Market Mea Culpa, DevOps, Opco Tech Conf and Summer 2013

My July market call did not work out.  I am long some equities and long some vol (which is not working out), with a high percentage cash position.  The Yen short worked.  I am looking forward to the upcoming Cisco results as they will be the first to report a July month and if their guidance for enterprise spending is positive, I will go long high beta tech growth names.

The market acts really weird.  Friday is a good example as the market opens down on the NFP and then about an hour after it is open, it moves steadily higher into the close.  I do not know if this is the effect of ETFs, HFT or QE or all three, but it is not historically normal so it must be the new normal and learning to invest in a market that acts in this manner is what I am pondering.

I am pondering because I am not writing.  Through no purposeful planning, I have taken the summer off from writing for the blog, but I will get back to it this month leading into VMWorld.  I am just finishing up The Phoenix Project, which is a novel about DevOps.  I am enjoying it.

I have been able to do a lot of biking this summer and social media pressure has forced me to start using Strava to record my rides.  I have an old spreadsheet from 1990-2005 that I used to record all my runs when I was a runner.  My knees forced me to take up biking and logging and mapping all the rides is just really cool.  I am totally enjoying the summer.  Summers in Boston are in most years really nice, but when the Sox are winning the whole city seems to have better attitude about everything and after this past year, the city could use an extended period of goodness.

I am speaking at the Opco tech conference next Tuesday (August 13th) in Boston.  I have heard from a number of people who will be in town that week and I look forward to seeing many of you.

/wrk

* It is all about the network stupid, because it is all about compute. *

** Comments are always welcome in the comments section or in private. **