Happy 1995, part 1

Even after trimming the list some, I had eight albums to pick up for 1995. So to control the monthly outlays on this little project, I've split 1995 into two groups of four. There is no rhyme or reason to the split - the bands are just in the order in which they appear in my band list.

Iron Maiden: The X Factor - Blaze Bayley from Wolfsbane replaces Bruce Dickinson in lead vocals on this album. The moment he opened his mouth on Sign of the Cross, I started missing Bruce. He's not terrible, but he has some huge shoes to fill. Otherwise, this album follows the same winning formula as previous Maiden albums. I'll get used to Blaze eventually.

Ozzy Osbourne: Ozzmosis - Ozzy seems to have decided that he has earned enough heavy metal street cred, and now is the time to cash in with some mainstream "rock". I can't really blame him that much... Metallica started their two-album cash-in projects Load and Reload in 1996, just one year later. The economy was recovering, and people were buying whatever dreck was being released by their favorite artists, in the hopes that it would take them back to their teen years. But really, Ozzy, this album sucks. Shame on you.

Anthrax: Stomp 442 - There is something about the vocals in Anthrax that usually drives me crazy, but this album has John Bush instead of Joey Belladonna on lead vocals, and I found myself really enjoying it. The heavy guitars that I love are still there, and the groove-metal sound, but without the heavy New-York-rap sort of vocal style. Highly recommended.

Filter: Short Bus - Let's get this out of the way first: this isn't metal. But I added it to the list because I had fond memories of Filter's hit Hey Man Nice Shot, and I wanted to see how they sounded on the balance of the tracks. It's clearly a first effort, but the general sound is good, and I'm looking forward to checking out the rest of their stuff in future months (aka future years!).



Amazon rolled out a brand-new service this month called Auto-Rip. They take all your past and current CD purchases and automatically add them to your Amazon Cloud Player as MP3s, which you can directly download. It's a new service with limited coverage, so they are focusing on the most mainstream albums first. This month, only Iron Maiden made the cut, but it was nice not to have to rip the CD. I have to wonder what this will do to Amazon MP3 sales... I frequently find that the hard CD is much cheaper than the MP3 album; now, I get MP3s either way (most of the time). Further proof that the content-licensing industry's prices continue to make no sense at all from a cost-margin standpoint.

Now if I could just somehow get Amazon to charge me the lower rate for a physical CD, auto-rip it, and then not burn the resources to ship it to me, I'll be all set. Or... maybe MP3 prices will fall to reflect their nearly zero cost. Yeah, right.

Happy 1994

1994 was a very special year for me, because I started it engaged to the love of my life, and ended it on our honeymoon. She married an unemployed bum, because I had left my job at Andersen Consulting and was taking much of December off before starting my new one at the Chicago Stock Exchange. We were still living downtown and saving loads of money for that first house. Here is what was going on in hard rock and metal that year.

Stabbing Westward: Ungod - This was Stabbing Westward's debut album, and although they aren't strictly metal, they've earned a spot on this list. I thought Stabbing Westward had entered my consciousness with Wither Blister Burn & Peel (1996), but of course I recognized Control when it played. This is a good disc, but I recommend keeping the razor blades out of reach while listening to it. Pretty standard for Stabbing Westward, I guess.

Pantera: Far Beyond Driven - Every Pantera album is heavier than the last. In this one, the vocals start bordering on the growling that I find so annoying in "modern" heavy metal. These kids and their growling heavy metal singers, have they no respect!? It's still a groovy sound, and I happily added it to my playlist rotation, but I have to say I liked Vulgar Display of Power quite a lot more.

Korn: Korn - One word: Issues. Korn's blend of heavily distorted guitar, pounding base, and lyrics that alternate between sing-song and rage-growl paint a picture of a deeply distorted main character. Whether this is a self-portrait, therapy-rock style, or a Pink Floyd-like fictional character is largely immaterial. It's impossible to listen to this album, especially with the lyrics in front of you, and not feel sympathy mixed with revulsion for the pro(?)tagonist.

Overkill : W.F.O. - I know so little about Overkill, since they were unknown to me until I started this project. But their music never fails to get me headbanging. There is a secret track at the end with a little practice material where they play a couple of snippets from Dio's Heaven and Hell and Judas Priest's Ripper, which is fun and cool stuff. Why they insisted on sticking 90 tracks of 1-second silence in front of it is a mystery. Korn did the same thing. Must have been all the rage in 1994 or something, but it's very annoying.

Danzig: 4p - This CD was delayed because it was shipping all the way from the UK, so I had written the above two paragraphs about Korn and Overkill making the annoying decision to include a bunch of silent tracks at the end before a hidden track. Then this album arrived, and lo and behold, 53 empty tracks between track 12 and the hidden track 66 (Invocation). I remember having a CD player back then that would physically adjust the heads every time it switched tracks. I can only imagine what these discs would have done to it, if I had played them over and over.

CS|MACO Wakes Up

On Thursday morning, the American Association of Individual Investors' Sentiment Survey showed that 38.5% of their (paying) members reported being bullish. This was up 2.8% from the previous week. At the end of the trading day on Thursday, SPY closed below its 200-day moving average, down $5/share, or 3.5%, from Tuesday's close.

This close below the 200-day moving average caused CS|MACO to signal a position-closing trade. Don't remember what CS|MACO is? I don't blame you - it's been very quiet since May, when it went long SPY. As a primarily trend-following trade, the longer it holds a position the more likely it will make serious money. But unfortunately, it also means it will give back a large proportion of its profits when the market turns against it.

This position was typical. CS|MACO signaled a buy on May 10 when the folks who feel obligated to pay AAII for the privilege of filling out a weekly sentiment survey reported that they felt profoundly un-bullish (only 25.4% of them were optimistic). That entry at 136 was about 1/3 of the way through a down-move in the S&P that bottomed on June 4 at 128 (closing price), only to rally throughout the summer to a high of 147.20 (closing price) on September 14 - one of my favorite days of the year. Since then the volatility of the S&P has been increasing and it has been drifting lower through a series of bounces. I knew it was only a matter of time until the 200-day moving average was crossed.

CS|MACO will stay out of the market until one of the following occurs:

• AAII comes out with a bullish number below 27.5% (buy signal); or
• SPY closes above the 200-day moving average again (buy signal); or
• SPY closes below the 200-day moving average, and it in turn closes below the 300-day moving average (short signal). That will be a while.

Just for fun, here's a little chart that plots the weekly prices of SPY (taken on Wednesdays) and the AAII bullish sentiment number. I've limited the time range to be the period of CS|MACO's latest position; that is, May 10-Nov 8.

Including dividends, CS|MACO is up about 4% on a Return on Investment basis since its inception in September 2010. Not a great track record, but I'm sticking with it for now. 

Happy 1993

In 1993, I moved from my suburban prison in Palatine, IL to a downtown apartment in the Chicago Loop. I sold my car and started walking to work, saving a ton of money on car payments, insurance, gas, and parking. I was still putting in killer hours at the job, though, so there was little time for metal. This month we welcome a new face to the motley collection of usual suspects: Tool. I only have one album by Tool, which is 10,000 Days (2006), but I enjoy the deep-dark style and brooding sort of flavor to the sound. Will Tool's first album reflect this style, or will they evolve into it over time?

Accept: Objection Overruled - Accept is a tough band for me to enjoy. The guitars are good, which is important, and the chords aren't repetitive, which is a major annoyance (looking at you, In Living Color). But the vocals sound so much like AC-DC, which drives me crazy with its machine-like repetition, that I have a hard time letting go of the vocal similarity and just ... Accept Accept (ha!). The very first song on this album, my first comment to myself was, "ugh, this sounds just like AC-DC." It took a little while for me to realize it was only the voice. The rest is actually pretty good.

Anthrax: Sound of White Noise - This CD is terribly tardy, and I'm tired of delaying this blog post because of it. I will try to remember to update when/if it arrives.

Dio: Strange Highways - Dio just keeps getting better. This album wasn't a big splash when it came out, but I think it's nearly as good as Holy Diver (1983). Tracy Griljalva joins the team as lead guitarist, and I hope he sticks around for a while. The only criticism I can think of is that the tempo is a little slow and plodding. But I think Dio makes that work better than most.

Motorhead: Bastards - When I first added Motorhead to the Year-a-Month project, I glanced over the impressive list of albums they had released over the years, and wondered how a drug-addled three-man band could possibly come up with that much material. The answer, of course, is that they're very formulaic. But it's a good formula, so what the heck.

Overkill: I Hear Black - Overkill is a guitar-lover's band. The rhythm guitar riffs never fail to get my head banging, and the lead guitar blends into and out of the rhythm better than almost any other band. I Hear Black was their most popular album so far, which wasn't saying much. This is not a big-name band, by any stretch, which is a shame.

Tool: Undertow - Annoyingly, Tool chooses to run their track count up to 69, with 59 tracks of 1-second silence before the last track. Needless to say, these tracks didn't make it into the music library. I was of course familiar with the hit Sober, but most of the other tracks were new to me. Sure enough, the characteristic broody darkness found in later Tool works was on full display in this debut album. This should make excellent programming music.

Somewhat Tarnished

So here's a weird factoid. A year-old post, Dipped In Gold, wherein I discussed a bit of investing I had been up to, has suddenly been picked up on the spammer circuit. It has about 10x as many pageviews in the past week as my next most popular post, Booting Custom ISOs with Syslinux, and has already appeared in the top-10 of all time. I'm getting about 2-3 spam-comments a day, which is a huge load for a blog that generally can expect one comment from a friend about heavy metal bands every couple of months.

I have no idea what random keyword inspired the bot-frenzy, but here is a representative sample comment:

I really like your blog.. very nice colors & theme.
Did you design this website yourself or did you hire someone to do it
for you? Plz answer back as I'm looking to create my own blog and would
like to know where u got this from. many thanks
Stop by my homepage : carton of newport cigarettes

The reference to cigarettes in the "payload" seems to be a pretty strong pattern, appearing in nearly all the comments in some form. I miss the good old days when it was all about porn and ED drugs of questionable provenance and wildly creative spelling.

In other news, for the 5 of you that enjoy reading the Year-a-Month posts, I have another one nearly done - I'm just waiting for a couple more CDs to arrive.

Thanks, Uncle Ben!

It's been a very long time since my last trading/investing post. I've continued to ride my CSMACO position (long SPY since May), and made a few covered call trades (Microsoft, Canadian Dollars were both good ones the last few months). And the Collaboration is Good trade has signaled an entry now and then in S&P Futures. Some I took, some I didn't, thanks to the distractions of moving across the country. I've also made some bearish bets on Salesforce.com (what is their revenue model really?) and Apple (haven't you hipsters run out of money yet?), which have not worked out too well. I trimmed back some of my poorly performing gold-related positions to offset some gains in other things immediately before the gold rally resumed - figures. But I still have a moderate stake in gold, so all is not lost. Overall it's been a tough but slightly positive quarter, but the trading has been pretty muted, and nothing interesting enough to write about.

But when it became clear, a few days ago, that the Fed was almost certainly going to announce a 3rd round of quantitative easing (QE3) in the September FOMC meeting, I knew I had to take a leveraged stake. Unfortunately real life kept me from finding time to enter a position until the last minute, but the market gave me the courtesy of a downtick on Sep 10th. This let me get a pretty good price on a sizable chunk of SPY calls, which I held through the announcement today.

Everyone knew QE3 was coming, and just about everyone was sure it was today. But there is a kind of gun-shy quality to this market: it reacts some to the rumor, but it prefers to wait for the actual news before making a decisive move. Call it what you will, but I like to think of it as a confirmation rally.

Going into the announcement, SPY was just about unchanged from yesterday, and random-walking market movements had already given me a small return on the calls. Sure enough Ben Bernanke announced QE3 and made a lot of meaningless bluster about "doing whatever it takes", etc etc, designed to give the masses confidences that he knows what he's doing and he'll make your life better. He doesn't, and he won't. But in the meantime, the entire financial system rallied: stocks, bonds, currencies (not the dollar, of course), commodities. Every single thing on my watch list is green today, except for the VIX. The S&P chart looks like a bottle-rocket going off.

I exited half the position at twice the entry price, meaning that I have my initial investment out and future proceeds are all profit. QE rallies usually take a few days to play out, so I'll hold the other half for a little while and see if I can improve the return a little.

Happy 1992

Ah, 1992. The year I graduated from Alma College, left my home state of Michigan and my college sweetheart, who had another year to go, and jumped into the hustle and bustle of Chicago life. The economy wasn't great back then (either), and I felt very lucky to have scored a job at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in their DCS/Logistics product division. I was going to get to write COBOL! W00t! I think I had about 3 weeks between graduation and my first day, and I mostly spent them looking for a place to live (I chose northern Schaumburg, for no rational reason that I can see now). The rest of the year was spent riding the Metra back and forth, working as many hours as I could trying to make ends meet in an apartment I could barely afford, wearing a suit and tie every day so that I could sit in front of a computer for 10, 12, 14 hours straight. There was no time for metal, but I aim to change that now, only 20 years later.

Black Sabbath: Dehumanizer - Dio's back! He's still my favorite Sabbath lead singer, and he does his customary great job on this one. As usual, Black Sabbath is defined by its lead singer. Comparing this album to TYR (1990) is sort of like comparing Iron Maiden and Motorhead - completely different sounds.

Iron Maiden: Fear of the Dark - I always enjoy a new Iron Maiden album. This one came with a bonus disc, apparently with B sides and live versions. There's a crazy song called Roll Over Vic Vella done to the tune of Roll Over Beethoven, very un-Maiden-like, and an extended 7-minute rant in heavy British style with an acoustic blues guitar riff in the background. The main disc, though, is standard Iron Maiden fare: foot-tapping metal about personal foibles and other random stuff.

Pantera: Vulgar Display of Power - This is Pantera at its best. The brown rhythm guitars, the power-filled cadence, the furious lyrics, it's all here. Pantera took the formula they developed in Cowboys From Hell (1990) and refined it, turning them into the heavy metal band an entire generation of disaffected teenage boys identified with in their darkest, angriest moments. To say this album rocks would be doing it a disservice. It destroys.

Megadeth: Countdown to Extinction - The first Megadeth album I ever bought was Youthanasia (1994), and I was looking to branch out from Metallica so I would have more variety. I was somewhat disappointed by what I felt was an arrangement that was too melodic and lyrics that were too political. This album feels like a turning point between the early enraged Killing Is My Business that rocks, and the watered down Youthanasia that seems to be simultaneously catering to a wider audience and getting some kind of message (I don't know what) across. The next album to appear on this list will be Cryptic Writings (1997). I hope someone pissed off Dave Mustaine in those intervening years and he went back to his earlier style. We'll see.

Danzig: How the Gods Kill - Danzig continues his trend of sounding like Jim Morrison, if the Doors were a lot heavier and started playing about 30 years later than they did. The song I most clearly recognized on this album, of course, was Dirty Black Summer. But they're all cut from the same cloth. Danzig is generally a little too quiet and muddy for my taste, but it was a nice change from Megadeth and Pantera above.

Motorhead: March or Die - Another Motorhead album that sounds remarkably like all the others. This one is notable for having the iconic Hellraiser and a cover of Ted Nugent's Cat Scratch Fever that sounds better than the original, in my humble opinion.