YOUR problem is that Wall Streeters just booked their sweet gains in the form of bonuses and you are chasing momentum.

The market is thick with breakouts and the price momentum is beautiful. There is no reason for 99 percent of investors to fight the tape.

BUT, you don’t chase wildly. You should not confuse this great tape with your intelligence.

The elastic band has been stretched pretty far in historical terms. Take a look at the ROLLING ONE-YEAR RETURN for the S&P . Of course we could keep going, but historically we are in some relatively uncharted waters.

There IS risk despite the risk free trade available to banks and the smart folks willing to borrow to their eyeballs with cheap money.

If I knew what it was and when it would happen, I would share it.

The housing bubble was predicted by EVERYBODY, yet Michael Lewis says maybe 20 people made money off it. That’s pretty insane seeing that almost 2 trillion was lost.

Enjoy the tape and the easy money, but know it will end extremely bad for most.

As I was getting the grey removed from my hair today, I started thinking about Nadsaq 5,000.  I mean…all those Nasdaq points and not one good hair or aging solution…

It has truly been an amazing 10 years since Nasdaq 5,000 in March 2000. It was a pretty amazing two years leading up to that as well.

I started my small hedge fund in June, 1998 and knew amazingly little. I can’t believe how little I know 12 years later.

Ten years from now, I will have no hair on my head and cabbage size patches in my nose and ears and time will be my enemy.

In January of 2000 I invested in a Q round of Cars Direct. A sure thing. It’s finally public and I am still down 90 percent. Time just makes that pig hurt more. As part of that same deal, I HAD to invest in Viva.com. It was the horse with three legs and it should have died a horrible death. It became Rent.com and was purchased by Ebay for $450 million in cash after almost shutting down in 2001. I am a genius and time can’t stop me biiitches.

I could go on but it would cut into my Twitter time.

There is only one lesson…stay in the game. Yutz’s like me are surviving and thriving.

Fat pitches are everywhere.

The markets can be very complicated…or insanely simple. The hardest part of investing is keeping it simple. The second hardest part is finding someone to help you keep it simple and than someone else to back that person up and so on….

I love reading about the economy and the markets, but for the time spent, I might have been better off as a lawyer just billing my time .

For all the beginners and those looking for a fresh start, this post is for you.

Here are ten rules to follow to enjoy the Stock Market:

1. You are not privy to inside information. Ignore tips.

2. If you are investing fake money or money you cannot afford, you should be working to earn and save enough money to do it with money you can afford to invest with.

3. Once you have enough money to invest (5-10 individual stocks) just start. Pull the freaking trigger. Feel the rush.

4. STOP doing it for the rush.

5. If you are going to invest, keep your costs as low as possible. Be cheap.

6. Learn to recognize healthy markets. I define healthy as hundreds of uptrending stocks with institutional support. Stocks trading above $15-$20 with volume of 500,000 shares or more. I want to fish when/where fish are jumping in the boat.

7. Read less about stocks and markets. A daily check at an aggregator like AbnormalRetrums.com is truly all you need to stay ‘cocktail party’ smart.

8. Prune Prune Prune…NEVER get to the point where you dread looking at your statement. NEVER. Find a backup to hold you accountable. Find another.

9. Keep a journal, blog, Stocktwits account..something to keep you even more honest with at least yourself. You will invest better.

Not sure if I missed something so please chime in with your thoughts so I can fill in a tenth….

It makes sense that the market (especially the Nasdaq) is rallying into the iPad release of early April and the momentum should carry through until at least May.

I have blogged about the importance of the iPad to the financial web .

In 1994 we got the Motley Fool. In 1998 we got TheStreet.com. It has been a black hole for financial web innovation since (save Interactive Brokers and Baby ETrade).

Cramer could have should have owned Wall Street and chose the make-up and television. For you home gamers, Cramer has done extremely well financially but $TSCM has a $110 million market cap (after doubling the last few months) with a $60 million on the balance sheet. Other than Bloomberg, which is private and charges $2,000/month, there are few exciting pure plays in the financial web. That is just wrong.

While quant funds continue to exploit what is left of any alpha in the markets, I believe that ‘Transparency is the new Alpha’.

I am excited for April and you should be too.

I don’t want to know them.

After spending so much time in Coronado, California though, a sliver of America that is almost perfect but has many of the same problems (real estate, housing) as the rest of America, I would rethink.

It starts with community. Communities are miracles for sure but there needs to be one for significant change to happen. The community needs to be completely supportive (good scenairo) or completely apathetic.

In Howard’s America, there would be no credit cards. We would assume EVERYONE is broke except for those with credit scores above say 700 or 800. We would RESET.

Capital One…broken up (I am short Capital One and seems like I always am). American Express (no position, just torn up cards)…adios.

Best Buy….see ya. I would save Radio Shack, because selling chords, headphones and battteries from a local strip mall is a noble business, but it would accept debit cards or cash only.

If you must use a CREDIT CARD to buy a 46 inch, flat screen television, you can’t have it. There is NOTHING in a Best Buy that this country needs (no position).

Bank of America and Citibank would have their credit card operations taken away. They have lost their priviledge. Chase Manhattan too. Their dumb iPhone app seals that assanine bank.

Banks take deposits in Howard’ America and they lend it to American citizens .Equifax and Transunion no longer have authority over credit ratings, your social graph does.

Just a start. I do think some of these changes are possible by just consuming with responsibility. They do not require any radical Lindzon policies.

Stop spending.

I had him on my show this Wednesday and asked for a good LIVE example of a trade that he was in with his subscribers. He walked us through $ITMN (minute 17 that begins) and how to manage the risk/reward of a stock (company) about to release major FDA news. On Friday, the stock was up in a gynormous fashion and Steven’s subscribers are happy once again.

If you want to learn about options and the myriad of ways to trade events and manage portfolio risk, you should subscribe to Steven Place . He will make you a better investor.

He loves baseball and has a sweet swing in the cage, but live, 10 year old wild pitching is hard to hit. He had two walks and got a few cuts in.

He is starting at second base.

I was more nervous that a ball would be hit to him than he was.

In the second inning, the bases were loaded and a seriously hard hit line drive was hit. Not sure if the ball caught him or he caught the ball, but it happened.

Game ball.

As good a feeling as an internet exit.

Life is good.

HERE YOU GO .

I do know her YouTube political campaign quickly sucks balls.

The whole ad made me cringe, but the ending is out of touch and pissed me off.

I now spend a lot of my life in California. I doubt I will ever leave. I consider myself lucky to have the chance to live here, despite it NOT being Meg Whitman GREAT..

She can’t fix the weather. I hope she is not in charge of acquisitions.

California is broke. That’s about it.

Meg founded/built a GREAT business. It ain’t so great itself these days. Starting a Company and/or State from scratch and making it great is a lot easier than stepping into a shitstorm with energy, food, water and immigration problems.

The State IS great. I want our leaders to acknowledge the greatness as a starting point before even getting my attention or support. Once we can agree on the amazingness of California and the country as a whole, we can make some baby steps toward kicking ass once again.

In the meantime, Gregor Macdonald is my choice for Governor of California . He lives in freaking Boston and is more qualified.

At the stock market level, I am seeing many setups. I had my friend Joe Fahmy on the show and today we reviewed $vprt $cmg $swks $clne $ge $caas and a few more leaders.

We also chatted about the business of managing money through Schwab Managed accounts. I have not given up on the business of hedge funds, but for us non-institutional guys, I am strongly in favor of picking a style and setting up client accounts in this format.

How dumb is it to have an indoor batting cage in industrial San Diego when it is 70 degrees and sunny everyday. I found out yesterday that it’s insanely smart.

My son Max loves baseball. He is getting good pretty fast. It is really fun to watch. His team went to practice at a batting cage last week and he could not stop raving about it, so I took him yesterday and got blown away.

I mean how simple is an indoor batting cage that has great equipment, working candy vending machines and baseball fanatics running the joint. After 20 minutes and $20 (it seems very high but you could not get a spot on a Tuesday), I was asking about franchise opportunities.

We need a lot more creative and simple ideas like The Brickyard to fix commercial real estate and get people to spend money, but while you are busy hiding out and laughing at investors, great ideas are hatching and good businesses are being launched.

That is the America I am hoping to see more of.

Pep talk over.

Basicland’s investment and commercial bankers were hostile to change. Like the objecting economists, the bankers wanted change exactly opposite to change wanted by the Good Father. Such bankers provided constructive services to Basicland. But they had only moderate earnings, which they deeply resented because Basicland’s casinos—which provided no such constructive services—reported immoderate earnings from their bucket-shop systems. Moreover, foreign investment bankers had also reported immoderate earnings after building their own bucket-shop systems—and carefully obscuring this fact with ingenious twaddle, including claims that rational risk-management systems were in place, supervised by perfect regulators. Naturally, the ambitious Basicland bankers desired to prosper like the foreign bankers. And so they came to believe that the Good Father lacked any understanding of important and eternal causes of human progress that the bankers were trying to serve by creating more bucket shops in Basicland.

Of course, the most effective political opposition to change came from the gambling casinos themselves. This was not surprising, as at least one casino was located in each legislative district. The casinos resented being compared with cancer when they saw themselves as part of a long-established industry that provided harmless pleasure while improving the thinking skills of its customers.

As it worked out, the politicians ignored the Good Father one more time, and the Basicland banks were allowed to open bucket shops and to finance the purchase and carry of real securities with extreme financial leverage. A couple of economic messes followed, during which every constituency tried to avoid hardship by deflecting it to others. Much counterproductive governmental action was taken, and the country’s credit was reduced to tatters. Basicland is now under new management, using a new governmental system. It also has a new nickname: Sorrowland.

Unfortunately, it won’t be widely read and understood.

My pal Cole from Blackstar Funds , a grumpy optimist, who passed me the link had this to say to my reply ‘Maybe, but we have baseball’:

True, but the process of a cancerous death is painful and ugly. It’s a warning story about the choices and priorities of today and how they will effect us going forward. Unleash the human capital and innovation of America to solve the energy problem and fix the massive inefficiency of the government and you can buy us another 200 years, keep the status quo and we croak in 50. The country was badly in need of a bitch slap to get our priorities back in line and stop with the casino sector (finance) nonsense , it’s back to basics, hard work, innovation, production of useful things and lowered expectations.

He is way too young to be that grumpy and mostly right.

Please chime in politely….

The stock market does not care right now.  The beautiful thing about stocks is that they are forward looking.  Sometimes waaaaaay forward.

Stocks still feel underowned.  Forgetting about broken stocks for the moment as I do not fish in that pond, there is a thickness of trending stocks and stocks on the verge of greatness.

I don’t trust the financials or government at all, so leverage is out of the question, but you should be out there mixing it up right now.

If only I had more time and money.

Very impressive how Quicken has completely dominated the personal finance software space and beat or bought everyone.

Bill Gates was right in trying to buy them way back when.  I am eyeing this great company now.

My fund and Social Leverage have been backers from the beginning as disclosure.

I have had good success with early investments surrounding inventory and the web, first by no skills of my own (Rent.com ), than by learning from that success Golfnow.com (purchased by Comcast), Limos.com and now Ticketfly.com.

In their own words, Ticketfly is ‘a next-generation ticketing and marketing company from the first folks to sell event tickets online‘.

They have not been at it too long on this go around, but were just named a ‘Top 10 Innovative Music Company ‘ by Fast Company and have been landing big accounts .

Andrew and Dan believed there would be huge fallout from the Ticketmaster/Live Nation conglomerate and it is happening. Good on them.

There is fallout everywhere from the conglomerate mergers and web startups everywhere are feasting.

There are pilot fish and Great White Sharks in the ocean and if you know where you sit in the food chain, you can survive and thrive.

Now go swim.

There is a new brouhaha about the store rejecting certain apps. Thank Goodness.

Maybe because I don’t think I will ever need them. Maybe because I am glad Apple has some rules for their store. Stocktwits has some ‘House Rules’ as well .

Apple is not owned by the government. Stop with the First Amendment nonsense. From this ban, it seems they don’t want apps that really do nothing .

I heard of a consortium set up by Verizon, T, Microsoft and your Mumma, started in Spain this week, that will compete with Apple. Go support them. They will support boobies. Go back to using your Nokia and StarTec.

Better yet, just wait for your Droid phone and that ‘open’ flesh accepting borg called Google.

Or, get a job, because there are plenty of people ahead of you in line with who will kick your ass while you are whining about this .

This conversation is nonsense and I hope you have a great day talking about anything but this.

Moods Drive Markets. The iPhone changes moods. Life is not as bad with an iPhone. Life will be even better with an iPad….if you like losing money that is ☺ .

There are only a few companies that don’t make the financial industry look clunky and old. Interactive Brokers ($IBKR) is one of them. They have been daring from the get-go and if you are a professional trader, they are the Gold Standard. From their lack of human touch to their ‘Dutch Auction’ IPO, they have broken the mold.

It is IMPOSSIBLE that there will not be more Interactive Brokers.

Gambling, Social Gaming and Facebook all fascinate me. Mostly because I do not fully understand them yet.

The US is still fascinated with equities. That may never change, but in the flat world in which we live, Forex has come on strong. Bloomberg is writing about the fortunes to be made in Forex .

Forex markets are 24/7/365 and young people will appreciate them as they are used to things being open all the time on the web.

Because the markets are global and intertwined like never before we are seeing that NEWS does not conveniently break during market hours. The Forex markets and the software that drives them are in a fantastic position.

As costs and spreads come down even further, the winners in the Forex market will be those with the best execution, those most open and simple to use (get money in and out).

In the consumer world of the masses, execution will not matter as much as user experience.

As for fraud, Bernie Madoff had to eventually steal as he took in more money and was faced with performance stress. That is the professional market for you. Performance stress is why cost and execution matter most. There is no performance stress if you are trading your parents $100 at 40 times leverage against millions of others around the world for seconds at a time, knowing your upside and downside the minute you press ENTER.

In Israel I met with Yoni Assia, the founder and CEO of eToro. Since meeting him, I have seen the Forex light. This company seems like an unstoppable force of nature. If you don’t believe me, log on, open an account in a few seconds, and place your bets on your parents Visa card (not you Max!).

In 5 years, your 20-year-old kid will be quoting the Yuan, Dollar, Yen and Euro (maybe) in the same way they talk about social gaming and photo sharing. They will be trading during class. There will be a million Jim Cramer’s. Though Jim Cramer seems tired and old to us ‘professionals’, the circus has just begun.

I have NO doubt that the iPad will amp things to a level not thought possible in the financial markets..

Will the average person make money….NO.

Will that matter…NO.

The business is about keeping the next generation trading longer. Get it yet?

I need a cold shower to temper my bullishness.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch gave us an insanely good review , but he does not himself trade or invest in stocks. Mike likes the product, the platform and the concentrated activity (idea) flow. Mike knows product as he sees and uses so much of what is new, so that means a lot to us.

Of all the reviews we have gotten as a product/company/community, my fave comes from contributor Josh aka ‘Reformed Broker ‘. He is a stock fanatic and though I don’t trade much anymore, I am a fanatic too. I love the movement in prices. I love the idea of our ‘HUman Ticker’. Here is Josh’s post:
*

Memo to “business” journalists who are busying themselves with clever little pieces on “The Death of the Equity Culture” – not only is it not dead, the Equity Culture is more connected and vibrant than ever before.

How do I know?

How about a little miracle called StockTwits?

Forged in the depths of the most brutal bear market in living history, the StockTwits community has given an identity and an outlet to those of us who are madly in love with stocks. There are over 100,000 of us obsessing over equities 24/7 after little more than a year. How many more of us will there be in 6 months?

And this week StockTwits cut the ribbon on a shiny, new, digital Temple to the Equity Culture in the form of their new Beta site. Anyone who is serious about the markets, from options to stocks to currencies to ETFs, now has a slick, fast interface to all of the best charts, quotes, videos, blogs, news outlets and commentary imaginable – all from one web page!

So maybe this is death, because as a stock fanatic, I am truly in heaven.

Long live the Equity Culture. Thank you StockTwits.

The good news for our community is that the platform has allowed for Forex, Futures, Macro and Financial News Nuts to aggregate as well.

Thank-You Josh and Mike for the reviews and all the others in the stream making this an educational, fun and profitable place to spend my trading/investing days.

If you are a new member of the StockTwits community you might be wondering what the most experienced members here enjoy the most about our site. So we have compiled a short list of some very cool features that you will love.

1. The Suggested Stream

The StockTwits Suggested Stream is a no brainer. It is a stream of the very best StockTwits members that we have personally vetted over the course of the last year. You will find a bit of everything but the common theme is high quality market discussions, generosity of ideas and camaraderie.

If you are a new StockTwits member, you will find experts who are discussing your areas of interest and so it it is also a great place to scan for people for you to follow.

2. The Charts Stream

The StockTwits Charts Stream is the human ticker for technicians. Pull it up and you will have no end of set ups at your fingertips flowing in real time. It takes no time to find expert chartists posting a multitude of fresh and actionable set ups.

Simply, you will be amazed that so many are willing to share their best charts.

3. Dip Into the Ticker Pages

Most who visit StockTwits will, right off the bat, have specific tickers they are interested in whether they are equities, Forex pairs or futures. The ticker pages allow you to easily view what the StockTwits community is saying about those tickers which interest you. In addition, you will also have easy access to Chartly charts focused on these tickers as well as the most recent links relating directly to these tickers. Here are a few for you to peruse: $GOOG $EURUSD $GC_F.

4. StockTwitsTV: Plenty Goodness for Everyone

StockTwits is in the midst of building the First 24 Hour Internet Finance Television Network and we are doing it with the help of the very best of our diverse community. While we are only just getting started, there is already plenty goodness for almost all interests.

If you are global macro focused, MacroTwits Hour with @GregorMacdonald on Sunday nights is chock filled with deep insights and community discussion. If you are a currency trader, The Forex Report with @KevinMHughes brings insights from a natural pro currency trader. If you are looking for special situations, @ReformedBroker’s Stock Wars covers the untold stories behind activist investors and corporate raiders.

And if you are technically focused, fuhggetaboutit, StockTwitsTV has so much to offer I don’t know where to begin.

You can find the complete programming schedule here.

5. Join The Conversation

Contributing to the flow is incredibly easy, fun and valuable. You will receive feedback and have the chance to exchange market related ideas with a multitude of great minds. All you have to do is type your message of 140 characters or less in the tweet entry box near the top center of any stream page and include a symbol tag beginning with a $ (EX: $AMZN, $AUDUSD, $GC_F).

Here are a few more tips to get you started. 1. Tweet about what you know best. 2. Keep it market focused. 3. Share your best ideas. People will love you for this. 4. Treat others how you would like to be treated. 5. For more on this, see our House Rules.

This is only a surface scratch of the features you will find on StockTwits but it is a great start.

Resmed makes products that help us sleep.  As this country ages, and gets heavier, Resmed is perfectly positioned to provide products that will keep us breathing through the night.

The products may not look pretty, but the results are all that matter.