We have been playing with tag clouds and they are pretty interesting.
We did one to analyze the Fed’s minutes and, since it’s a day off, I thought we’d do one to see what we talked about last week at PSW. I was not entirely surprised that, in my posts, Inflation was the word of the week last week (just the 5 morning posts, not the weekend ones). What I do find interesting is that bearish did not even make the top 100 last week but there are three variants on the word “Fed,” which are, with “Bernanke” clustered aptly around the word “inflation.”
Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Let’s compare this cloud with the one we get by feeding in the week’s Member Chat sessions. It is my goal, in the morning post, to provoke conversation around the topics I feel are going to be the most important macro effects for that day or looking forward. We then have many excellent contributing Members who bring their own viewpoint to the table so it’s very interesting to see how things change once we go inside during live trading sessions. One note – we generally don’t discuss politics during market hours as it’s too distracting so you won’t (hopefully) see a lot of political tags:
As I have noted, WAY too many people are playing NFLX! We can expect to see my name up in lights but NFLX and AAPL are the only stock that get mentioned so often that they make the top 100 words. Perhaps we can figure out how to extract a symbol search as that would also be fun to track over time.
Now, here’s something interesting. As it was a long weekend, I took the opportunity to get back in touch with my inner Liberal and we had some free-ranging discussions on the economy and society. The following is a tag cloud of posts and comments since Friday evening (right after our 5 bullish energy trades and including my take on the American Revolution):
Notice John Boehner makes an appearance as we do talk politics over the weekend. It’s interesting that “people” got such a lot of space and it crept up in weekly chat sessions too. I suppose it reflects a general belief among Members that people are still in charge – despite the best efforts of Big Business to de-emphasize their importance.
We seem to have gotten tired of talking about inflation but I’m sure it will be back tomorrow as gold, silver and oil went flying today in Global trading. Another thing missing from the tag cloud is the color commentary we get from our cartoon staff. TradeBot 3000, Watson, Royston Bond III, Money Penny, Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Albert Einstein and HRH Elizabeth the Second are very popular already and I’m sure they’ll have plenty to say next week if things are not as crazy as they were in the week past.
If you haven’t read Stock World Weekly, now would be a good time as it’s really good and this will be your last chance for constructive criticism as we roll out of Beta. Congratulations to Elliot and Ilene for putting together a great Newsletter and thanks to all who contribute their great content every day – it’s become a publication we can all be proud of.
Well, back to the grindstone tomorrow – see you inside,
– Phil
