memoryloot

In about less than 24 hours I will finally be setting foot in my 2nd Radiohead concert. I seriously cannot wait. I’ve been waiting for them to tour since the last time I saw them at Coachella. I’m wondering what they will be playing for tomorrow night. Anyhow, just want to rejoice before I jump right back into the current book I’m reading. It’s only the 3rd day and I’m already 3/4 finished.

It’s some pretty scary times if you’re in the market right now. I had to assess my own portfolio and found that I’m only down 0.31% since the start of the year. Not bad considering that I had some pretty big losses in my 401K account. Thankfully I moved to cash at a timely manner. Next step is moving my Rollover IRA into Scottrade so I can begin trading some Bear Funds. Oh yeah, there are finally Bear market ETFs. I’ll be monitoring those closely. Moving to Scottrade should also get me situated for the next Bull market. Hopefully I can reach my 20% annual growth this year. I’m 8% behind where I should be.

On a side note, I told you Miami was going to be the NBA Champions. Now if I was only this good in predicting the market…

As of Wednesday this week, I am 100% in cash. I missed on the 2nd day bounce but after seeing my international fund drop 16% since I first got into the position and my small cap fund hit my stop-loss mark of 10% the previous day, I had enough. That’s a hefty loss on 30% of my portfolio. I’m up a couple of percent on the remaining 70% of my portfolio. I really should just figure out how much I’ve loss since the beginning of 2006. June has been a pretty bad month to be in the market. I’m looking for some Bear market funds to get into. Here are the funds I’m monitoring:

RYSHX
RYCWX
RYMHX
URPIX – I’m specifically watching this closely since this is a complete inverse of the S&P 500. From what I understand, for every 1% S&P 500 drops, this fund hedges twice as much. Unfortunately, if the S&P 500 rises like yesterday, you will lose twice as much. I haven’t got into position yet only because the 70% of my portfolio is parked in a rollover IRA where they don’t give you the choice of other fund families. I will be moving to Scottrade soon.

Exhaustion would barely begin to describe how I am feeling right now. Alot had happened since my post a couple of days ago. We experienced the true Chicago night-life and was not disappointed. Dinner was cheap Friday at Cafe Iberico and the sangria was flowing! We then went to the Signature Room in the John Hancock Building on the 95th floor. Awesome view from way up there while we were enjoying a couple of drinks. We then made a stop at the Smart Bar. For a person who doesn’t like house music, this place made it easy to enjoy it. The crowd was lively and it wasn’t the typical LA bar/club scene. People actually went there for the music. Go figure!

Saturday started close to noon when we woke up and decided to buy some souvenirs as well as check out Potbelly. Potbelly was delicious. The sandwiches was prepared perfectly. It was not overwhelmed by sauces or too much meat or too much lettuce like any of the other sandwich chains. It was a a good amount of everything and the bread was toasted perfectly. I have to say I wasn’t disappointed there. We then hopped on the blue line subway and went to Jamie’s cousin’s graduation party. Chicago public transportation was very easy to follow. We arrived on bus after a quick transfer from the train ride. It was so convenience getting around there between the trains, bus, and cabs. Cheap too! We had the typical filipino gathering with a plethora of signature filipino dishes. Yum!

When we left, we stopped by Garrett Popcorn Shop on Michigan. We waited for a good 45 minutes to an hour. The popcorn was delicious but was so oily, we had to stopped otherwise we would have spoiled our appetite before our dinner. By that time, it was already 7pm when we got back to our hotel room and had to prepare for dinner over at Rodan. Very good Lychee Martinis there. I had 3 by the end of the dinner. The Argentinian steak I had was overcooked even though I asked for medium rare. The appetizers and drinks was definitely the main highlight of the dinner.

After dinner we decided to head on over to the Funky Buddha Lounge, a hip-hop bar/club/lounge. Again it was a good mix of people in there. No pretentious LA crowds that we were accustomed to in LA clubs. People were there was just having a good time dancing and drinking and mingling. People were actually curteous as the bump into you. The was a breathe of fresh air. We ended up staying there for a couple of hours and gained access to the VIP lounge thanks to Lynn and Ray. The DJ was okay that night. He had alot of good tracks but the style of mixing wasn’t great. He would pull up a song and just play about 1-2 minutes before he mixed in the next set. People would go crazy for a song and then suddenly he would just take that away and throw in another track. I don’t think it was consistent DJing. Of course, who am I to say about this, especially since I’ve never done it before.

We left FBL around 1:30-2:00 and met up with Jamie at Sonotheque. I’ve never been to a drum and bass bar but this was very good. Similar to the Smart Bar but less industrial. We did not get out of there until close to 4am. We then grabbed some food over at a nearby taco restaurant and went back to hotel to get our luggage and catch our flight home. Yup, we did not sleep until we got on the plane. I was having such a tough time resting on the plane. It was not comfortable at all. When I got home, I just took a shower, unpacked, and hopped into bed until 6pm Sunday night. I have to admit, Chicago did not disappoint. I will definitely go back to visit at a later point in time. Thanks to Mary, Jamie, Lynn, both Ray’s, Tony, and everybody else who entertained us. It was one of the craziest weekends I’ve ever had experienced in a long while.

Our adventures of Chicago began when we arrived at Midway at 12:30 this morning. Jamie’s sister was cool enough to drop us off at our hotel room even though she had to get up early for work today. Knowing that we had to wake up early in the morning to let in our 2 travelling companions, Pradeep and Deepak, I did not get to comfortably rest until they arrived. They soon arrived at 10am this morning and by that time, we decided we need to go out to get some cash to spend so we all went to look for a Bank Of America. Unfortunately, nobody in Chicago seems to know where a Bank of America is. It does not seem as popular as it is in the West Coast.

After getting our money at an arbitrary ATM machine (one of the many petpeeves I try to avoid), we decided to grab lunch at a recommended place called Star of Siam. The place was decorated nice with some parts of the restaurant resembling some carpet and pillow for guests to sit on in Indian style but was really sorta like a bench where you normally would sit without a back. Its like sitting on a little table but not. You just had to be there. I ordered the catfish and eggplant curry and my gf ordered the Pad Thai. Deepak and Pradeep who came with us agreed that it wasn’t as good as the other Thai places in Los Angeles. At least our bellies were full. Later Jamie tells us that we should have ordered their Thom Yum soup. She claims that it’s her favorite there!

We met up with Jamie and friends at PotBelly’s, a famous sandwich chain restaurant much like Quiznos but apparently better tasting. We will have to try that either tonight or tomorrow. We all spent the rest of the afternoon walking through Millenium and Grant Park. Got to see “The Bean”, which resembles a huge drop of mercury in the shape of an actual bean. You’ll know what I mean when I post the pictures of this trip. We had a chance to play in the water with the kiddies between two walls with rotating images of faces which at times began spewing water on bystanders near them. We even got to listen to some groovy Jazz music in the city’s Jazz Festival. Remember the fountain in Married with Children? We got to see that as well (Buckingham Fountain). Immaculant when you see it in person.

We ended up walking Jamie back to her brother’s place and walked back to our hotel room. I just woke up from a few hours of napping to write this post. We’re getting rested for our evening events and will soon have to get ready. It’s suppose to rain later tonight into tomorrow. Hopefully it is scattered showers. Otherwise we’ll have buy some umbrellas since we weren’t anticipating rain at any point of this trip. Pictures will be posted once we get back to LA.