Baltimore — (TFN): It’s confirmation! On Friday I wrote how I may have a touch of the flu or some other mind-altering ailment because my thoughts were far more liberal than I am comfortable with admitting.

Well, it turns out my ultra-liberal, straight-ticket voting, French-guy marrying sister has a verifiable case of the pig flu. And guess who I had dinner with on Thursday night? You betcha, big sis.

There we have it: cause and effect.

Fortunately, my head case was short-lived. By the time my venison sausage and eggs were off the front burner on Saturday morning, I was back to my old self, almost knocking my O.J. off the table stomping my fist over a local political battle.

In Friday’s edition of notes, I quoted the following paragraph from Callum Robert’s book The Unnatural History of the Sea:

If any trawling ground be over-fished, the trawlers themselves will be the

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This is the third post of my series on why the best traders hide under a dunce cap.

See:  Part One.  Part two.

Just call me stupid.  My rules are written in ink and my opinions are written with chalk.

Traders who have no rules, only emotional inclinations, eventually write off trading as a fool’s game full of crooks, con-artists, insider trading, pump and dumpsters and chart reading hucksters.  They do this because their emotions have led them astray and a scapegoat is needed, so the unsuccessful traders blame the market for what ails them. The real culprit, however, is found within. The real culprit is the trader who wants to be right and ends up on the wrong side of the trade over and over again. The trader who thinks he is smart (and right) is

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Aimco Properties LP, a division of Apartment Investment and Management Co. (AIV), recently sold its Palencia Apartment Homes asset in Tampa for $23.3 million. This is the second multifamily sale in the region in 2009. The real estate investment trust plans to sell seven more multifamily units in the region by the end of this year.

Aimco bought Palencia Apartment Homes for $14.9 million in 1997. The property covers 70 acres of land and generates an average rent of $766, or 99 cents per square foot.

Earlier this year, AIV sold its Doral Oaks Apartment for $10.7 million, or $42,460 per unit, which was nearly twice its original purchase price. The 252-unit complex was sold to GMC Properties, a subsidiary of GMC Mortgages & Financial Services, a leading financial services products company.

In the last two years, AIV has been persistently increasing liquidity through asset sale and currently

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Kazakhstan was once a nation of nomads wandering vast steppes. They herded cattle, goats and camels. On the country’s western edge lies the Caspian Sea. Towns grew up along the shore there, hauling in catches of sturgeon and black caviar.

But otherwise, Kazakhstan was an empty desert. Even in the days of the old Silk Road, traders would skirt Kazakhstan’s southern border rather than try to cross that hell of a desert. It was remote. Desolate. The Soviets used parts of the northeast to test nuclear weapons.

The Aral Sea, site of one of the greatest environmental disasters ever, is in Kazakhstan. A century ago, carp, perch, caviar-bloated sturgeon and much more filled the Aral Sea. Fisherman hauled hundreds of tons of fish per year, fed themselves and loaded trains full of fish headed to Moscow. Then the Communists had some harebrained scheme to use the water for irrigation.

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