Friday Potpourri

Some loose ends and random thoughts at the end of the week. Mali came bounding into the room when she heard the music; no accounting for the tastes of cats. What's true is true, she *is* my wife's girlfriend and sleeps with us every night...hmmm...

* Blog Traffic - January was a record month for visits and page views on the blog. This fits the pattern of increased traffic during periods of market weakness and uncertainty. (The previous traffic record was in August). I note, however, that the last couple of days traffic has decreased as the market has ground higher. This has been an uncanny sentiment measure: traffic peaked the day of the market low. To give an idea of the blog's overall traffic growth, there were about 8200 visits in January, 2006; 45,000 visits in January, 2007; and 87,000 visits in January, 2008. 75% of the traffic comes from the U.S. and Canada; 16% from Europe; and 7% from Asia. I'm deeply appreciative of the continued interest and support.

* Cross-Blog Conversations - I see that Chris Perruna has picked up on the idea of carrying on conversations across blogs. If you're a financial blogger and offer commentary on a post here (or would like me to react to a post of yours), by all means email me the URLs. In the interim, I'll post a few words this weekend about Chris' worthy topic regarding trading mistakes to avoid at all costs.

* Tracking New Highs/Lows - I continue to find this one of the most helpful indicators; here's an interesting look from Trader's Narrative.

* Questioning Eyeballs - Teresa Lo wonders about the MSFT-YHOO hook-up; also check her daily digests for a nice summary of news and themes.

* Technical Analysis Ideas - Investing Idea presents interesting technical analysis and wonders if India is ready to break out. Talking about technical analysis, I like how Brian Shannon tracks the market vs. its daily volume-weighted average price (VWAP). Nice way of detecting a trending market early. The good trends stay above or below VWAP for most of the session.

I'll have indicators updates this weekend and more links. Right now, Mali's come back into the room to hear her favorite Mastercard commercial. That cat...