Trading is stressful at times, and I love to de-stress by laughing. I would like to pass this on to TraderTom readers, and hope they will get as much belly ache from laughin as I got from the following. This is particularly true as I am about to travel to Cape Town for an FX seminar, and I am flying VIRGIN, a great company in mind. so here goes:
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The best complaint letter ever?
This is a letter recently received by the Virgin Atlantic customer complaints team and is currently being hailed on news blogs, such as this one on The Telegraph as possibly the funniest customer complaint letter ever.
We called the Virgin Atlantic press office and they confirmed they received the letter and that Richard Branson himself called the author to thank him for the feedback.
Here's the letter.
Dear Mr Branson
REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008
I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.
Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at the hands of your corporation.
Look at this Richard. Just look at it:
I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?
You don't get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it's next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That's got to be the clue hasn't it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they. Well answer me this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in:
know it looks like a baaji but it's in custard Richard, custard. It must be the pudding. Well you'll be fascinated to hear that it wasn't custard. It was a sour gel with a clear oil on top. It's only redeeming feature was that it managed to be so alien to my palette that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter. Perhaps the meal on the left might be the desert after all.
Anyway, this is all irrelevant at the moment. I was raised strictly but neatly by my parents and if they knew I had started desert before the main course, a sponge shaft would be the least of my worries. So lets peel back the tin-foil on the main dish and see what's on offer.
I'll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it's Christmas morning and you're sat their with your final present to open. It's a big one, and you know what it is. It's that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.
Only you open the present and it's not in there. It's your hamster Richard. It's your hamster in the box and it's not breathing. That's how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this:
Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking it's more of that Baaji custard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It's mustard Richard. MUSTARD. More mustard than any man could consume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.
Once it was regurgitated it was clearly then blended and mixed with a bit of mustard. Everybody likes a bit of mustard Richard.
By now I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a sugar hit. Luckily there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye earlier due to it's baffling presentation:
It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING. Either that or some sort of back-street underground cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast. You certainly wouldn't want to be caught carrying one of these through customs. Imagine biting into a piece of brass Richard. That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.
I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was relax but obviously I had to sit with that mess in front of me for half an hour. I swear the sponge shafts moved at one point.
Once cleared, I decided to relax with a bit of your world-famous onboard entertainment. I switched it on:
apologise for the quality of the photo, it's just it was incredibly hard to capture Boris Johnson's face through the flickering white lines running up and down the screen. Perhaps it would be better on another channel:
Is that Ray Liotta? A question I found myself asking over and over again throughout the gruelling half-hour I attempted to watch the film like this. After that I switched off. I'd had enough. I was the hungriest I'd been in my adult life and I had a splitting headache from squinting at a crackling screen.
My only option was to simply stare at the seat in front and wait for either food, or sleep. Neither came for an incredibly long time. But when it did it surpassed my wildest expectations:
Yes! It's another crime-scene cookie. Only this time you dunk it in the white stuff.
Richard.... What is that white stuff? It looked like it was going to be yoghurt. It finally dawned on me what it was after staring at it. It was a mixture between the Baaji custard and the Mustard sauce. It reminded me of my first week at university. I had overheard that you could make a drink by mixing vodka and refreshers. I lied to my new friends and told them I'd done it loads of times. When I attempted to make the drink in a big bowl it formed a cheese Richard, a cheese. That cheese looked a lot like your baaji-mustard.
So that was that Richard. I didn't eat a bloody thing. My only question is: How can you live like this? I can't imagine what dinner round your house is like, it must be like something out of a nature documentary.
As I said at the start I love your brand, I really do. It's just a shame such a simple thing could bring it crashing to it's knees and begging for sustenance.
Yours Sincererly...
NEXT UPDATE 28TH JANUARY AT NOON
NO UPDATE 27TH DUE TO TRAVELLING
Results from previous trades are in the archives.
26th January 2009 - 09.26am
Chart no 1: I have gone long this morning on the Dax March contract. I see a clear impulse move down, which could look either as the start of a much larger wave structure down, or simply just an M formation in the range. The trend is clearly pointing down, but at this point I see some time symmetry, which tempts me to take a LONG position. From the chart you can also see we are at the lower end of the support area.
More charts to come this morning
I am position short the EUR GBP from 1.40, 1.35, and 1.20, but this morning I noticed a strong reversal bar. I am taking a short-term counter-trend position, in part to hedge my short position, and in part because it looks like we could see a strong counter-trend in all the key currencies.
25th January 2009 - 22:29pm - SUNDAY NIGHT READING
A bit of Sunday night light reading, for your amusement. It is also worth knowing when you trade index futures:
MANIPULATION
In my early days of trading I remember an episode where a Dow Jones Index constituent called 3M announced a profit warning before the market were due to open.
I suspect it was somewhat of a surprise to the financial community because the Dow futures dropped 100 points in a straight line. About 15 minutes before the market opened UBS Warburg upgraded IBM. Within minutes the Dow was back to break even. It was my first taste of index manipulation. UBS was probably “long” the Dow, and needed to keep the index up. So they upgraded a stock which could offset the losses in 3M.
WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?
So what do you need to know? 3M was a large constituent percentage wise of the Dow, making up almost 10% of the Dow. The paradox was that General Electric, which was 10 times larger than 3M, made up only 3% of the Dow. IBM, a much bigger company than 3M, made up about 8% of the Dow, which was enough to offset the loss on 3M after the profit warning, as market makers on NYSE marked IBM up some 5%. So the stock that was upgraded miraculously had almost the same index value as the stock which issued a profit warning.
Why is this? Because the Dow index is a price based index rather than a market capitalization index. So the more a company’s share price goes up, the more it is weighted in the index, even if its market capitalization is much smaller than say another company.
TODAY 2009
So what about today? Every week I receive an email from John Mauldin. Although you probably think I look only at charts, I find John’s analysis compelling read, so I thought I would take some snippets from his latest research note, and pass them on to you. I have abbreviated the material to the essential points
“”
Today Microsoft is worth only 136 Dow points, even though it is one of the biggest companies in the world, with a market cap of $153billion. If it went bust, it would shave off 2% of the Dow. That is all.
IBM is worth $120 billion, which is less than Microsoft. If IBM went bust, the Dow would lose over 650 points!!
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is a price-weighted index. The divisor for the DJIA is 7.964782. That means that every $1 a DJIA stock loses, the index loses 7.96 points, regardless of the company's market capitalization.
"Dow Jones, the keeper of the DJIA, has an unwritten rule that any DJIA stock that gets below $10 gets tossed out. As of last night's close (January 20), The DJIA had the following stocks less than $10:
Citi Group (C) = $2.80 GM (GM) = $3.50 B of A (BAC) = $5.10 Alcoa (AA) = $8.35
If all 4 stocks went to ZERO today, the Dow would lose 157 points.
In the Dow index there are 4 finance stocks. There is Citi Group, Banc of America, American Express and JP Morgan.
If all 4 stocks went to zero, the Dow would lose 331 points.
If you add GE as a finance stock, and it too went to zero, the Dow would lose 434 points.
IMPORTANT
If IBM went to zero, the Dow on this stock alone would lose more than 650 points.
As a matter of fact you can take all the financial stocks including GE and including all the Dow stocks that trade less than $10, and if they all opened at zero today, they would bring down the Dow index by less points than if IBM alone went to zero.
IBM in the world of Dow is worth MORE than Citi, BAC, GM, Alcoa, JPM, AMEX and GE!!!!
You could add Microsoft to this list and not be over where IBM is today in terms of the DJIA index.
Let's look at it another way. A 10% positive move for IBM would move the Dow up by over 60 points. A 10% move by Citigroup would increase the Dow by less than 3 points. “”
ANALYSIS
