Ends and beginings

So, I find myself hitting a bit of a wall on the last couple posts (and I am realizing that I really don’t like the keyboard on our new laptop.)  While I continue to write, I am finding it more difficult to come up with what to write about.  So today I am going back to a stream of conciseness type posting which seems to be my fall back (which is maybe telling me something.)

Today’s was President Obama’s goodbye speech from Chicago.  I did not watch it but likely will tomorrow online.  While I think, the President is far from perfect, I do this he has been successful given the congressional strategy to do anything they could to stop him from doing anything.  I tend to think history will be kind to this President.  While he was not as forceful in pursuing some policies that I truly think he could have, overall I believe he played the hand he had very well.  The exception may have been in Syria but I’m not sure there were (are) any good answers for that neck of the woods.  One thing I’m not sure if he deserves blame for or not is in the dramatic decline in the Democratic party at the state level (which clearly did not make his life any easier.) The decline in local level party support has been catastrophic in the ability of the party to support local level candidates all the way up to governorships.  That has resulted in the state level gains that the GOP has enjoyed of late (that and the GOP laser focus on building those races (in no small part thank to the Koch’s.)  That level of inequity of focus will take some time to revert and I’m just not sure how much of the neglect falls on the President.  Anyway, the next few years should be a stark contrast to the previous 6 or 7.  I just hope they don’t make too much of a mess of things.  It is comical how quickly the GOP is already struggling with the prospect of implementing some of the key things the all ran on.  Voting to repeal Obamacare was much easier when they knew the President would veto it.  Now a vote for repeal likely has very real results.  It will be interesting.

I signed up for a brokerage account at work today.  I am hoping that if my yearend bonus comes in all right, I might have a bit of cash to do a little trading again.  My initial thought would be to try to do some covered call trading (since I am rather limited in what I can do.)  My thought would be to try to do it a little different in that I would like to focus on strongly trending equities where I might be able to sell the call with the idea of riding a bit of the up move and capturing the premium as a kicker.  I have not spent a ton of time looking at it but likely more on this to come.  It is not a particularly sexy trade but, I suspect that it may be a way to pull out some decent returns with a relatively low risk profile.