Adam Smith, Revisited

I'm beginning a new career as an Investment Analyst. Call me! Call me now! Your retirement depends on it! No, really! I know Dow Jones personally! We had lunch together! I call him "Dow!" So call now! But wait! There's more!

Trust me. I am categorically qualified to be your broker, on several levels. You can rest assured that once you've been my client, by all measurements, you're broker.

Witness these qualifications...

• I'm a news junkie.
• I can flawlessly spell both "Adam" and "Smith."
• I can flawlessly spell both "Barney" and "Smith," but not in the correct order.
• I contribute to my own retirement account.
• I monitor my account with all the mulled, limp, "I'm gonna live forever" apathy you might expect from someone who is a Child of the '60s.

And my market research is immaculate. One day, while FoxNews was stuck in yet another extended host vs. panel shriek-fest, I switched over to Fox Television. But every show was a cartoon. Nobody was real. So I switched to C-SPAN's coverage of Congress. Nobody was real there, either, but they were pretty funny. So then I switched to CNBC's financial news. I discovered that financial people have their own way of communicating, and can, with a straight face, say some odd things.

• Seems like everybody in Dallas is going long.
• I missed her by two teenies.
• Stay tuned. The futures are ahead.
• I shorted sheets.
• An upside downtick in underutilized cyclicals caused a flight to Jumbos. (yep - with a straight face)
• Pharmaceuticals got a nice injection.
• We gotta watch their gas levels.
• The stimulus needs to be more stimulating, and the omnibus needs to be more...uh...omnilating.
• Stem Cells have split.
• Rolling averages are going nowhere.
• Pork Bellies. (Nothing new, but I still think it's funny. Like "Hog Futures." To me, there's only one possible Hog Future. It's called "breakfast.")
• Flat is the new Up.
• Looking backward scared the bears.
• They're riding up after writing down.
• The boss tossed ROST at cost, and lost.
• I went long on Ultra-Short Russells.
• Stay tuned. We'll be back with the futures.

Having thus documented my curriculum vitae, I will now, like all good drug dealers (and unlike all members of Congress) offer you a free taste. Below is my handy chart of market definitions, all of which are absolutely accurate, as far as you know.

Market Definitions

• Adjustment: a drop in stocks you own
• Dip: a drop in stocks you don't own
• Collapse: a drop in the market that happened while we were at Happy Hour
• Anomaly: a drop in stocks you told us to sell, but we forgot, due to Happy Hour
• Dive: what you will be living in after an Anomaly
• Plummet: a drop that we did not predict
• Upturn: what happens to the stocks you just sold
• Downturn: a gastric accident. Let's just leave it at that, okay?
• Uptick: We have no idea what this means. "Uptick" may be the most stupid noun we ever coined.
• Downtick: Okay, we were wrong about "Uptick."
• Trend: anything that CNN observes 2 days in a row
• Long Term Trend: anything that happens to stocks you own
• Market Correction: anything bad that happens to stocks you own
• Dow Jones: an ancient Chinese method of predicting the future by throwing sticks on the ground (insert your own irony here...)
• Selling Long: when 'Cheers' dumps a cast member
• Selling Short: when 'Saturday Night Live' dumps a cast member (c'mon - keep up...)
• Ranch: For investment analysts who attend Investment Analyst conventions, 'Ranch' describes the site of intensely focused fully deductible seminars, replete with open bar parameters and market-savvy investment-oriented pole dancers. For the rest of you, 'Ranch' (RNCH) is a revenue-associative, downside-negative, chart-responsive, recessively-genetic, upturning market element whose managerial structure efforts the allocation of dedicated paradigms toward the non-punitive, resource-intensive, labor-acclimatized, off-shore-progressive, Lego-neutral development of a tax-deferred all-natural, organic salad dressing.
• Margin Call: a rather brusque phone call from your broker, demanding all the cash you have on hand, plus some more that you don't have, in order to save your ass[ets]

As you can see, investing is fraught with confusing terms, which often cause the most seasoned Investment Analyst to suffer from what is known in medical journals as Hysterical Giggling. So call me now! As part of this special offer, we'll throw in a tasteful velvet painting of dogs at a poker table, betting on the Atlanta Falcons game.

It'll look great in your dive. Trust me.