest tranche purchase back in April and I’ve got some very nice gains in the position with this latest big pop today. I’m going to sell about 1/5 of my position here today.

Truly a great job on the this new iPhone app https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scutify/id673974489 from @KheangLy.

Clicking on the scuttles or the tweets inside the app open up viewable images and clickable links. More features on the way too. And stay tuned for the soon-to-be-released Scutify iPad app too.

I hope you guys have been following the terrific economic and #market debates from @RobertMarcin and @JeffMiller on Scutify. Lots of insights about the quite differing and disparate approaches of two successful money managers in their back and forth.

Peace and love til next week.
Cody