A few odds and ends to chew on as we get ready for a whole lotta football (football starts here at 6 or 7am so I can take in a game and still have a full day out of the house which maintains marital harmony:->>)

A reader left a comment several days ago that I have been meaning to answer, sorry for the tardy response. The reader said that alternative investments are supposed to zig when equities zag but lately the alternatives have gone down more than regular equities. My take on this may not be palatable but I do believe it should be viewed this way.

Looked over the length of the bear market many of the alternatives have zigged. Over the last month many have given up the ghost. I have touched on this a few times in the past. If you can blend in some things that don't start to go down until much later (commodities and Brazil) and can find some things that turn up much sooner you have a chance for that zig zag effect over the whole cycle. Obviously the double short products are still zigging.

Here is a little tidbit from the WSJ about creating an exchange for airwave frequencies. Apparently there is some secondary trading of these but accessing information is difficult to do. I can tell you from fire department experience that the business of using, changing, accessing and anything else to do with frequencies is not simple. While I doubt I would want to trade a frequency ETN I do wonder if an index that captures price movements of this sort of thing might be a useful proxy for gaging the state of the economy.

There has been an interesting thread floating around about Bill Gross' recent commentaries that seem to be calling for a bailout. Barry questions whether Pimco is "genuinely terrified of a major meltdown in the global economy." I'm not sure what to make of any of this just yet but it is worth watching as the implications are obviously important.

Much has been made (including on this site) about the vicious decline in commodities and emerging markets in the last seven weeks. There have been numerous vicious declines in the last five years and at some point the vicious declines were followed by vicious rallies. That will either follow suit this time or not but fast moves do exhaust at some point, usually a point that is overdone, and then go back the other way.

I tend to put less long term significance on fast moves as this one has been than gradual moves that no one worries about.

Don't take that as my trying to call a bottom to the move as opposed to recognizing this for what it might be and if it is just another fast correction then we should expect a fast move up at some point.