This also isn’t a post about bull-riding, where you succeed after 8 seconds: it’s about evicting an about-to-puke dog from the bed, where you fail after 8 seconds.

Last night at 3:30am, my 7th sense somehow alerted me to the fact that foster dog Nikko, who sleeps on a pillow in between my pillow and Mrs. Dynamite’s pillow, was about to puke.   For those who don’t know, if you’re paying attention to your dog, you have about an 8 second warning from the time he starts to show signs of puking until the puke hits the ground/rug/bed wherever he is.

So it’s 3:30am, I’m in a deep sleep, but I sense a disturbance in The Force.  I wake up, say “uh-oh” out loud, and roll right to turn on my bedside lamp.  Mrs. Dynamite, like a top tier Jedi, reaches to the left to turn on her light then rolls right to grab Nikko with two hands and then rolls back left to deposit him safely on the floor just as he barfs – harmlessly onto the wood floor.

I was in awe of my wife’s ninja-esque deep sleep dog-puke natural reactions.   It was as natural as Jose Canseco’s swing – as if she’d practiced it fore 10,000 hours, Outliers style.

I grabbed some Fantastik from the bathroom closet, wiped up the little pile of puke – it seems as though eating a small stick that afternoon may have been the root cause – and we all got back in bed.

obligatory picture of Nikko:

related:  The Pete Rose Slide and Dogs Puking in Bed

also related:  my Jose Canseco Vegas Story

-KD

The post The Most Exciting 8 Seconds of My Night appeared first on Kid Dynamite's World.

But fear not, dear readers, I’ve still got “it.”

I’m going to give you one guess as to which of your favorite financial* bloggers dominates the NUMBER ONE GOOGLE SEARCH result for the term “women pooping dogs”

Not Josh Brown.

Not James Altucher.

Not Tyler Cowen.

Not Barry Ritholtz.

Not Paul Krugman.

that’s right – it’s yours truly.   Number one.  King of the mountain.

-KD

* I use the term “financial blogger” with significant artistic license when I’m describing myself

The post The Kid’s Still Got It appeared first on Kid Dynamite's World.

That something was Fish McBites.

Fish Fucking McBites?  Are you kidding me?  As the classic Saturday Night Live skit asks, “Who are the ad wizards that came up with this one?”   Not even cutesy advertising these days can make me want to buy Fish McBites at McDonalds, but let’s go to the ad anyway:

Did you get up and dance?  Did you throw up in your mouth?  Did you just make a disturbed face like you’d make after watching your dog eat his own poop, puke it up, and eat it again?

So this morning I Googled “Fish McBites” and lo and behold – these things are NOT flying off the shelves.

McDonald’s Fish McBites Flounders: New Product Line Doesn’t Hook Consumers (This one is chalk full of fish puns)

McDonald’s Fish McBites Aren’t Hooking Customers

Fish McBites Fail To Spark McDonald’s Sales

Reading those articles, I found out that Fish McBites are the first new Happy Meal rollout in over a decade!  Really, McDonalds?   Lemme give you some free advice:  no one wants to eat fish at McDonalds.  We don’t want Filet-o-fish, we don’t want Fish McBites, and we don’t want McSushi.    Of course, I generally don’t want *anything* at McDonald’s, so maybe I’m biased – maybe I don’t actually speak for The People on this one.   I do, however, have a feeling that if you rolled out a Buffalo Chicken McBite you could lure me into your store.

I guess the only thing left to do here is to revisit this classic South Park Fish Sticks joke:

-KD

full disclosure: I have not had Fish McBites, and I will not have Fish McBites

The post Is Anyone Surprised That Fish McBites Suck? appeared first on Kid Dynamite's World.

There was a period of time where I played poker “professionally” in the sense that it was my only source of income.  I put “professionally” in quotes because although it was my only source of income, I could not pay my bills on my poker income alone.   But I missed out on what was perhaps the most lucrative part of the poker bubble that began with Chris Moneymaker winning the main event at the 2003 World Series of Poker:  I was never good at online poker.

I’m not afraid to admit this – and there’s a trading analogy here as well: you have to know your strengths and methods, and cater to them, rather than trying to force yourself into someone else’s molds or methodologies.   While I could have sat home and tried to force myself to fit some online poker mold that was unnatural for me and that I hated, I instead ventured out daily to live cash games held privately in NYC.

Sometimes people ask me why I disliked/sucked at online poker, and I have trouble explaining it.   It’s not that when I sit at the table with you I can look into your soul.  Although “feel” is a huge part of the live game, when you’re playing with experienced players, it wasn’t (for me at least) based on specific physical tells like you might read about in a book or see in a movie (no one peeled apart their Oreos and Teddy KGB’d them).   I think it was more that I was used to playing with the same players day after day, and I felt that my biggest advantage was my ability to get a better grasp of what was going on inside their head than they had of what was going on inside mine.

My problem with online poker was that I was just staring at numbers and names on a screen.   In a live game, even if I’ve never played with you, I can tell within 10 minutes what sort of “clue” you have.  This isn’t some special power I have, of course, I’m guessing most poker players would say the same thing.   Online, however, I was lost.  Clueless.  Is my bits & bytes opponent making a savvy advanced play, or is he just a donkey?   No clue.     Yes, I know some of you are quite good at figuring this out – I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m just saying that I wasn’t good at it!

Now, as online gambling is starting to show signs of making a comeback in the United States, and given that I live in the woods of New Hampshire where, believe it or not, high stakes no limit hold’em cash games don’t just pop up daily, I am thinking that there will be a time where I will have to re-dedicate myself to learning the online game to take advantage of potential opportunities as legalization spreads.   Hopefully, I won’t have to get a Facebook account ($FB, no positions) to take advantage of Zynga Poker ($ZNGA: no positions)  if and when it eventually throws its hat into the Legal U.S. Online Poker ring, but if that’s where the fish are, so be it…

Anyway, let’s get all @bclund and take this back to a trading analogy, shall we?   Most of us are, by nature, mean reverters: we’re hard wired to buy low and sell high.    I wrote a post about this topic a few years ago, but the cliff notes are that momentum strategies – the “opposite” of mean reversion, in a way – are the ones with the fat positive tails – buy HIGH can be where it’s at.  Note, I didn’t say buy high IS where it’s at – and I think I explained this concept clearly previously.   I think Josh Brown’s recent post “money doesn’t follow value, it follows performance” is saying something very similar about the power of momentum.

But does this mean you should just run out and start buying stocks making new highs?  Of course not.  There’s a METHOD to all methodology, and it’s not just about blindly chasing momentum.   What I have found, personally, is very much in line with the data that Jeff Degraaf illustrated, which I talked about in the earlier post:   when you’re early in the momentum trade, you get whipsawed like nothing else:  the average return of a trade is actually negative.  You end up with a lot of small losers, and then, hopefully, the HUGE winner.   Now, this is where methodology, tilt, and the online poker analogy come to tie this whole story back together.   It’s easy to get whipsawed repeatedly trying to catch a big momentum move.   Perhaps I suffered this fate because my methodology was wrong and I was entering trades prematurely – but that’s something that I needed to work out, just like I need to work out an effective adaptation to the online version of the game I love to play live.

So this post kinda rambled back and forth across the topics of poker and trading.   My poorly-stated (perhaps) point is that the two endeavors have many traits in common:  there is someone trying to take your money on the other side of the trade/table, you have to avoid getting thrown off your game, and there are many different ways to play the game: I find that I have the best success when I do what comes naturally, rather than trying to imitate what I see other people doing, or to try to fit myself into someone else’s mode/model.

Momentum and Mean Reversion

Fear and Greed

-KD

The post Poker and Trading – Birds of a Feather appeared first on Kid Dynamite's World.

“He had just made the final out in a city where his name is booed, his jersey is reviled, and his team had been swept….Kemp was waiting to cross the diamond to sign an autograph for a terminally ill Dodgers fan, waiting to summon the passion necessary to pass along the hope that he now found so precious…Kemp handed the kid the autographed ball. He handed him his cap. He tore off his dusty No. 27 jersey with the buttons still fastened and put it on the kid’s lap. Then he bent over and removed his shoes and handed them over to complete the grand slam.”

Here’s the video:

Kemp commented:

““I didn’t plan on taking the jersey off, but it’s something I felt would probably cheer him up a little bit … and that was my first time taking my shoes off in front of the fans,” Kemp said with an embarrassed grin. “But life is so much bigger than baseball.”

Kudos, Matt Kemp.  Quite a gesture.

-KD

The post Matt Kemp: Respect appeared first on Kid Dynamite's World.

Fast forward to this morning, where I felt something under my foot as I walked in my socks on my living room rug.  Wait – what’s that?? – is that?? – it can’t be – but it is…  YES – poop.   A firm little nugget was on the bottom of my sock, and two more tiny turds were on the floor.   Amazingly, the poop didn’t get smushed into the rug or my sock.  I cleaned it up, scrubbed the rug with cleaner, and went upstairs to tell Mrs. Dynamite.

Her reply: “PLEASE take off your socks and put them in the laundry.”

Good idea, honey.

And THAT is the difference between women and men.  To me, my socks were still clean – there was no sign of poop on them.   To my wife, I was tracking dog poop essence/remnants all over the house…

-KD

The post The Difference Between Women and Men: Dog Poop Edition appeared first on Kid Dynamite's World.

via Bloomberg:

“President Barack Obama vowed to “exponentially step up our game” to combat military sexual assaults after the Air Force’s top officer for sexual-assault prevention was arrested on charges of sexual battery.”

Do I really need to comment on this one?

*sigh*

-KD

The post You Can Not Make This Stuff Up appeared first on Kid Dynamite's World.

Shame on you Representative Harold Rogers

-KD

The post Cut Punters – Jon Stewarts Skewers Congress on the Sequester appeared first on Kid Dynamite's World.

I bottled my 28th batch – 2 gallons of “Cream of 3 Crops Ale,” first thing in the morning.  I made my priming sugar solution (6T maple syrup dissolved in 2 cups of water) in a little pot on the stove, sanitized my equipment, got everything ready (racked from the glass carboy to the bottling bucket using my auto-siphon), had Mrs. Dynamite help me bottle (she fills, I cap), and then went to check my email and daily internet news.   I came back 30 minutes later to clean up, and noticed a problem:  my priming sugar solution was still on the stove.

Idiot.

I bottled without priming sugar.

Now, my options were:

1) ultimate laziness:  just leave it, and have flat beer

2) something else

I decided on option 2, but then had to decide what to do.  I figured this was the perfect opportunity to test out using raisins as priming sugar (3 raisins per 12oz bottle – natural sugar in the raisins drives the bottle conditioning), but I didn’t have any raisins.   Another option was to try to add some of my priming sugar solution to each bottle (after uncapping them) using an eyedropper.   Slight problem: the only eyedropper we have in the house is the one we use to test our dogs’ urine pH, etc… And I wasn’t up for cross-use there.

So I opted to pop open all 22 bottles, pour them gently back into my bottling bucket (this time with priming sugar solution), and rebottle.  I’m not especially worried about oxidation, although the beer nerds say that’s a potential issue.   Also, I re-sanitized my bucket and bottling wand/etc, so I’m hoping I won’t have any contamination issues.

Anyway…

When things go wrong in homebrewing, don’t sweat it – you’re probably not the first idiot to make this mistake.

related: My Homebrewing tab.

-KD

The post A Classic Homebrew Error: Forgot To Add Priming Sugar! appeared first on Kid Dynamite's World.

This call actually started out pretty boring, but the last 25 minutes or so picked up with some interesting items.

Transcript courtesy of Morningstar:

I have, in the past,  written posts about the role of luck in casino company quarterly earnings.  By “luck” I mean exactly that – if the casino got more or less lucky than they expected to.   I do this by analyzing hold or win %’s compared to typical expected %’s.  Wynn noted:

“There is something in Matt’s release that I would like to draw everybody’s attention to, because it’s significant and critical that you take note of it. What’s happened in Macau is something that we’ve never seen in Las Vegas, but as a growing pattern and it should effect all the analysis that most of you are doing, but what’s happened is the customers are buying the chips at the cage, which does not enter into the drop. So the whole percentage in the mass market and our diamond club, our premium mass market is irrelevant number you should disregard that number now and pay only attention to the amount of the win, because this absence of the chips purchased at the cage and they handle, they skewed the numbers and make it look like we’re holding an abnormal amount of money. There was one part of our casino in Encore, which look it held the 100% or more. So our advice now to observers of the industry and our investors disregard the whole percentage in Macau in the mass market. It is now an irrelevant number, because of the particular nature of the behavior of the customers.”

So even though it’s just one category (Macau Mass Market), I’m probably not going to do that report for WYNN anymore…

The next interesting tidbit is a lengthy reply Steve Wynn gives about the difference between Macau, where his property is right in the middle of all the others, and he benefits from walk in traffic and gamblers looking to change their luck, and Cotai, where he had to build a must-see destination.   The segment is too long to excerpt, but you can read it yourself.  It’s the reply to Barclay’s analyst Felicia Hendrix

On online gaming – and how he doesn’t know how to distinguish his product, like he can with a beautiful hotel/casino (emphasis mine):

“Another thing is that it’s very difficult to distinguish yourself online. We still experience in our buildings and that’s a long and difficult assignment, but we have experienced, we know how to do that. I don’t know how to make the experience on a computer screen 17 inches in diameter particularly unforgettable. We’re going to learn how to do it because we’re not going to be left behind in this matter and we’ve turned this over to the capable hands of Mr. Maddox who will give you his view of the subject”

I’ll excerpt this lengthy explanation of what Wynn calls “boxes of slots” -

“How do we compare to the other regional casinos? Hear me, there is no comparison. Regional casinos are boxes of slots. Period, end of sentence. We are building very lovely integrated hotels. Now they don’t have 3,000 rooms, they have got 300 or 500 or whatever, but they have beautiful restaurants. They have atriums. They have convention facilities, meeting rooms that are delicious and better than any hotel in any city that we’re going into. They have spas that are wonderful. These hotels are great places to go for a weekend and you don’t ever have to get near a slot machine or a blackjack table or a baccarat table in one of our places. Down the hall, the way a convention meeting room might be separate. So then in each of our cities, visitors who are not predisposed to gamble, families with children can go into our hotels and enjoy fanciful restaurants and shopping and our other experiences that are associated with hospitality. And remember this, in our industry there has been a simple truth. Slot machines and blackjack tables in and of themselves have no power at all. You create a legalized casino in a city and they open up, a box of slots opens up and the first year there is a big puff of tax revenue and a big puff of earnings and then they flatten out because basically they deal only to the neighborhood. Unless you bring people from outside the region into the region, you do have a future growth pattern. We are building buildings that will grow and be the places where people from out of town come to stay, little destination resort hotels in beautiful cities, like where I went to school in Philadelphia or where my family is from in Boston. My mom and dad were born there. So, we have no comparison whatsoever to any local casino. They are all boxes of slots by my lights. Now, that’s all that they needed in those days. Harris did a very good job building this network around the world. Harrah’s did a very good job of building this network around the world and I admire what they did. Their progressive bonus program has been a very successful one. But make no mistake, what we are building is not a box of slots. We’re building hotels that just happen to have a gaming room of back with its own garage and its own access. But two separate concepts. The Urban Wynn idea will undoubtedly be copied as we go forward because we usually get copied. But there isn’t a model for what we’re doing anywhere.”

On the importance of the international market in Vegas:

“So having said that we have the largest component of gaming revenue of any Nevada casino, I must point out that of the $600 million in table win, 70% of it is in roulette and baccarat, which our business, that is primarily Latin American, European and Asian. Without the international market, we would be in an entirely different position.”

And the grand finale, in response to a question about the importance of the Chinese customer in Vegas (emphasis mine):

“If anything interfered with Chinese traveled in the United States, would it impact our property? Roughly the equivalent of the building is falling down. Yeah, nothing serious, just a catastrophe, that’s all. If you want to have anxiety about potential scenarios that could cause problems, you will just pick one right there. I don’t think that we’re not having an anxiety attack on that point nor have we worried about it for the past 30 or 40 years. The Chinese are on the move. The Japanese are on the move. The Taiwanese are on the move. The Latin America, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, those are all – we have a big business this first quarter from Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the People’s Republic of China. That’s our business. That’s who we are.”

-KD

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