Curb Your Enthusiasm? Nonsense!

You know, I think Karst purposely puts these incendiary missives up here to get my goat & make me blog. But that's just business as usual at Paranoid Rage-a-Holics Anonymous...

RE: the Oil Speculator Curbing, I think I'm a fairly savvy investor (just not this last quarter, thankyouverymuch) and in the past I've tried to relate buying stocks or trading options to what we go through daily as produce folks, where we buy & sell with the added wrinkle of time element added. And I've come to this conclusion, for oil as well as tomatoes: the market is the market is the market, and it cannot be controlled. A 402-19 vote to curb speculation? Overwhelming! Me, I'm with the nineteen that saw the 402 for the grandstanders that they are.

You have your supply. You have your demand. And then...you have your psychology-sentiment-fervor-lack of restraint, whatever the heck you want to call it. Certainly, it feeds on itself. Three or four Novembers ago, the California green tomato deal ended abruptly with early rains, the Palmetto/Ruskin (FL) deal wasn't ready, the backyards had the 'blight' (my Iowa mother-in-law thinks every non-perfect tomato in her garden has 'the blight'), and consequently the market shot up to nearly $40.00 FOB.

And we fed into it. Alan Greenspan, the best in the history of Fed chairmen in my opinion, would no doubt have called it 'unbridled enthusiasm'. We knew beyond doubt that supply was coming. But we still bought when we could & made a long profit as the invoice amounts were growing exponentially.

Then, like a switch, demand stopped. Five bucks a pound for a tomato will do that every time. And like a house of cards, it was implosion time. The market was in the teens within a matter of days, and the street guys were dancing to that old accounting tune, FIFO, first-in-first-out, or more accurately, first-loss-best-loss.

The point of all this, from that trying time that put more than a few grey hairs on this head, is that we couldn't control it. No one can. Sure, factor in some greed in these instances, but smart people know about the day of reckoning that is the flipside. And the oil speculators know full well that buying this high, feeding into the frenzy, has the inherent risk of being caught, leaving them to scramble when the music stops and they've run of chairs.

Have a quiet weekend.

Later,

Jay